Comparative Freedom, Comparative Advantage

The podcast I was listening to about 15th C England did not mention the Hajnal Line, but the concept was behind a great deal of what was being discussed. Women in 15th C England (and Holland) had more rights than women in other places. It does not look coincidental that these were the two places that most quickly prospered and went on to found wealthy colonies as well.

First, here is the Hajnal Line

West of the red line (but inside the blue lines added by researchers after Hajnal) women married later and occasionally not at all.  Widows did not always remarry. They could inherit property. Any modern American woman transported back to that time would find the restrictions on her life intolerable.  Women could not join most guilds, and had almost no political power, even at the local level.  Their husbands could take over the management of their inherited property or any money they had. However, compared to women in other countries these women had a lot of freedom.

HBDChick's post from a few years ago will give you plenty to chew on in terms of where this all came from and what advantages it created. Just for openers, it seems to have been worth a few points of IQ and a reduction in internal violence in modern Western, especially Northwestern Europe, with exceptions. She leans heavily on the system of manorialism favoring the development of nuclear versus extended families. Authority came from the lord, not the clan leader. Her additional theory is that the Roman Catholic Church forbidding cousin marriage was for unclear reasons only obeyed in NW Europe beginning about 1200 or so, even though it was supposedly in play everywhere, and this had cumulative effects. Cousin marriage solidifies extended family holdings rather than nuclear. Men had to prove some worth to the family in order to be allowed to marry, and thus tended to be older.  Women were married off younger because there were no further resources they were going to acquire before marriage, so they might as well start off having the necessary children for agricultural purposes right away.

Women who marry later and have skills and resources of their own, that they have earned as servants or in home crafts such as spinning or brewing, create a familial foundation for small businesses and thus a merchant society. A 30-year old man has a different attitude toward  a 26-year old wife than a 16 year-old one, even in what we would experience as a deeply patriarchal society. The older bride, who had helped her mother manage her father's business and might be in line to inherit it, would see herself differently and have expectations as well.  She would have fewer children, but a greater percentage of them would live to adulthood. There would then be increased trade, as men could feel more confident leaving a business in the hands of their wife while they went to London or the Continent to see about importing and exporting, or learning new industrial or agricultural techniques.

And perhaps that is the foundation of the industrial revolution and western civilisation, more than other things we usually credit.  We usually see rights for women as being a result of those societal changes.  Maybe they were the cause.