America’s Rot Began With Women

The ownership of women became the operating system for everything else.

I received a comment on a recent piece I published called, “Can America Find It’s Way Again?” It's been rattling around in my head ever since. Something clicked and I couldn’t shake it and when I can’t shake something, I go hunting for whatever it is I’m looking for.

You can read the article here:

Jodi Schiller wrote the comment. She's a systems scientist and AI governance strategist who's served on the IEEE AR/VR Advisory and Standards Board since 2015, and her writing focuses on AI, human systems, and governance. Her goal is to build intelligent technology that actually works better for humanity.

This is our exchange:

She was right. I was missing a core analysis to my piece. It’s not that I didn’t want to touch it, it’s that I needed to keep digging deeper. This is what I found…

On July 5, 1993, a man could be prosecuted in all fifty states for raping his wife.

Bill Clinton was already president. The internet already existed. I was already alive. I’d turn eleven years old a month later. There are women reading this right now who were born into a country where their husband had a legal right to their body, and the state agreed with him. Our mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers, and every generation before them.

I start here because I think we tell ourselves a story about how far back this goes, but the story is a damn lie. We picture powdered wigs and corsets. We picture something that happened to other women, a long time ago, in a world so different from ours that it doesn’t implicate anyone alive today. But, it’s not ancient history. It’s 1993… a living memory.

The control of women’s bodies and labor isn’t one item on a long list of historical injustices. It’s the prototype. It’s the original template that every later system of ownership, extraction, and subjugation was built from and reused. You can’t understand how authoritarianism works, how a system convinces itself it has the right to own a person’s labor, a person’s body, a person’s future, without understanding that it learned how to do that on women first.

THE BLUEPRINT

Start with coverture, because coverture isn’t fantasy, it’s actually law.

Under English common law — that America inherited wholesale into our current legal system and has been enforced here for most of our history — a woman’s legal identity dissolved the moment she married. Once married, she became what the law literally called a “feme covert,” a covered woman, merged into her husband’s legal existence. Before then, she was owned by her father. She could not own property in her own name. Any wages she earned became her husband’s property to keep, spend, or give away without her input. She could not sign a contract. And a husband was assumed to have permanent, standing sexual access to his wife, because the law didn’t recognize the concept of a wife withholding consent. How dare she, amirite?

August 12th, 2000, the day 18 year old me was transferred from my father to my 23 year old husband - now ex-husband.

This legal reasoning was first articulated by the English jurist Matthew Hale, who wrote that a husband could not be found guilty of raping his wife because she had given irrevocable consent through the act of marriage. Hale wrote that in the 1600s and it was still functioning legal doctrine in parts of this country three hundred fucking years later.

American states didn’t start dismantling coverture until 1839, starting in Mississippi, with New York’s 1848 Married Women’s Property Act becoming the model other states eventually copied. And even then, “dismantling” is doing some heavy lifting because some of coverture’s financial mechanics survived in U.S. law well into the 1960s. The sexual half of it survived even longer. That’s the 1993 date. More recent than most people realize. That’s a law that finished dying inside the lifetime of women who are currently raising children in which men have still yet to grasp.

This is what I mean by blueprint. Coverture was an unfair, functioning legal substrate for one human being to own the legal personhood, labor and body of another. It was tested, refined and normalized on women first, across centuries, before it became the available tool other systems reached for.

THE SUBSIDY

Now , lets do what I love to do and follow the money, because the rot isn’t just legal, it’s economic and lately it feels like the economics are almost too enormous to hold in our heads.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO) in the UN, right now, today, women worldwide are undertaking more than 16 billion hours of unpaid domestic and care labor every single day. Every fucking day. Women do this work at roughly two and a half times the rate men do and the pattern starts in childhood. Girls are already doing 160 million more hours of unpaid labor a day than boys before either of them is old enough to vote.

The ILO is not an activist group. It’s the actual global labor standards body and they estimate the value of that unpaid work at up to 9 percent of global GDP, something like 11 trillion dollars a year or so and calculates that women’s share of that uncounted labor alone is worth more to the global economy than men’s entire paid and unpaid contribution combined. In Canada, government statisticians found unpaid household labor was worth more than a third of the country’s entire nominal GDP in 2019 — more than manufacturing, wholesale, and retail combined.

That means that every economy on the planet has been quietly running on a subsidy nobody agreed to pay, extracted from half the population, uncounted and uncompensated, for the entire span of recorded economic history. That subsidy is what freed up the other half of the population, you know, the half writing the laws, running the governments, building the companies, etc., to go do all of that while someone else, unpaid and unrecognized, kept the entire goddamn machine functioning underneath them.

Forty-five percent of working-age women are currently outside the paid labor force specifically because of unpaid caregiving obligations. For men, that number is five percent.

FIRST, BY THOUSANDS OF YEARS

I am not ranking atrocities. I am not asking you to weigh whose suffering mattered more. I think what I’m doing is much more useful to the argument. I am tracing when the logic of ownership first shows up in the human record. Going back to the very root cause. The answer isn’t ambiguous when you really actually look at the record.

The earliest documented evidence of slavery as a human institution comes from ancient Mesopotamia — cuneiform tablets from the 3rd millennium BCE, roughly 3000 to 2000 BCE, recorded tallies of enslaved women. That is the oldest hard evidence we have of slavery existing anywhere. Chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas began with the Portuguese trade in the 1440s, and in the land that became the United States specifically, is dated to 1619. The enslavement of Native peoples by European colonizers began with Spanish colonization in the early 1500s. Do the math. That’s a gap of roughly four and a half thousand years between the earliest documented enslavement of women and the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. Not a close call or a matter of interpretation.

And even that number is almost certainly too conservative, because it’s only the earliest written record. Slavery as a practice, almost certainly predates writing itself, which means the true starting point is even further back than what survived on a busted clay tablet.

Gerda Lerner, a Historian, spent her entire career asking why this pattern shows up so consistently across independent civilizations. Captured men were killed. Captured women and children were kept. Not out of mercy, but, out of risk management. Men were more likely to fight back, flee, or organize a rebellion. Women and children were easier to absorb, easier to control and just as capable of producing the labor and the next generation of laborers their captors wanted. Other historians of slavery — Orlando Patterson, Joseph Miller — independently arrived at the same explanation studying different regions and different eras. It’s not just one scholar’s theory about one place. It’s a pattern multiple historians found by looking at the actual evidence in more than one part of the world.

I don’t write this as a competition for who was hurt worse either. It’s a question of chronology. It’s important to ask ourselves, where, in the archaeological and historical record, human beings first built a working system for owning other human beings. And on that specific question, the evidence says women. First. By thousands of years. Before race was the organizing principle of anyone’s cruelty, sex already was.

REUSING THE TEMPLATE

Once a society has normalized the idea that a human being’s body and labor can be legally and economically owned by someone else, it becomes available. It becomes a tool other systems of domination can pick up and repurpose.

And white supremacy went to fuckin’ work.

I’m not arguing that coverture caused chattel slavery, or that they’re the same thing, because they are not the same thing and collapsing them insults the specificity of both. But, what I am arguing, is that they share an underlying logic, and that logic was rehearsed on women first. Ownership of a person as a legal category. Extraction of labor without compensation as an economic category. Denial of bodily autonomy as a baseline condition, not an exception. Every authoritarian and extractive system that came after and every regime that has ever decided some class of humans exists to serve another, reached for a version of that same logic, because the logic was already sitting there, proven out, normalized, defended by serious men in powdered wigs citing serious legal precedent.

That’s the rot. Not one bad law. Not one bad century. A blueprint. A template.

REPURPOSED ROT

And it isn’t finished. It just updates its branding and marketing every generation.

You can watch the current version happening in real time with the rise of Erika Kirk and resurgence of “tradwife” culture selling submission as an aesthetic. The renewed legislative push to control reproduction — which has never, in any era, actually been about the unborn, it’s always, everywhere, been about who controls a woman’s labor and future. The economic data that shows sixty percent of the entire gender pay gap in Europe is directly attributable to motherhood. Economists have a clean, bloodless name for it. They call it, “the motherhood penalty.”

I’d call it what it actually is. The subsidy, again. Same shit, different century and better marketing.

ALL HANDS ON DECK

This essay isn’t an invitation to shame anyone and I don’t think shame was ever going to be useful here anyway. Shame makes people defensive. Facts make people see. I’d rather hand you the actual legal text than a guilt trip. If we really want to get down to the nuts and bolts of the machine we need to keep digging to find the root and kill it.

I do think this is an invitation to stop treating this as a women’s issue that women are supposed to solve on their own, in their spare time, after they finish the sixteen billion hours of unpaid work. If the control of women’s bodies and labor is the foundation the rest of the structure was built on top of, then you can’t dismantle the building by working only on the upper floors. You have to go back down to the foundation. That takes everyone. It take everyone. It’s the only way.

Calling out the rot, out loud, is the first act of pulling it out.

So here’s the question I’m going to leave you with, because I don’t have a tidy bow to put on this one: What else have we been told is too hot to touch? Let’s talk about it.

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