The Misunderstood Patriarchy? A Look at Old Laws, Common Law, & Their Protective Origins
For many people, the old legal codes and common law traditions of the West look like a smoking gun in the case of Men vs. Women’s Liberation. The verdict seems obvious: patriarchy, built brick by brick by men who feared powerful women. With witch trials, coverture laws, restrictions on voting, working, owning property—all presented as intentional tools of systemic oppression with no virtue in sight.
But what if, instead of an evil XY conspiracy of control, a great deal of it was originally meant to shield women instead of shackling them? What if the supposedly repressive systems operated by insecure paranoids with less than sizeable genitalia were, in many cases, early attempts at something much more nuanced: protection?
Let’s not sugarcoat the obvious. Women in the past didn’t have modern freedoms. But neither did most men. The world they both lived in was, frankly, brutal. Daily life was violent & Insecure, and financially more than precarious. Men were expected to brave war, endless hours of wage work, often in the open through widow-making winters. Women were, culturally and legally, kept at the center of the only thing stable, enduring, & sacred in pre-modern society: the home.
The Hearth IS the Heart of Civilization
In nearly every pre-industrial society, the home wasn’t just where you lived. The home was your school, your hospital, your business, your daycare, your temple. The person who ran it wasn’t “just” a housewife; she was the COO of Civilization Inc.!
Laws that discouraged, or prevented, women from entering combat, hard labor, or cutthroat commerce weren’t born from a sexist sneer. They were often born from the same impulse that says, Don’t put a vase in the boxing ring. Women weren’t excluded because they were valueless; they were only excluded because they were valuable. It was axiomatic that they were too important to be thrown into the chaos and carnage that men were, for better or worse, expected to endure without complaint.
Coverture: Bad PR, Worse Branding
A classic target of disgruntled feminists is “coverture,” the legal doctrine that made a married woman’s legal identity “covered” by her husband’s. Today, it’s easy to only see that as an intentional erasure. But originally, it also meant a woman didn’t bear personal legal liability for debts or lawsuits. She was protected from the financial world, which, at the time, was about as stable and ethical as a bar fight during a famine.
When women did go to court alone (which was rare), they were often seen as vulnerable to extortion or manipulation. The idea wasn’t that they were mentally inferior, it was that society wasn’t yet organized to defend them properly if they played by the same cutthroat rules men did. So instead, they were granted a kind of legal sanctuary within the family structure.
Did Men Have Double Standards? Yes. But Also Doubled Burdens.
Men didn’t exactly get a holiday for their side of this bargain. They got to vote if they could manage to hold property. but they also got drafted, taxed into poverty, & worked into the ground; there are whole graveyards dedicated to individual trades of working men. The legal benefits were paired with legal obligations: to provide, to protect, to sacrifice. The phrase “man of the house” wasn't just a title—it was a job description with an implied death sentence.
In the old order, men and women were not equals. Not in freedom, not in danger, not in burden. But they WERE complementary in powerful, natural ways we've begun to forget. The system wasn’t about keeping women in; it was about keeping them safe.
Then Came the Machine
Everything changed with industrialization. Suddenly, strength wasn't the only currency. Literacy, logic, organization, & resilience became more valuable than brute force. The economic value of the home diminished; the economic value of the marketplace soared. In that new world, laws that once protected women now shackled them.
We evolved as a society & tore down so many of the barriers. We also lost the narrative. We began to justify the present by branding the whole past system as malicious when much of it was merely outdated but well-intentioned.
Rethinking the Narrative
It’s tempting to read history with modern eyes and assume that if women weren’t empowered, they MUST have been oppressed. But not all limits are chains, and not all chains are cruel.
Much of what we call “patriarchy” was less a monolithic male conspiracy and more a rough, imperfect social contract forged in a world where life was short, risk was high, and someone had to make sure the next generation survived.
It’s fair to critique the old ways. However, it’s also fair to remember that they were trying to solve problems we can barely imagine. Maybe, just maybe, they deserve a little more nuance, and a lot more respect than we’ve been giving them.
While there’s no need to slavishly glorify errors of the past there's also no need to blindly vilify it wholesale. History, like humans, is messy—and often, it was doing its best with the tools it had.