This was a short discussion I had on “a certain section” of “a certain website”. It goes as follows:

The statement is that women have been oppressed for ages. This is an undeniable fact; it can’t be refuted when women were legally property of men. His argument was that because men did hard labour that meant it was an entitlement to be the “head of household”. The type of labour you do didn’t define who was in command. Men were the “head of household” because of authority taken by being the legal owner of the woman. His labour (regardless of what that is) wouldn’t change the objective fact he owned her. If we followed this guy’s logic, the working class of any country would be the rightful ruler of it, as they do the work to sustain it.

The argument cannot be made that it was the degree of physically demanding labour that made the woman his property. The same is true if extended to rich families of the same era. Landlords did no hard work, rich families who had mass amounts of wealth still held their daughters as property until they were transferred to a husband via contract (marriage contract/agreement, to love and obey). Men who did less physically demanding work by virtue of being rich were considered to have more value than a man who did. The father was then more likely to give the daughter as property to the man with more wealth as opposed to demanding labour.

Women originally became property out of tribal societies (primitive accumulation) because it was necessary to determine who had legal ownership of property. The official wife (by contract) and her children were the legitimate heir to any held property or wealth. Hence the term “illegitimate child” (not by his official wife), meaning the child hand no claim on wealth or property the father had.

The teacher was wrong for not explaining why he was incorrect; it was weak to simply reply on an appeal to authority and then an appeal to force in order to answer him. The girl saying he was unable to empathize was perhaps correct, but that did not excuse her inability to defend her position. The boy reacted in frustration to not being given an answer, rightfully so. This class just seems like a cluster fuck.