Your username is amazing as well!!!

Erm it was 1859… do you not think that it was a convenient excuse to get out of a lesbian relationship without being judged too harshly?

Women contribute--the ones who rather a man "take care of her" than take care of herself. (The plurals are all over the place in that sentence, but it's too early to grammar).

But that's a derail. If we look at history, when women got men's knees off their necks, they were entirely capable of keeping society going. History also shows how women's freedoms, even in such circumstances, are circumscribed and limited in scope and duration. See, for instance, the feminist scholarship around women's experience during the two World Wars. There's also a fascinating book called Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Mary Elizabeth Perry) where she describes how the city of Seville operated as the commercial capital of Habsburg Spain, when commerce meant that most of the men were conducting trade elsewhere and the women were running home-base. She also describes the consequences for women of the Counter-Reformation, as their rights and freedoms were removed by religious authority.