Family Law/Property Law

I'm adopting a new goal to post once per week, on Thursdays or Fridays. But so that I don't lose it, I wanted to talk about an idea I've been ruminating for a while: family law has its origins in property law. In order to flesh this out, I will need to figure out when property law as we understand it came into being and for whom. As for the Western world and the Anglo-American legal tradition, I know that all real property in England ultimately belonged to the crown. What about personal property? What regulations were there over a man regarding his livestock, and how were they different from regulations pertaining to women and children? Is the Bible helpful in understanding this question?

Same questions go for the Middle East. How did property law evolve there? When did a separate family law jurisprudence emerge, and was it part of church or secular adjudication? Is the Quran helpful in understanding this question as it pertains to the Middle East?

I work from a place of curiosity and deep offense with this question. The idea that I am less than a man because I am a woman has always been quite unpalatable to me. Knowing that women in different times or places literally had no human rights and were completely dependent on their fathers and husbands is hard to wrap my mind around. The very idea that my birth as female dooms me to different treatment for life is shocking and maddening. This is why my feminism gave rise to intersectional progressive values and secular humanism: I reject white, able-bodied men as the "default"of humanity. This world does not belong to one subset of its inhabitants.

How did this devaluation of women begin? Women's physical power to create life must have seemed divine in early humanity: goddess worship was most likely, quite common. I had a thought the other day that perhaps death in childbirth contributed to the devaluation of women. It seems inefficient today to keep half the world's population illiterate and weak. Maybe during most of human history, when women were married and pregnant in their teens and deaths in childbirth were frequent, educating women, or indeed becoming attached emotionally to them, must have seemed like a waste of time. Maybe our biology reduced us to death before the patriarchy reduced us to our biology.