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I would argue that "women and children first" has been practiced since the dawn of times in a smaller setting i.e. tribes of hunter gatherers The motivation is

I would argue that "women and children first" has been practiced since the dawn of times in a smaller setting i.e. tribes of hunter gatherers The motivation is to protect women and children from likely dangerous circumstance so that the tribe can be quickly repopulated. The tribes that sent all the women and children off to war or adventure and had only a few women or girl survivors left would have to wait for decades to repopulate the tribe to previous numbers but the opposite could be achieved in years. I can't find a link but this very scenario is playing out in Ukraine at the moment. There was a video released by the government outlining the policy perhaps to explain why men were barred from leaving the country.

senderista 2y ago
Of course cannon fodder can’t leave the country.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  I'm upvoting you to counter the downvotes because that is the brutal reality of war, particularly if the top brass (on both sides) don't actually have anything to lose.
  - senderista 2y ago
    In both Russia and Ukraine, conscription does not apply to those who chose their parents wisely
- CTDOCodebases 2y ago
  That's a biased take. A more accurate take would be "Of course cannon's and cannon fodder can't leave the country during a time of war."
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
  Yup
llm_trw 2y ago
If all your fighting age males died the women and children would just becomes slaves to whoever won. There are numerous examples of this being documented during Romes expansion into Western Europe. A group of young men on the contrary can quite easily raid and kill the men in neighboring villages and take as many women as they can keep as slaves. Again, documented in Romes founding. People seriously underestimate how bloody and amoral history is and that women were as complicit in all of the barbarity as the men.
- elmomle 2y ago
  Could you clarify what you said about women's complicity at the end? Every other part of your comment seemed to attribute very little agency to women (they are essentially prizes for whoever wins a fight, with seemingly no other choice).
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Women didn't generally run away they just accepted their new husband. or soethe story goes, I imangine cases of women fighting back would be surpressed in, such societies.
    - komali2 2y ago
      How is that complicity?
      - Sirizarry 2y ago
        It’s not. That’s like saying someone who’s getting robbed at gunpoint is complicit because they’re handing over the money.
        CTDOCodebases 2y ago
        They are complicit though because in this case whatever value they hold (labor, baby factory, social connection) goes away when they refuse to do those things or get killed while refusing. In your analogy imagine being held at gunpoint knowing that if you give up your riches you will ultimately survive but the behavior that caused you to give up your riches will be incentivized and perpetuated due to your compliance. Now contrast that with the situation where you refuse to hand over your riches and the would be robber walks away or kills you only to have the riches disappear the instant you do. Granted it is not an easy situation for an individual to make but choosing to be complicit and acting accordingly is still an exercise of an individuals agency.
1123581321 2y ago
"Women and children first" only means something in mass transportation or dense urban evacuation in a society with a concept of queueing. More generally, there are ancient virtues of preserving the precious, vulnerable and honored, but the situations where the men would have to uselessly line up in the back would not exist. They would be fighting, attacking back, carrying weaker people, creating diversions, etc.
- zer00eyz 2y ago
  I think you're close to the mark but not quite on it. Women and children first is an artifact of modernity. It is a required value in a location where you can A) have a disaster and B) have people (men) who don't have strong bonds. If we were all from the same family, or village, then yes your "preserving" line of thought works. But mix in a group of males who dont have women or children with them, they can push to the front as it were. Even if they don't have the numbers to be successful they are a "threat to order" that might not exist. One where men who could be helping are now fighting/keeping order. We are extending familiarity to society.
  - 1123581321 2y ago
    Well said.
  - CTDOCodebases 2y ago
    Yes this. Even though it has been practiced for years prior at some point it was probably just instinctual and driven by emotion instead of logical thought. The phrase and it's propagation is an artifact or modernity.
komali2 2y ago
You, and many, have argued the point about the tribes and whatnot, but I've found that this frequently seems to be just applying one's current day culture to a speculation of what things might have been like. One counter point that immediately jumps to mind is the modern concept of "child" is likely far different than in the past, when manhood ceremonies might have occurred as early as 15 years old. We have plenty of young kings and military commanders just from the last thousand years, stretching back 10 or 20 thousand, who knows? As for women in war, just from written era of history (the last 4k years) there's ample evidence of women fighting in war and being honored for valor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_warfare Since you mention tribes I assume you mean more the 5-20k years ago timeline, in which case I'd hesitate to plainly speculate that these societies all tucked their women away in caves like the Flintstones suggests, or that any one of these societies was much like another. It's a very, very long period of time after all. David Graeber is a fun anthropologist to read if you want to challenge some of the "common sense" assumptions we often make about ancient societies. "Debt" and "The Dawn of Everything" in particular I recommend.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > One counter point that immediately jumps to mind is the modern concept of "child" is likely far different than in the past, when manhood ceremonies might have occurred as early as 15 years old. ...You're arguing that the age of manhood has grown lower over time? You have your bar mitzvah at 13. > As for women in war, just from written era of history (the last 4k years) there's ample evidence of women fighting in war and being honored for valor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_warfare Here's what that link looks like: > 16th century BCE – Ahhotep I is credited with a stela at Karnak for "having pulled Egypt together, having cared for its army, having guarded it, having brought back those who fled, gathering up its deserters, having quieted the South, subduing those who defy her". > 1479–1458 BCE – Reign of Hatshepsut. It is possible that she led military campaigns against Nubia and Canaan. > 13th century BCE – Estimated time of the Trojan War. According to ancient sources, several women participate in battle > 13th century BCE – Lady Fu Hao, consort of the Chinese emperor Wu Ding, led 3,000 troops into battle during the Shang dynasty. > Mid-12th century BCE – Deborah believed to have been appointed judge and defeated the army of King Jabin of Canaan, according to the Book of Judges. > 11th century BCE – 4th century CE [sic] – Approximate time for the burial of a Kangju woman in modern Kazakhstan who was buried with a sword and a dagger. > Late 9th century–8th century BCE – Shammuramat (Semiramis) ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire. She was the first woman to rule an empire without a man ruling with her. You might notice that so far only one of these examples involves a woman fighting in war, and that example is taken from legendary "documentation" written 600+ years after the events.
sandworm101 2y ago
Well, in the ancient world it was often old men first, to preserve knowledge and political power. Kings of men over mothers of children.
jameslk 2y ago
> I would argue that "women and children first" has been practiced since the dawn of times in a smaller setting i.e. tribes of hunter gatherers > The motivation is to protect women and children from likely dangerous circumstance so that the tribe can be quickly repopulated. This is the male expendability hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_expendability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_expendability
- CTDOCodebases 2y ago
  Thanks for the link. I came up with this theory after researching why men seem to have been the primary hunters in hunter gatherer tribes. Totally unscientific but I think that heterosexual men and women shape the behaviors of each other for better or worse. Similar stuff is observed in animals. Spiders are particularly interesting.

senderista 2y ago

Of course cannon fodder can’t leave the country.

Dalewyn 2y ago
I'm upvoting you to counter the downvotes because that is the brutal reality of war, particularly if the top brass (on both sides) don't actually have anything to lose.
- senderista 2y ago
  In both Russia and Ukraine, conscription does not apply to those who chose their parents wisely
CTDOCodebases 2y ago
That's a biased take. A more accurate take would be "Of course cannon's and cannon fodder can't leave the country during a time of war."
BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
Yup

llm_trw 2y ago

If all your fighting age males died the women and children would just becomes slaves to whoever won. There are numerous examples of this being documented during Romes expansion into Western Europe. A group of young men on the contrary can quite easily raid and kill the men in neighboring villages and take as many women as they can keep as slaves. Again, documented in Romes founding. People seriously underestimate how bloody and amoral history is and that women were as complicit in all of the barbarity as the men.

elmomle 2y ago
Could you clarify what you said about women's complicity at the end? Every other part of your comment seemed to attribute very little agency to women (they are essentially prizes for whoever wins a fight, with seemingly no other choice).
- bluGill 2y ago
  Women didn't generally run away they just accepted their new husband. or soethe story goes, I imangine cases of women fighting back would be surpressed in, such societies.
  - komali2 2y ago
    How is that complicity?
    - Sirizarry 2y ago
      It’s not. That’s like saying someone who’s getting robbed at gunpoint is complicit because they’re handing over the money.
      - CTDOCodebases 2y ago
        They are complicit though because in this case whatever value they hold (labor, baby factory, social connection) goes away when they refuse to do those things or get killed while refusing. In your analogy imagine being held at gunpoint knowing that if you give up your riches you will ultimately survive but the behavior that caused you to give up your riches will be incentivized and perpetuated due to your compliance. Now contrast that with the situation where you refuse to hand over your riches and the would be robber walks away or kills you only to have the riches disappear the instant you do. Granted it is not an easy situation for an individual to make but choosing to be complicit and acting accordingly is still an exercise of an individuals agency.

1123581321 2y ago

"Women and children first" only means something in mass transportation or dense urban evacuation in a society with a concept of queueing. More generally, there are ancient virtues of preserving the precious, vulnerable and honored, but the situations where the men would have to uselessly line up in the back would not exist. They would be fighting, attacking back, carrying weaker people, creating diversions, etc.

zer00eyz 2y ago
I think you're close to the mark but not quite on it. Women and children first is an artifact of modernity. It is a required value in a location where you can A) have a disaster and B) have people (men) who don't have strong bonds. If we were all from the same family, or village, then yes your "preserving" line of thought works. But mix in a group of males who dont have women or children with them, they can push to the front as it were. Even if they don't have the numbers to be successful they are a "threat to order" that might not exist. One where men who could be helping are now fighting/keeping order. We are extending familiarity to society.
- 1123581321 2y ago
  Well said.
- CTDOCodebases 2y ago
  Yes this. Even though it has been practiced for years prior at some point it was probably just instinctual and driven by emotion instead of logical thought. The phrase and it's propagation is an artifact or modernity.

komali2 2y ago

You, and many, have argued the point about the tribes and whatnot, but I've found that this frequently seems to be just applying one's current day culture to a speculation of what things might have been like. One counter point that immediately jumps to mind is the modern concept of "child" is likely far different than in the past, when manhood ceremonies might have occurred as early as 15 years old. We have plenty of young kings and military commanders just from the last thousand years, stretching back 10 or 20 thousand, who knows? As for women in war, just from written era of history (the last 4k years) there's ample evidence of women fighting in war and being honored for valor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_warfare Since you mention tribes I assume you mean more the 5-20k years ago timeline, in which case I'd hesitate to plainly speculate that these societies all tucked their women away in caves like the Flintstones suggests, or that any one of these societies was much like another. It's a very, very long period of time after all. David Graeber is a fun anthropologist to read if you want to challenge some of the "common sense" assumptions we often make about ancient societies. "Debt" and "The Dawn of Everything" in particular I recommend.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> One counter point that immediately jumps to mind is the modern concept of "child" is likely far different than in the past, when manhood ceremonies might have occurred as early as 15 years old. ...You're arguing that the age of manhood has grown lower over time? You have your bar mitzvah at 13. > As for women in war, just from written era of history (the last 4k years) there's ample evidence of women fighting in war and being honored for valor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_warfare Here's what that link looks like: > 16th century BCE – Ahhotep I is credited with a stela at Karnak for "having pulled Egypt together, having cared for its army, having guarded it, having brought back those who fled, gathering up its deserters, having quieted the South, subduing those who defy her". > 1479–1458 BCE – Reign of Hatshepsut. It is possible that she led military campaigns against Nubia and Canaan. > 13th century BCE – Estimated time of the Trojan War. According to ancient sources, several women participate in battle > 13th century BCE – Lady Fu Hao, consort of the Chinese emperor Wu Ding, led 3,000 troops into battle during the Shang dynasty. > Mid-12th century BCE – Deborah believed to have been appointed judge and defeated the army of King Jabin of Canaan, according to the Book of Judges. > 11th century BCE – 4th century CE [sic] – Approximate time for the burial of a Kangju woman in modern Kazakhstan who was buried with a sword and a dagger. > Late 9th century–8th century BCE – Shammuramat (Semiramis) ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire. She was the first woman to rule an empire without a man ruling with her. You might notice that so far only one of these examples involves a woman fighting in war, and that example is taken from legendary "documentation" written 600+ years after the events.

sandworm101 2y ago

Well, in the ancient world it was often old men first, to preserve knowledge and political power. Kings of men over mothers of children.

jameslk 2y ago

> I would argue that "women and children first" has been practiced since the dawn of times in a smaller setting i.e. tribes of hunter gatherers > The motivation is to protect women and children from likely dangerous circumstance so that the tribe can be quickly repopulated. This is the male expendability hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_expendability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_expendability

CTDOCodebases 2y ago
Thanks for the link. I came up with this theory after researching why men seem to have been the primary hunters in hunter gatherer tribes. Totally unscientific but I think that heterosexual men and women shape the behaviors of each other for better or worse. Similar stuff is observed in animals. Spiders are particularly interesting.