|
One thing to also consider is that most of the historical definitions of who got treated how could be written as, "How things where done in the big city." There was a lot more variety and less obsessiveness in outlying places and a lot of what did happen was due to hundreds of years of the same sort of indotrination the church tried on indians in California and other places where they set up missions. Given a few hundred years of everyone that disagrees with so called 'chivalry' getting axed, its not hard to imagine the true nature of things getting badly skewed. There are numerous examples of how the way women where treated in the middle ages was 'abnormal' from the perspective of many cultures, even in the same regions.
If you want to be realistic, you would have to also make clerics the 'enforcers' of those standards, the king jump at every sneeze of the church and hold stonings, burnings or just flat out murder as 'standard' everyday events enforcing the standards. At least for the first few hundred years of the 'social order'. As Fern would no doubt state, chivalry was a fiction. It was a pure white suite, which society told the exucutioner to where, in between beheadings. Assuming you get the analogy. But some people only want to see the supposed 'positive' behaviour that came from the pretense of putting a woman up on a pedistal, then chaining her their, so she couldn't get down to do anything.
|