Sablesword
TMF Master
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2001
- Messages
- 785
- Points
- 18
(Posted here as an example of alternate-history world building, and on the off-chance that non-writers on the TMF might find it interesting)
This is an unserious, alien-space-bats alternate history that I ginned up as a kinky excuse to have an “all women are slaves” setting in the 1950s, without using the hoary cliché of “The South Won the US Civil War.” It’s the sort of soft alternate-history that continues to have improbable similarities to our timeline, long after the Point of Departure. In particular, the major historical figures are nearly all the same, albeit with a few gender-swaps thrown in.
In this timeline, psychic abilities are weak but real, stronger in women than in men, and slowly growing stronger with time. The Point of Departure was the conception of Jane Brown in 1799 as a gender-swapped John Brown and as a woman with real psychic ability to back up her charisma. Her career was essentially the same at that of our timeline’s John Brown.
Changes in history were few and minor prior to 1865, and consisted mostly of alternate “psychic” explanations for events that were the same in both timelines. A very small number of women had what were later recognized as genuine psychic abilities. Among these women were Queen Victoria, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Jane Wilma Booth – the last being a gender-swapped version of John Wilkes Booth.
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Jane Booth in 1865 sent a psychic shockwave around the world. Mary Lincoln went mad and attempted a military coup. The coup failed, and Mary Lincoln was confined to an insane asylum in 1866 (vs 1875 in our timeline.) Queen Victoria sensed the assassination and suffered an increase in her psychic abilities. As a result she became “eccentric,” with her abilities becoming public knowledge. Victoria lived out her life as Queen and Empress, but on her death in 1901, Parliament passed an act requiring all future British monarchs to be male. This didn’t cause any changes in the succession, compared to our timeline, until the crown went to Edward IX, the son of George VI and a gender-swapped version of our timeline’s Elizabeth II.
The shock of 1865 also caused psychic abilities to be taken seriously as a subject of scientific study. By 1870 the scientific and public consensus was that they were real and that they were slowly growing more common and widespread. However their nature and functioning still needed to be explored. Two noteworthy researchers were Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, who in this timeline remained friends with Jung becoming Freud’s successor, rather than the two men having a falling out as they did in our timeline.
The psychic shock did not prevent Congress from passing the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, just as in our timeline. However the shock did cause the rise of Brother Samson, a black preacher and former slave who founded “The Pillars of the Temple of the Bible,” a sect that quickly became known as the Samsonites. Brother Samson preached, among other things, the brotherhood of men of all races, and the virtue of women submitting to the authority of their husbands.
The Samsonites have had a significant influence over the years. They were important in the Demancipation movement, and also in promoting minority civil rights and improving race relations. Their efforts caused civil rights progress for blacks to come about a decade earlier and with less fractiousness than in our timeline. For example, the US Army and Navy became integrated just before World War II, rather than in 1948 as in our timeline.
The Samsonites are also the reason why Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t exist in the Demancipation timeline. The founders of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in our timeline joined the Samsonites, instead.
The expansion of psychic abilities also shaped (and ultimately destroyed) the women’s suffragist movement. The early suffragist leaders turned out to have strong abilities and attempted to use them to advance their cause. The first significant use was at the 1873 trial of Susan B. Anthony for attempting to vote. A number of “women’s circles” tried to use “psychic witchcraft” to influence the trial. Their abilities were far too weak to do so, of course, but they did manage to communicate telepathically to the judge and jury. This communication, which was actually no more compelling than a letter or telegram would have been, was perceived as a powerful mind-control attempt, and it created a belief in the women’s extraordinary psychic strength that lasted for decades in the popular imagination. It also created a strong backlash of feeling against the women’s suffrage movement, setting the movement on a course to failure and ultimately resulting in Demancipation.
Further attempts at psychic influence were made by women suffragists over the next fourteen years, resulting only in further backlash. The “Anthony amendment” was voted on by Congress in 1887, much as in our timeline, but with much more public interest. Despite Susan B. Anthony’s calls against doing so, psychic attempts were made to influence the vote, and this time the backlash proved fatal.
The Temperance movement largely renounced its former support for women’s suffrage after 1887, with Carrie Nation being a notable exception to this trend. She was a psychically gifted hatchet-wielding madwoman who supported both temperance and women’s suffrage until her arrest and institutional enslavement in 1906.
Wyoming voted down women’s suffrage in 1887 (rather than passing it in 1893, as in our timeline). After that, the women’s suffrage movement had no further successes in even bringing the issue to a vote. The post-1887 advances in women’s suffrage in our timeline did not occur in this one.
In hindsight, the key event of 1887 was the “ax-crazy psychic suffragette” becoming a self-reinforcing stereotype. Women with strong psychic gifts did tend to go mad – a tendency that would greatly increase in the twentieth century. Because of the common belief in suffragettes being both psychically gifted and ax-crazy, this madness normally did take the form of the woman adopting radical suffragist and feminist views, combined with a delusion that dismembering men with an ax was an acceptable form of gentle persuasion.
(As a side note, the term “suffragette” arose earlier than in our timeline. In the 1870s, female psychics predicted “In the future, we will be known as ‘suffragettes’” and as a result of these predictions “the future” arrived by 1887 rather than after 1900.)
What remained of women’s suffrage after 1887 was a violent revolutionary movement, rather than a politically viable one. Despite its reduced size, it was highly visible in newspaper headlines and in popular fiction, with the figure of the ax-crazy psychic suffragette taking her place alongside the mad anarchist bomber.
The only political successes the revolutionary suffragettes had was with the various revolutionary socialist movements. Those movements became much more feminist (in theory) than in our timeline, ultimately leading to the USSR adopting socialism-feminism as its official ideology.
For the mainstream, the old debate over women’s suffrage had ended, both in the US and the rest of the world. The new debate was over the danger posed by these violent psychic madwomen. At first the majority view was “Lock up only those women who have proven themselves dangerous,” with “Lock up all psychically gifted women as potentially dangerous” being a strong minority opinion. Developments in psychic and psychological studies in the 1890s produced a third opinion that eventually became established policy: “Enslave the women, so that they can at least be let out in public.”
The enslavement of women was first proposed satirically back in 1866, by a pseudonymous ‘John Jackson.’ In “A Modest Proposal for the Enhancement of Husbandly Authority,” the author argued that women should be widely enslaved to “balance” the emancipation of blacks after the Civil War. The satire proved popular enough to spawn a number of imitations.
In 1873, in response to Susan B. Anthony’s trial, another pamphlet published by ‘John Jackson’ (who may or may not have been the same author) called for “feminist women convicted of feminist crimes” to be sentenced to enslavement and private ownership, rather than to ordinary prison terms.
In 1890, a monograph was published by a pseudonymous ‘John Jackson’ who was definitely not either of the first two. His Studies on the Effects of Enslavement described illegal experiments in enslaving women – thus the pseudonymous publication – and concluded that frank chattel enslavement really was an effective treatment for the treatment of mental illness in women, especially if the madwoman had strong psychic gifts. The State of Mississippi quickly passed a law to implement this enslavement-treatment, and this led to the Missie case.
In 1892, a black woman named Missie (no last name) was found to be insane and sent to the Montgomery State Asylum in Mississippi. Even though her mental illness didn’t take (or hadn’t yet taken) the violent ‘suffragette’ form, she was still subjected to enslavement therapy and made a legal, institutional chattel of the Montgomery Asylum under the new Mississippi law. She made a Thirteenth Amendment challenge to the law, and in 1896 lost in the Supreme Court. The Court ruled, in Missie v. Montgomery State Asylum that the Thirteenth Amendment only applied to men.
(The Plessy case of our timeline never made it to the Supreme Court in the Demancipation timeline, as the Missie case took its place.)
Also in 1892, Lizzy Borden murdered four people and injured several more (vs our timeline where she was only accused of two murders). Afterwards, Lizzy Borden displayed the classic signs of being a mad psychic suffragette, was found “not guilty by reason of insanity,” and was confined to an asylum for the rest of her life.
The Missie and Lizzy Borden cases resulted in a number of States (and many foreign countries) passing “Missie” or “Lizzy” laws to legalize enslavement-therapy for psychic madwomen. At first, ownership of the women was kept strictly in government hands. There were, however, many salacious stories about women being privately owned by individual men in far-away and exotic places.
These stories had a basis in fact. It turned out that enslavement therapy worked much better if the women were owned by individual men rather than by government institutions. In particular, there was Freud’s publication in 1895 of Studies on Hysteria (a completely different work than in our timeline). Freud had found that the combination of enslavement to an individual man, combined with a slave-collar of iron, steel, or some other ferromagnetic metal, was marvelously effective at eliminating mental illness in women. Even though the experiments took place in the Ottoman Empire (where slavery was still effectively legal) Freud’s treatment became known as “Vienna Enslavement.” It was also initially denounced as “immoral,” “horrid,” and “unthinkable” – too radical to be adopted in either Europe or America.
This attitude started to change with the turn of the century. Despite the opposition, Vienna Enslavement went from being generally illegal in 1900 to generally legal in 1910. It worked, and it also turned out to be popular. The Undermarket of New York City was a particularly famous (or notorious) example. Women were bought and sold there, flouting the New York State law against doing so, until that law was finally repealed.
The Samsonites worked quietly to support legalized female enslavement. Officially, their policy was that women should only be symbolically enslaved by their husbands, in ways that did not violate any of the local anti-slavery laws. Unofficially, they worked to get those laws repealed.
The chief opposition to female enslavement came from the Temperance movement. Even though it had renounced support for women’s suffrage, it still supported women’s rights in other areas. It called for psychic women to be “Bound, but not enslaved,” and to use their powers for “Good, and not Evil.” It blamed the madness of psychic women on both alcohol and on the new beverage known as “Brew.”
Brew is a mildly stimulating but non-intoxicating drink that provides a very mild boost to psychic abilities. It was first produced as a home-remedy-type concoction around 1870, used by women to focus and enhance their psychic abilities. Commercial production of Brew began around 1880, and it soon afterwards became popular with men as well as women. It was also credited (and blamed) with having far greater potency than it actually possessed. While there were early attempts to promote brew as a non-alcoholic “Temperance drink,” it quickly became labeled by the Temperance movement as a “Devils Brew” or “Witches Brew” as evil as Demon Rum.
There was also some opposition to female enslavement outside the Temperance movement. Even though Vienna Enslavement worked, there were those desperate to find some alternative. Various forms of symbolic- and faux-enslavement were tried, along with the permanent wearing of steel collars without enslavement, and the use of Brew, other drugs, and various “physical” therapies. Most of these alternatives failed completely, and none had more than a very limited success.
The Prohibitionists had a simple solution: Abolish alcohol and Brew. They blamed these beverages for driving women mad, not just when women drank them, but when men drank them and then associated with women. The Socialists also had a simple solution: Abolish capitalism. They blamed the need for female enslavement on capitalism, the existence of property ownership, and “bourgeois decadence.” A third group, small but of outsized importance, were (and are) the Southern Abolitionists. Formally known as “The Loyal Southern Fellowship for a New Emancipation,” this group was originally the rump of the Bourbon Abolitionists that remained after the New York and other northern Bourbonists joined the Prohibition movement. The Southern Abolitionists rejected Vienna Enslavement, were pointedly neutral on the subject of Prohibition, and kept a pragmatic focus on ending female enslavement to the exclusion of all other issues.
The opponents of female enslavement made a great deal out of the psychic research findings that everyone had at least a little psychic ability, and in particular that men had psychic abilities too. But as Jung, Freud, and other psychic researchers pointed out, men’s psychic abilities are different in both degree and kind. Not only do men have less psychic sensitivity and strength, on average, but they also have a natural immunity that women lack. Furthermore, the “psychic atmosphere” was thickening over time, as the average level of psychic ability increased. A level of sensitivity that was safe for women back in the 1870s was no longer so in the twentieth century.
Support for universal female enslavement, or “Demancipation,” thus went from a lunatic crackpot view in the nineteenth century, to a reasonable minority view in the first decade of the twentieth century, and then to a majority view in the 1910s. The Ottoman Empire did impose Demancipation in 1908, but no other nation wanted to follow its lead. Opponents still hoped that some new alternative would arise, making enslavement therapy for suffragettes and other psychic madwomen unnecessary. Even supporters admitted that Demancipation would be a radical change to society, one that most people wanted to put off for as long as possible.
But by the early 1910s, a new and unforeseen problem had arisen. As the number of slave women increased, so did their interactions with free women – and those interactions turned out to be much more fractious than anyone either expected or wanted. It became clear that a society with partial female enslavement would be untenable unless the number of slave women could be kept small and their interactions with free women kept limited. Male mathematical psychologists calculated a “breaking point” number that would be reached sometime in the 1920s, and female psychic seers predicted a “feminine catastrophe” that would occur once that number was reached. At that point, the friction between free and slave women would grow so great as to bring down the world order and possibly even civilization itself. Despite these predictions, only a few small nations followed the lead of the Ottoman Empire in imposing Demancipation. Most nations still refused to change, despite the predicted crisis.
The crisis came early in the form of the First World War. Despite certain revisionist claims, this was an all-male blunder. Neither free nor slave women had any significant part in either starting the war or in directing its course, with the possible exception of the spying by Mata Hari and her owner. There is a strong case that the animus of free women toward a slave caused her to be held responsible for that spying (and thus executed for it), after her master abandoned her to flee to Germany.
By the end of the war, the consensus in most of the world was that Demancipation had to be tried. The reasons why this consensus formed are still under debate, but the arguments include: That it was seen as time for women to sacrifice for the common good, after the sacrifice of men during the war. That a “feminine catastrophe” was still looming and had to be averted. That free women were ashamed of their animus toward their enslaved sisters and wanted to make amends. That slave women would be grateful to free women who sacrificed their freedom, thus mending the rift between the two groups. That freedom for free women would soon become less than worthless as they were increasingly cosseted. Finally, there was the argument that Demancipation would allow slave women to enjoy good treatment and prosperity, under conditions of social harmony. In any case, most of the world’s nations imposed female Demancipation between 1918 and 1922.
Great Britain and its dependencies imposed a near-Demancipation in 1918 that exempted less than ten percent of the female population. In 1928, the Equality of Women (Demancipation) Act enslaved those well-educated and (formerly) wealthy women who had previously been exempted.
France and Switzerland passed Demancipation with a legal fig leaf. All women had to be collared, while technically being not-quite-slaves under the law. Socially, their status was close enough to Vienna enslavement to keep them sane, with the chief practical difference being that they were called “Femme à collier” or “kragenfrau” instead of “femme esclave” or “sklavin.” In 1945 the legal ambiguities were eliminated, and French and Swiss females became normal slave women.
Soviet Russia, along with the other communist countries, officially opposed the Demancipation movement. According to their ideology of socialism-feminism, the “need” to enslave women was just another example of capitalist bourgeoisie decadence. In practice, however, women in communist countries were collared, reduced to a position equivalent to slavery for all practical purposes, and treated badly in the bargain.
Germany enacted full female Demancipation in 1918, and Italy, Poland, Spain, and the rest of Europe had all passed Demancipation laws by 1920. When the Nazis took power in Germany, they continued to enforce Demancipation despite the official Nazi doctrine of “National Feminism.” The party line was that German women would be emancipated once they had become pure and strong enough to stand the strain of freedom. In the meantime, the Nazi policy toward women was Kragen, Küche, Kirche – “Collar, Kitchen, Church.”
In the United States there was a strong majority in favor of Demancipation but not quite a true consensus. After Congress passed the Nineteenth or “Demancipation” amendment in 1919, five States held female-only plebiscites on its ratification. Officially, these were only advisory, but the legislatures followed their lead in approving or rejecting the amendment. Women voted down Demancipation in Florida (49-51) and Mississippi (45-55), and approved it in New Jersey (67-33), Texas (51-49), and Utah (78-22). The other forty-three States voted on ratification without plebiscites, and in the end the amendment was ratified in 1920.
The Prohibition and Demancipation amendments were passed with an informal understanding that one or the other would end up being repealed after a dozen years or so. Competing political movements immediately arose to work toward repeal of one or the other of the two amendments. In the event, Prohibition (the Eighteenth Amendment) was repealed in 1933, just as in our timeline. In the meantime, Prohibition applied to Brew as well as to alcohol, producing a black market in both.
After the passage of Demancipation, the 1920s were a decade of fads and enthusiasms as people sorted out the norms and standards of the new era. The decade also saw the discovery or invention of the first psi-active materials. Most of these were just laboratory curiosities at first, but “beauty cream” almost immediately became commercially important.
Beauty cream is a vitamin-fortified, psi-active cold cream invented in 1923. Women who use this cream retain a youthful appearance as they age, as a psychic or psychosomatic effect.
Tobacco use became much less common after 1920 than in our timeline. Cigarettes had become associated with soldiers and the military during the First World War, and civilian men who smoked mostly smoked cigars and pipes. Women did not smoke at all. Tobacco smoke was believed to cause unnatural aging in women, and as a psychosomatic effect this became true. World War II strengthened the association of cigarettes with the military, and so afterwards civilian men smoked even fewer cigarettes than they had between the wars.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression lasted just as long as in our timeline, but did not run quite as deep. Major political figures, parties, and policies remained very close to those in our timeline, despite both the absence of women voters and the presence of women psychics. There were some differences at the margins, however.
The concept of “bond witches” first arose in connection with Franklin Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust” in 1932. It quickly became generalized, with the term referring to any woman whose superior psychic ability was marked by her wearing a cheap glass “gem” in her collar.
With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 and its implied endorsement of continued Demancipation, most of the anti-Demancipation groups folded. The Southern Abolitionists continued to exist, shrunken in membership to a tiny fringe movement, albeit one that retained outsized visibility and (in the South) influence.
The 1930s also saw the first development of devices that could be directly activated by mental power, and that could provide feedback when mentally probed. The first examples only worked for women, but these were quickly followed by versions that would respond to men as well, and then by versions that could distinguish between the sexes, allowing for devices that women could be locked out from using.
The first telescribe (the psi-driven successor to the typewriter) was invented in 1936. Telescribes were used widely by governments during World War II and gained commercial success afterwards. In 1949, IBM introduced its wildly popular Ectomatic model, and by the end of 1950 telescribes had almost completely supplanted typewriters.
As noted above, the US armed forces were racially integrated just before the start of World War II, instead of afterwards as in our timeline. Another difference that occurred shortly before the war was the migration or importation of hundreds of thousands of Jewish women, sent from Nazi Germany in a “Devil’s Bargain.” The money from the sale of these women went into the Nazi’s coffers as the price for letting them escape. The Jewish men who had owned them remained behind, and most of them died in the Holocaust.
During World War II, slave women naturally contributed to the war effort. At least as many women worked in civilian factories as did in our timeline. Uniformed women, however, were confined to the various female auxiliary organizations, where their position, for obvious reasons, was separate and unequal. These organizations included GEARS (Girls Enslaved, Army Reserve Service) and GENIE (Girls Enslaved, Navy Indenture-Enlistments) in the US, and RING (Royal Incarcerated Navy Girls) in the UK.
Many female auxiliaries worked in areas where their psychic abilities were helpful, including photo interpretation and operating the new RADAR installations with their psychic controls. Another important contribution was psychic “shielding” or “jamming” that small groups of highly-trusted women produced to hide various secrets from opposing psychics who might otherwise sense or foretell them. The surprise at Pearl Harbor, for example, is credited to (or blamed on) a circle of Japanese bond witches who kept the attack plan concealed from their American counterparts.
The Russians made much more use of women as military auxiliaries and even in combat roles, in keeping with their socialist-feminist ideology. Despite the loud pretense that Russian women were “Not Slaves!” these women wore steel collars as part of their uniforms and were commanded by men.
In the last months of the war, Nazi Germany formed a small number of “wonder-units” of women with strong psychic abilities, manumitting them and removing their collars. This worked out badly for both the Nazis and the women.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, conditions in Europe, and especially in Germany, were slightly less dire than in our timeline. Part of this was due to the urgent counsel of Allied bond witches who foresaw that the Morgenthau Plan to de industrialize Germany would bring disaster if fully implemented. Another part was the feeling that German slave women should not be punished – or at least not punished too harshly – for the misdeeds of their masters. After all, it was solely German men who voted in the Nazis in the Demancipation timeline (as opposed to our timeline where German women also helped vote them into power).
On the other hand, there were Soviet moles who, following orders from Moscow, advocated that the Morgenthau Plan be implemented with great harshness.
On the home front, the Federal government imposed racial desegregation on schools in the fall of 1944 as a “temporary wartime measure.” This produced a lot of grumbling about “dirty Samsonite tricks,” and in the fall of 1945, the city of Topeka re-segregated its schools. This, in turn, led to the Supreme Court decision of Brown v Board of Education (with a different Brown than in our timeline) in 1946.
In 1954, Congress passed a civil rights law similar to the 1964 Civil Rights Act of our timeline. However, the 1954 law of this timeline also voided the various State laws that prohibited non-white men from owning white women and (often) white men from owning non-white women. This provision was immediately tied up in court battles, but in 1958 the Supreme Court not only ruled the measure constitutional, but also declared that such anti-miscegenation laws would be unconstitutional even without the federal act.
The Cold War unfolded much as it had in our timeline. Demancipation and the existence of the Southern Abolitionists did throw a wrinkle into it, however. The communists kept trying to infiltrate Southern Abolitionist organizations, and the Southern Abolitionists were vigilant about keeping the commies out. The men who still opposed Demancipation after World War II were evenly split between being communists and Southern Abolitionists, while women who opposed Demancipation were almost all socialist-feminists. Southern Abolitionism had become a man’s thing that women were reluctantly dragged into.
The “moderate” or “incrementalist” Southern Abolitionists drew a certain amount of sympathy, even among the great majority who wanted to see Demancipation continue. Nearly everyone agreed on the need for legal and social reforms in the treatment of slave women, even if they disagreed about what those reforms should be, or about how far they should go. There is, however, a post-war consensus that men should be gentlemen to the women they own, and the sort of harsh treatment that was tolerated before the war stopped being tolerated afterwards.
Women’s fashions in the 1930s and 1940s were much the same as in our timeline, with three exceptions. The first, of course, is that women all wear slave collars. The second was a custom (and in many places a law) that women’s shoes have built-in hobbles. And the third was that women did not wear visible socks or stockings.
Back in the 1920s, people started viewing female stockings as being an odd combination of Victorian-fuddy, and shockingly rebellious and indecent. This attitude solidified in the 1930s and 1940s, with the taboo growing even stronger in the 1950s. The absence of the nylons and pantyhose that are so common in our timeline is thus a major difference. When slave women have a practical need to cover their legs, they commonly wear leggings, calf-length harem pants, or short pantaloons.
Spring, fall, and winter fashions for women in the 1950s were also similar to those in our timeline. Summer fashions tended to be much skimpier. Saris and sari-like costumes were popular in the early 1950s, and a simple sarong-like rectangle of colorful fabric – often translucent – became the fashion in the late 1950s. These summer fashions were usually polyester, but sometimes were cotton – or silk for the high-end versions.
Pleasure-tickling of slave women was just one of many fads that arose and faded in the Roaring Twenties, when the various possibilities of Demancipation were being explored. During World War II, both the US and the UK conducted intense, secretive studies of tickling, spurred by reports of (entirely fictional) secret Nazi projects and (wildly exaggerated) secret Japanese projects. After the war, tickling continued to be an uncommon pastime, one stereotypically practiced by ‘nerd’ or ‘egghead’ types on a slavegirl who also wore thick eyeglasses. Then Happy Household (“A Magazine by and for House Slaves”) published “Are You a Natural Ticklee?” in its January 1956 issue, launching pleasure-tickling as a popular fad.
It helped that many women were natural ticklees and that most other women could be easily induced to enjoy being tickled. It also helped that pleasure-tickling was believed to have a number of psychic and psychological benefits for the women – and some of those beliefs were actually true. By 1959, tickling had made the transition from fad to cultural institution.
Up through the 1950s (and beyond), the limitations on slave women concerning such things as owning property, obtaining driver’s licenses, earning advanced degrees, and pursuing professional careers, varied from State to State in the United States (and from country to country outside the US). In general, the laws the South provided for more leniency about what slave women were and weren’t allowed to do. Mostly this was due to the influence of the Southern Abolitionists. At times, however, the Southern Abolitionists and the Samsonites have entered a strange-bedfellow alliance to advance a particular reform.
In particular, “women drivers” were notorious for being allowed south of the old Mason-Dixon Line, while being prohibited north of that line. West of the Mississippi river, the State laws were a patchwork when it comes to slave women being allowed to drive.
This is an unserious, alien-space-bats alternate history that I ginned up as a kinky excuse to have an “all women are slaves” setting in the 1950s, without using the hoary cliché of “The South Won the US Civil War.” It’s the sort of soft alternate-history that continues to have improbable similarities to our timeline, long after the Point of Departure. In particular, the major historical figures are nearly all the same, albeit with a few gender-swaps thrown in.
In this timeline, psychic abilities are weak but real, stronger in women than in men, and slowly growing stronger with time. The Point of Departure was the conception of Jane Brown in 1799 as a gender-swapped John Brown and as a woman with real psychic ability to back up her charisma. Her career was essentially the same at that of our timeline’s John Brown.
Changes in history were few and minor prior to 1865, and consisted mostly of alternate “psychic” explanations for events that were the same in both timelines. A very small number of women had what were later recognized as genuine psychic abilities. Among these women were Queen Victoria, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Jane Wilma Booth – the last being a gender-swapped version of John Wilkes Booth.
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Jane Booth in 1865 sent a psychic shockwave around the world. Mary Lincoln went mad and attempted a military coup. The coup failed, and Mary Lincoln was confined to an insane asylum in 1866 (vs 1875 in our timeline.) Queen Victoria sensed the assassination and suffered an increase in her psychic abilities. As a result she became “eccentric,” with her abilities becoming public knowledge. Victoria lived out her life as Queen and Empress, but on her death in 1901, Parliament passed an act requiring all future British monarchs to be male. This didn’t cause any changes in the succession, compared to our timeline, until the crown went to Edward IX, the son of George VI and a gender-swapped version of our timeline’s Elizabeth II.
The shock of 1865 also caused psychic abilities to be taken seriously as a subject of scientific study. By 1870 the scientific and public consensus was that they were real and that they were slowly growing more common and widespread. However their nature and functioning still needed to be explored. Two noteworthy researchers were Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, who in this timeline remained friends with Jung becoming Freud’s successor, rather than the two men having a falling out as they did in our timeline.
The psychic shock did not prevent Congress from passing the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, just as in our timeline. However the shock did cause the rise of Brother Samson, a black preacher and former slave who founded “The Pillars of the Temple of the Bible,” a sect that quickly became known as the Samsonites. Brother Samson preached, among other things, the brotherhood of men of all races, and the virtue of women submitting to the authority of their husbands.
The Samsonites have had a significant influence over the years. They were important in the Demancipation movement, and also in promoting minority civil rights and improving race relations. Their efforts caused civil rights progress for blacks to come about a decade earlier and with less fractiousness than in our timeline. For example, the US Army and Navy became integrated just before World War II, rather than in 1948 as in our timeline.
The Samsonites are also the reason why Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t exist in the Demancipation timeline. The founders of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in our timeline joined the Samsonites, instead.
The expansion of psychic abilities also shaped (and ultimately destroyed) the women’s suffragist movement. The early suffragist leaders turned out to have strong abilities and attempted to use them to advance their cause. The first significant use was at the 1873 trial of Susan B. Anthony for attempting to vote. A number of “women’s circles” tried to use “psychic witchcraft” to influence the trial. Their abilities were far too weak to do so, of course, but they did manage to communicate telepathically to the judge and jury. This communication, which was actually no more compelling than a letter or telegram would have been, was perceived as a powerful mind-control attempt, and it created a belief in the women’s extraordinary psychic strength that lasted for decades in the popular imagination. It also created a strong backlash of feeling against the women’s suffrage movement, setting the movement on a course to failure and ultimately resulting in Demancipation.
Further attempts at psychic influence were made by women suffragists over the next fourteen years, resulting only in further backlash. The “Anthony amendment” was voted on by Congress in 1887, much as in our timeline, but with much more public interest. Despite Susan B. Anthony’s calls against doing so, psychic attempts were made to influence the vote, and this time the backlash proved fatal.
The Temperance movement largely renounced its former support for women’s suffrage after 1887, with Carrie Nation being a notable exception to this trend. She was a psychically gifted hatchet-wielding madwoman who supported both temperance and women’s suffrage until her arrest and institutional enslavement in 1906.
Wyoming voted down women’s suffrage in 1887 (rather than passing it in 1893, as in our timeline). After that, the women’s suffrage movement had no further successes in even bringing the issue to a vote. The post-1887 advances in women’s suffrage in our timeline did not occur in this one.
In hindsight, the key event of 1887 was the “ax-crazy psychic suffragette” becoming a self-reinforcing stereotype. Women with strong psychic gifts did tend to go mad – a tendency that would greatly increase in the twentieth century. Because of the common belief in suffragettes being both psychically gifted and ax-crazy, this madness normally did take the form of the woman adopting radical suffragist and feminist views, combined with a delusion that dismembering men with an ax was an acceptable form of gentle persuasion.
(As a side note, the term “suffragette” arose earlier than in our timeline. In the 1870s, female psychics predicted “In the future, we will be known as ‘suffragettes’” and as a result of these predictions “the future” arrived by 1887 rather than after 1900.)
What remained of women’s suffrage after 1887 was a violent revolutionary movement, rather than a politically viable one. Despite its reduced size, it was highly visible in newspaper headlines and in popular fiction, with the figure of the ax-crazy psychic suffragette taking her place alongside the mad anarchist bomber.
The only political successes the revolutionary suffragettes had was with the various revolutionary socialist movements. Those movements became much more feminist (in theory) than in our timeline, ultimately leading to the USSR adopting socialism-feminism as its official ideology.
For the mainstream, the old debate over women’s suffrage had ended, both in the US and the rest of the world. The new debate was over the danger posed by these violent psychic madwomen. At first the majority view was “Lock up only those women who have proven themselves dangerous,” with “Lock up all psychically gifted women as potentially dangerous” being a strong minority opinion. Developments in psychic and psychological studies in the 1890s produced a third opinion that eventually became established policy: “Enslave the women, so that they can at least be let out in public.”
The enslavement of women was first proposed satirically back in 1866, by a pseudonymous ‘John Jackson.’ In “A Modest Proposal for the Enhancement of Husbandly Authority,” the author argued that women should be widely enslaved to “balance” the emancipation of blacks after the Civil War. The satire proved popular enough to spawn a number of imitations.
In 1873, in response to Susan B. Anthony’s trial, another pamphlet published by ‘John Jackson’ (who may or may not have been the same author) called for “feminist women convicted of feminist crimes” to be sentenced to enslavement and private ownership, rather than to ordinary prison terms.
In 1890, a monograph was published by a pseudonymous ‘John Jackson’ who was definitely not either of the first two. His Studies on the Effects of Enslavement described illegal experiments in enslaving women – thus the pseudonymous publication – and concluded that frank chattel enslavement really was an effective treatment for the treatment of mental illness in women, especially if the madwoman had strong psychic gifts. The State of Mississippi quickly passed a law to implement this enslavement-treatment, and this led to the Missie case.
In 1892, a black woman named Missie (no last name) was found to be insane and sent to the Montgomery State Asylum in Mississippi. Even though her mental illness didn’t take (or hadn’t yet taken) the violent ‘suffragette’ form, she was still subjected to enslavement therapy and made a legal, institutional chattel of the Montgomery Asylum under the new Mississippi law. She made a Thirteenth Amendment challenge to the law, and in 1896 lost in the Supreme Court. The Court ruled, in Missie v. Montgomery State Asylum that the Thirteenth Amendment only applied to men.
(The Plessy case of our timeline never made it to the Supreme Court in the Demancipation timeline, as the Missie case took its place.)
Also in 1892, Lizzy Borden murdered four people and injured several more (vs our timeline where she was only accused of two murders). Afterwards, Lizzy Borden displayed the classic signs of being a mad psychic suffragette, was found “not guilty by reason of insanity,” and was confined to an asylum for the rest of her life.
The Missie and Lizzy Borden cases resulted in a number of States (and many foreign countries) passing “Missie” or “Lizzy” laws to legalize enslavement-therapy for psychic madwomen. At first, ownership of the women was kept strictly in government hands. There were, however, many salacious stories about women being privately owned by individual men in far-away and exotic places.
These stories had a basis in fact. It turned out that enslavement therapy worked much better if the women were owned by individual men rather than by government institutions. In particular, there was Freud’s publication in 1895 of Studies on Hysteria (a completely different work than in our timeline). Freud had found that the combination of enslavement to an individual man, combined with a slave-collar of iron, steel, or some other ferromagnetic metal, was marvelously effective at eliminating mental illness in women. Even though the experiments took place in the Ottoman Empire (where slavery was still effectively legal) Freud’s treatment became known as “Vienna Enslavement.” It was also initially denounced as “immoral,” “horrid,” and “unthinkable” – too radical to be adopted in either Europe or America.
This attitude started to change with the turn of the century. Despite the opposition, Vienna Enslavement went from being generally illegal in 1900 to generally legal in 1910. It worked, and it also turned out to be popular. The Undermarket of New York City was a particularly famous (or notorious) example. Women were bought and sold there, flouting the New York State law against doing so, until that law was finally repealed.
The Samsonites worked quietly to support legalized female enslavement. Officially, their policy was that women should only be symbolically enslaved by their husbands, in ways that did not violate any of the local anti-slavery laws. Unofficially, they worked to get those laws repealed.
The chief opposition to female enslavement came from the Temperance movement. Even though it had renounced support for women’s suffrage, it still supported women’s rights in other areas. It called for psychic women to be “Bound, but not enslaved,” and to use their powers for “Good, and not Evil.” It blamed the madness of psychic women on both alcohol and on the new beverage known as “Brew.”
Brew is a mildly stimulating but non-intoxicating drink that provides a very mild boost to psychic abilities. It was first produced as a home-remedy-type concoction around 1870, used by women to focus and enhance their psychic abilities. Commercial production of Brew began around 1880, and it soon afterwards became popular with men as well as women. It was also credited (and blamed) with having far greater potency than it actually possessed. While there were early attempts to promote brew as a non-alcoholic “Temperance drink,” it quickly became labeled by the Temperance movement as a “Devils Brew” or “Witches Brew” as evil as Demon Rum.
There was also some opposition to female enslavement outside the Temperance movement. Even though Vienna Enslavement worked, there were those desperate to find some alternative. Various forms of symbolic- and faux-enslavement were tried, along with the permanent wearing of steel collars without enslavement, and the use of Brew, other drugs, and various “physical” therapies. Most of these alternatives failed completely, and none had more than a very limited success.
The Prohibitionists had a simple solution: Abolish alcohol and Brew. They blamed these beverages for driving women mad, not just when women drank them, but when men drank them and then associated with women. The Socialists also had a simple solution: Abolish capitalism. They blamed the need for female enslavement on capitalism, the existence of property ownership, and “bourgeois decadence.” A third group, small but of outsized importance, were (and are) the Southern Abolitionists. Formally known as “The Loyal Southern Fellowship for a New Emancipation,” this group was originally the rump of the Bourbon Abolitionists that remained after the New York and other northern Bourbonists joined the Prohibition movement. The Southern Abolitionists rejected Vienna Enslavement, were pointedly neutral on the subject of Prohibition, and kept a pragmatic focus on ending female enslavement to the exclusion of all other issues.
The opponents of female enslavement made a great deal out of the psychic research findings that everyone had at least a little psychic ability, and in particular that men had psychic abilities too. But as Jung, Freud, and other psychic researchers pointed out, men’s psychic abilities are different in both degree and kind. Not only do men have less psychic sensitivity and strength, on average, but they also have a natural immunity that women lack. Furthermore, the “psychic atmosphere” was thickening over time, as the average level of psychic ability increased. A level of sensitivity that was safe for women back in the 1870s was no longer so in the twentieth century.
Support for universal female enslavement, or “Demancipation,” thus went from a lunatic crackpot view in the nineteenth century, to a reasonable minority view in the first decade of the twentieth century, and then to a majority view in the 1910s. The Ottoman Empire did impose Demancipation in 1908, but no other nation wanted to follow its lead. Opponents still hoped that some new alternative would arise, making enslavement therapy for suffragettes and other psychic madwomen unnecessary. Even supporters admitted that Demancipation would be a radical change to society, one that most people wanted to put off for as long as possible.
But by the early 1910s, a new and unforeseen problem had arisen. As the number of slave women increased, so did their interactions with free women – and those interactions turned out to be much more fractious than anyone either expected or wanted. It became clear that a society with partial female enslavement would be untenable unless the number of slave women could be kept small and their interactions with free women kept limited. Male mathematical psychologists calculated a “breaking point” number that would be reached sometime in the 1920s, and female psychic seers predicted a “feminine catastrophe” that would occur once that number was reached. At that point, the friction between free and slave women would grow so great as to bring down the world order and possibly even civilization itself. Despite these predictions, only a few small nations followed the lead of the Ottoman Empire in imposing Demancipation. Most nations still refused to change, despite the predicted crisis.
The crisis came early in the form of the First World War. Despite certain revisionist claims, this was an all-male blunder. Neither free nor slave women had any significant part in either starting the war or in directing its course, with the possible exception of the spying by Mata Hari and her owner. There is a strong case that the animus of free women toward a slave caused her to be held responsible for that spying (and thus executed for it), after her master abandoned her to flee to Germany.
By the end of the war, the consensus in most of the world was that Demancipation had to be tried. The reasons why this consensus formed are still under debate, but the arguments include: That it was seen as time for women to sacrifice for the common good, after the sacrifice of men during the war. That a “feminine catastrophe” was still looming and had to be averted. That free women were ashamed of their animus toward their enslaved sisters and wanted to make amends. That slave women would be grateful to free women who sacrificed their freedom, thus mending the rift between the two groups. That freedom for free women would soon become less than worthless as they were increasingly cosseted. Finally, there was the argument that Demancipation would allow slave women to enjoy good treatment and prosperity, under conditions of social harmony. In any case, most of the world’s nations imposed female Demancipation between 1918 and 1922.
Great Britain and its dependencies imposed a near-Demancipation in 1918 that exempted less than ten percent of the female population. In 1928, the Equality of Women (Demancipation) Act enslaved those well-educated and (formerly) wealthy women who had previously been exempted.
France and Switzerland passed Demancipation with a legal fig leaf. All women had to be collared, while technically being not-quite-slaves under the law. Socially, their status was close enough to Vienna enslavement to keep them sane, with the chief practical difference being that they were called “Femme à collier” or “kragenfrau” instead of “femme esclave” or “sklavin.” In 1945 the legal ambiguities were eliminated, and French and Swiss females became normal slave women.
Soviet Russia, along with the other communist countries, officially opposed the Demancipation movement. According to their ideology of socialism-feminism, the “need” to enslave women was just another example of capitalist bourgeoisie decadence. In practice, however, women in communist countries were collared, reduced to a position equivalent to slavery for all practical purposes, and treated badly in the bargain.
Germany enacted full female Demancipation in 1918, and Italy, Poland, Spain, and the rest of Europe had all passed Demancipation laws by 1920. When the Nazis took power in Germany, they continued to enforce Demancipation despite the official Nazi doctrine of “National Feminism.” The party line was that German women would be emancipated once they had become pure and strong enough to stand the strain of freedom. In the meantime, the Nazi policy toward women was Kragen, Küche, Kirche – “Collar, Kitchen, Church.”
In the United States there was a strong majority in favor of Demancipation but not quite a true consensus. After Congress passed the Nineteenth or “Demancipation” amendment in 1919, five States held female-only plebiscites on its ratification. Officially, these were only advisory, but the legislatures followed their lead in approving or rejecting the amendment. Women voted down Demancipation in Florida (49-51) and Mississippi (45-55), and approved it in New Jersey (67-33), Texas (51-49), and Utah (78-22). The other forty-three States voted on ratification without plebiscites, and in the end the amendment was ratified in 1920.
The Prohibition and Demancipation amendments were passed with an informal understanding that one or the other would end up being repealed after a dozen years or so. Competing political movements immediately arose to work toward repeal of one or the other of the two amendments. In the event, Prohibition (the Eighteenth Amendment) was repealed in 1933, just as in our timeline. In the meantime, Prohibition applied to Brew as well as to alcohol, producing a black market in both.
After the passage of Demancipation, the 1920s were a decade of fads and enthusiasms as people sorted out the norms and standards of the new era. The decade also saw the discovery or invention of the first psi-active materials. Most of these were just laboratory curiosities at first, but “beauty cream” almost immediately became commercially important.
Beauty cream is a vitamin-fortified, psi-active cold cream invented in 1923. Women who use this cream retain a youthful appearance as they age, as a psychic or psychosomatic effect.
Tobacco use became much less common after 1920 than in our timeline. Cigarettes had become associated with soldiers and the military during the First World War, and civilian men who smoked mostly smoked cigars and pipes. Women did not smoke at all. Tobacco smoke was believed to cause unnatural aging in women, and as a psychosomatic effect this became true. World War II strengthened the association of cigarettes with the military, and so afterwards civilian men smoked even fewer cigarettes than they had between the wars.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression lasted just as long as in our timeline, but did not run quite as deep. Major political figures, parties, and policies remained very close to those in our timeline, despite both the absence of women voters and the presence of women psychics. There were some differences at the margins, however.
The concept of “bond witches” first arose in connection with Franklin Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust” in 1932. It quickly became generalized, with the term referring to any woman whose superior psychic ability was marked by her wearing a cheap glass “gem” in her collar.
With the repeal of Prohibition in 1933 and its implied endorsement of continued Demancipation, most of the anti-Demancipation groups folded. The Southern Abolitionists continued to exist, shrunken in membership to a tiny fringe movement, albeit one that retained outsized visibility and (in the South) influence.
The 1930s also saw the first development of devices that could be directly activated by mental power, and that could provide feedback when mentally probed. The first examples only worked for women, but these were quickly followed by versions that would respond to men as well, and then by versions that could distinguish between the sexes, allowing for devices that women could be locked out from using.
The first telescribe (the psi-driven successor to the typewriter) was invented in 1936. Telescribes were used widely by governments during World War II and gained commercial success afterwards. In 1949, IBM introduced its wildly popular Ectomatic model, and by the end of 1950 telescribes had almost completely supplanted typewriters.
As noted above, the US armed forces were racially integrated just before the start of World War II, instead of afterwards as in our timeline. Another difference that occurred shortly before the war was the migration or importation of hundreds of thousands of Jewish women, sent from Nazi Germany in a “Devil’s Bargain.” The money from the sale of these women went into the Nazi’s coffers as the price for letting them escape. The Jewish men who had owned them remained behind, and most of them died in the Holocaust.
During World War II, slave women naturally contributed to the war effort. At least as many women worked in civilian factories as did in our timeline. Uniformed women, however, were confined to the various female auxiliary organizations, where their position, for obvious reasons, was separate and unequal. These organizations included GEARS (Girls Enslaved, Army Reserve Service) and GENIE (Girls Enslaved, Navy Indenture-Enlistments) in the US, and RING (Royal Incarcerated Navy Girls) in the UK.
Many female auxiliaries worked in areas where their psychic abilities were helpful, including photo interpretation and operating the new RADAR installations with their psychic controls. Another important contribution was psychic “shielding” or “jamming” that small groups of highly-trusted women produced to hide various secrets from opposing psychics who might otherwise sense or foretell them. The surprise at Pearl Harbor, for example, is credited to (or blamed on) a circle of Japanese bond witches who kept the attack plan concealed from their American counterparts.
The Russians made much more use of women as military auxiliaries and even in combat roles, in keeping with their socialist-feminist ideology. Despite the loud pretense that Russian women were “Not Slaves!” these women wore steel collars as part of their uniforms and were commanded by men.
In the last months of the war, Nazi Germany formed a small number of “wonder-units” of women with strong psychic abilities, manumitting them and removing their collars. This worked out badly for both the Nazis and the women.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, conditions in Europe, and especially in Germany, were slightly less dire than in our timeline. Part of this was due to the urgent counsel of Allied bond witches who foresaw that the Morgenthau Plan to de industrialize Germany would bring disaster if fully implemented. Another part was the feeling that German slave women should not be punished – or at least not punished too harshly – for the misdeeds of their masters. After all, it was solely German men who voted in the Nazis in the Demancipation timeline (as opposed to our timeline where German women also helped vote them into power).
On the other hand, there were Soviet moles who, following orders from Moscow, advocated that the Morgenthau Plan be implemented with great harshness.
On the home front, the Federal government imposed racial desegregation on schools in the fall of 1944 as a “temporary wartime measure.” This produced a lot of grumbling about “dirty Samsonite tricks,” and in the fall of 1945, the city of Topeka re-segregated its schools. This, in turn, led to the Supreme Court decision of Brown v Board of Education (with a different Brown than in our timeline) in 1946.
In 1954, Congress passed a civil rights law similar to the 1964 Civil Rights Act of our timeline. However, the 1954 law of this timeline also voided the various State laws that prohibited non-white men from owning white women and (often) white men from owning non-white women. This provision was immediately tied up in court battles, but in 1958 the Supreme Court not only ruled the measure constitutional, but also declared that such anti-miscegenation laws would be unconstitutional even without the federal act.
The Cold War unfolded much as it had in our timeline. Demancipation and the existence of the Southern Abolitionists did throw a wrinkle into it, however. The communists kept trying to infiltrate Southern Abolitionist organizations, and the Southern Abolitionists were vigilant about keeping the commies out. The men who still opposed Demancipation after World War II were evenly split between being communists and Southern Abolitionists, while women who opposed Demancipation were almost all socialist-feminists. Southern Abolitionism had become a man’s thing that women were reluctantly dragged into.
The “moderate” or “incrementalist” Southern Abolitionists drew a certain amount of sympathy, even among the great majority who wanted to see Demancipation continue. Nearly everyone agreed on the need for legal and social reforms in the treatment of slave women, even if they disagreed about what those reforms should be, or about how far they should go. There is, however, a post-war consensus that men should be gentlemen to the women they own, and the sort of harsh treatment that was tolerated before the war stopped being tolerated afterwards.
Women’s fashions in the 1930s and 1940s were much the same as in our timeline, with three exceptions. The first, of course, is that women all wear slave collars. The second was a custom (and in many places a law) that women’s shoes have built-in hobbles. And the third was that women did not wear visible socks or stockings.
Back in the 1920s, people started viewing female stockings as being an odd combination of Victorian-fuddy, and shockingly rebellious and indecent. This attitude solidified in the 1930s and 1940s, with the taboo growing even stronger in the 1950s. The absence of the nylons and pantyhose that are so common in our timeline is thus a major difference. When slave women have a practical need to cover their legs, they commonly wear leggings, calf-length harem pants, or short pantaloons.
Spring, fall, and winter fashions for women in the 1950s were also similar to those in our timeline. Summer fashions tended to be much skimpier. Saris and sari-like costumes were popular in the early 1950s, and a simple sarong-like rectangle of colorful fabric – often translucent – became the fashion in the late 1950s. These summer fashions were usually polyester, but sometimes were cotton – or silk for the high-end versions.
Pleasure-tickling of slave women was just one of many fads that arose and faded in the Roaring Twenties, when the various possibilities of Demancipation were being explored. During World War II, both the US and the UK conducted intense, secretive studies of tickling, spurred by reports of (entirely fictional) secret Nazi projects and (wildly exaggerated) secret Japanese projects. After the war, tickling continued to be an uncommon pastime, one stereotypically practiced by ‘nerd’ or ‘egghead’ types on a slavegirl who also wore thick eyeglasses. Then Happy Household (“A Magazine by and for House Slaves”) published “Are You a Natural Ticklee?” in its January 1956 issue, launching pleasure-tickling as a popular fad.
It helped that many women were natural ticklees and that most other women could be easily induced to enjoy being tickled. It also helped that pleasure-tickling was believed to have a number of psychic and psychological benefits for the women – and some of those beliefs were actually true. By 1959, tickling had made the transition from fad to cultural institution.
Up through the 1950s (and beyond), the limitations on slave women concerning such things as owning property, obtaining driver’s licenses, earning advanced degrees, and pursuing professional careers, varied from State to State in the United States (and from country to country outside the US). In general, the laws the South provided for more leniency about what slave women were and weren’t allowed to do. Mostly this was due to the influence of the Southern Abolitionists. At times, however, the Southern Abolitionists and the Samsonites have entered a strange-bedfellow alliance to advance a particular reform.
In particular, “women drivers” were notorious for being allowed south of the old Mason-Dixon Line, while being prohibited north of that line. West of the Mississippi river, the State laws were a patchwork when it comes to slave women being allowed to drive.
