Woman Domesticated

Once burdened with physically demanding chores, exhausting farm work, and other unpleasant duties, man's quality of life dramatically improved after his successful domestication of the common woman.
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Though for years women had roamed free throughout most of Asia, Europe, and Africa, experts estimate that by around 3,000 BCE men had begun putting them to work.

"A valuable commodity with seemingly endless uses, the woman has played a crucial role throughout human history," noted historian Alan Helbling said. "Not only could she be trained to perform a variety of tasks, but once her spirit was broken and her energies reined in, she could be taught to come whenever she was called."

"They're really quite magnificent creatures," Helbling added.

While initially wild, with their own stubborn ideas and desires, Helbling said that women slowly learned to submit to instruction, and over time, showed less and less resistance when being forced to mate. In addition, raising a woman to maturity was considered low maintenance, which meant that a man could expend little effort when attending to her care and feeding.

Eventually, women were brought inside the home to provide companionship, and some even became a part of the family.

Anthropologist Jeremy Murphy claims that, to prevent the wilder women from running away, men limited their freedom by training them to stay in enclosed spaces for long periods of time. According to Murphy, disobedience on the part of women was not taken lightly; physical punishments and restrictive harnesses were often employed to curb any independent behavior.

"With the creation of the corset, man was further able to control his growing stable of wives and daughters, and could parade them around without ever having to worry about keeping them in line," Murphy said. "The corset, along with the many other yokes and straps that followed, provided a physical reminder of who was boss."

For most of the 18th and 19th centuries, women continued their work in the field and at home, often showing little sign of their once liberated nature. However, by the mid-20th century, a number of strange occurrences were reported: Spooked by the growing civil rights movement and loud protests taking place across the country, hundreds of women suddenly broke free from their restraints and, for the first time in millennia, ran wild, joining four-year colleges and professional workplaces along the way.

The majority have yet to return.

"They'll come back—you'll see," cried Kentucky resident Dale Berring, who saw his woman leave for greener pastures almost 10 years ago. "And when they do, there'll be hell to pay."

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This piece is part of The Onion's Our Annual Year: The Top 10 Stories Of The Last 4.5 Billion Years