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I realize steampunk is based in primarily in the Victorian and Edwardian periods but I was wondering how steampunk and women's rights work together?

but the women didn't get the right to vote until 1920ish (well... in the united states... I don't know about anywhere else)

Ways I saw it, even though Steampunk is largely centred around the development of steam power and other technologies, it stands to reason other things could be 'advanced' as well - women's rights included.

Perhaps a greater spirit of invention led to more women doing 'their own thing' - leading to a sooner suffrage movement (and one hopes are more immediately successful one).

Whilst on the whole I like the ideals of Victorian etiquette, and strive to be something of a Gentleman, in find unfair rights most irksome indeed.

My group pretty much said "eh, we're altering history anyway. One more detail wouldn't hurt it." In our universe, we had something called the "Great Reform Act" happen sometime around 1850 which put women on completely equal footing as men. We do have it somewhat loosely established, though, that older military institutions are still working through a certain amount of growing pains with it, even fifty years later.

Basically, we had to come up with a reason why about 60% of the Badger's crew seem to be women, including her captain. When more than one cast-member wrote into their backstory "it was the only military branch where she felt openly welcome," we decided to take that as a sign.

The bit of alternate history that piques my interest is the oft-cropping-up airship. So many SP stories and universes have well-established flight in the form of airships in the Victorian era, decades before the Wright Brothers. I would be interested to try and pin down the historical consequences of having widely-used flight thirty or even forty years earlier than we did in the real world. I could see things like Japan opening its boarders and the Russian Revolution happing a lot sooner than they did.

Berz.

I think it's safe to assume that Da Vinci's flight inventions got sponsoring rather than sitting in a old note book for a few centuries. Imagine the speed of scientific advancement if he'd been the forefront.

Funny you should mention because...



Da Vinci is where we diverge history! ^_^

That said, though, Da Vinci's designs were really more artistic than they were practical, a lot of the time. He had a lot of cool ideas, but almost none of them worked. Take the Da Vinci Corkscrew, for example. And some historians actually theorize that he did that with his designs on purpose so that if they were ever built without his input they wouldn't work. Basically, he wanted to keep his inventions from being used by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. He designed a tank-like vehicle that looked like a horse, for instance, that had two axes on either side and was supposed to go charging through the battlefield chopping enemies to tiny little bits. But if you built it as it is in the designs, it would sit in one spot, spinning in circles; the treads would turn in opposite directions.

A certain amount of Da Vinci's own eccentricity kept him from being taken too seriously, a lot of the time. And his jealous guarding of his secrets pretty much meant that a lot of them died with him.

Berz.

Yay for chicks in pants!

Misogyny ftw.