....she's very curious about what about it is terrible for self-supporting women and is not actually sure if she's permitted to speak, here, or if it would be better or worse if someone addressed her so she could. Hopefully she can pick it up from what everyone else says. 

(Should she, like, be here? Should she be sneaking out? Is it rude to still be present? - no, the Duchess would dismiss her, she's pretty sure -)

"The Code Cyprian treats free men as citizens, with the franchise and various other rights and responsibilities, at the age of twenty one, and women on marriage. Or if they're officers - the Reclamation would not be directly affected -"

"Is there some kind of coverture before that - so many people don't have social fathers -"

"I would accept a great deal of trouble to end the Terror that I would not happily accept under even these circumstances. I think we'd be unaffected," gesturing to indicate the duchess but not Ser Jornet or Tallandria, "holding titles in our own right, but from the summaries my cousin and personal secretary Lady Sofia Reytan gave me, the rights reserved to men and married women include, if memory serves, ability to bring a civil court case on one's own behalf. Sofia told me in no uncertain terms that if I voted for that intact she would refuse to assist me any further in any of my business, and she's the most indispensable of a staff I've put quite a lot of work into building."

Well, that completely destroys all of her plans, at least her plans with Archduke Requena's suggested changes, in addition to destroying a bunch of other things.

"Not being a citizen does not actually entail having any fewer freedoms than the people of Cheliax all have right now, they won't be more disadvantaged by not having fathers than they presently are. But - yes, I'd rather just have it twenty-one for everybody, I think."

.....Korva has also been the primary breadwinner for her household since she was sixteen, but not having a right to bring court cases until age twenty-one is at least less fundamentally horrific. Or, well, horrific if they plan to have a system in which they expect people to actually use the civil courts for important things, like negotiating all of their marriage and family obligations.

"What's the reasoning behind the choice of twenty-one as the age of adulthood?"

"The decision to set the age of majority in Cheliax so young was made by Hell, because young people make worse decisions and they believed - correctly, I think - that promulgating the idea that in your mid-teens you are an adult and should embark on all adult endeavors would damn many of them. Nineteen or twenty or twenty one is common everywhere else and is, I think, reasonable, assuming some provisions for underage people without guardians."

"If I remember right Taldor allows as low an age of majority as the Thrunes did, in certain narrow circumstances which the Asmodeans tried to construe as broader to make it sound less radical, when they weren't trying to make it sound like a favor to us. I think I'd favor nineteen; I've had plenty of staff who were in their teens and had good judgment. Even a very few of those who were fourteen or even thirteen, all former urchins; I just wouldn't want to make general policy for them."

"The appropriate age of majority surely depends on what it is that majority is used for within the rest of the law. But if we wind up using a lot of civil court mechanisms to patch damaged family institutions - nineteen isn't just old enough to have a child, it's old enough that some people manage to have four of them."

Thank you, paladin guy from the family committee.

Nod. "Taldor's situation is... complicated. As Her Highness says, the age of adulthood is not entirely consistent — in particular, the age at which someone could bring a civil case in their own right, the age at which a title-holder is permitted to serve in the Senate, and the age at which someone could marry without their parent's permission are all different, among other rights and responsibilities that I expect are also covered. ...And as she says, there are various special circumstances that can sometimes result in those ages being younger than typical, and the laws about which circumstances occasionally contradict."

"I think the example I heard was something about inheriting a noble title with the endorsement of family, which sounded drawn oddly on purpose as part of some strange fight over regency a thousand years ago. It's the sort of story people would tell about Taldor, though, and might be a fabrication."

"I wasn't focusing on the structure of the family on last read, what does Galt presently do about young mothers and fathers? Married but still within the paternal grandfather's household?"

"They permit underage marriage with the family's approval or a magistrate's. I don't think it makes sense to bar all underage marriages, though I think they're usually very terrible for everyone involved. They often occur in circumstances where the alternatives are also terrible. 

....I do think you want to very strongly discourage a woman bearing four children out of wedlock by the age of nineteen, that being an enormous inevitable burden on the state or else a bunch of murders, or both. Maybe a fee for bastards will be sufficient to prevent that but if not we'll have to do something more."

"Apologies, Your Grace, I believe I missed the initial discussion of the bastardry penalty — what sort of fee does the Code Cyprian levy? Do you happen to have a page reference?" He gives the two hundred fifty-page code a slightly nervous glance.

(Marit has not told a lie since well before he first took vows; it's very obvious that he genuinely hasn't realized the fee for bastards is a separate proposal from the Code Cyprian.)

"Discourage it, certainly, but if someone is today, already running around aged fifteen with a baby and we'd like to let her sue whoever left her with it, her being fifteen is if anything more reason to let her do that - and if someone is discouraged and then enchanted or abducted or something, likewise. - Marit, I don't think it's in the Code Cyprian, it's an idea of Delegate Tallandria's."

"Ah, my apologies. I suppose in that case I have the same question for you," he says to Tallandria.

Oh, gods, having to speak is arguably worse than not getting to. At least that's a clear enough address. She feels sick, but at least half of that is that they're all sitting around calmly discussing whether a woman's ability to participate in society on equal terms should be in any way related to the question of whether anyone wants to fuck her.

"It's a proposal that the family committee is working on, though it isn't ready for the floor yet. We'd discussed the possibility of making siring a bastard either a crime with a purely financial penalty, or a tort," hopefully she's using that word correctly, "and had been thinking about a fine of about thirty gold or so, or not more than two or three years of agricultural indenture for anyone incapable of paying. Archduke Requena pointed out earlier that it's a bit unfair to make it formally a crime for men who are in fact supporting the resulting children, but if we wanted to use civil court cases to enforce it, you would of course need a civil court system that young unmarried women were both formally allowed to bring suit in, and capable of actually navigating without expensive legal counsel."

"We could reserve the franchise for marriage for both sexes, if we have a franchise, and permit everyone to bring suits in court. But I don't know if legal sex equality will pass the floor. It is further radicalism on top of the Code Cyprian."

"What other radicalism do you think worth highlighting?"

What the hell does 'radical' even mean. Cheliax has had legal sex equality in almost every respect for the last seventy years. ...probably. She's never talked to anyone who remembered it not having it.

"It is almost entirely without formal privileges of the nobility."

"It respects the rights of the householder and the employer, however."

"I'll back it, unless the Church is opposed. But you and I and the Archduchess are the three most liberal nobles in that room."