"Do you know anything about what free Liars from the other universes would do?"

Headshake. "I guess I could ask them. Since we have some here."

"It seems like it might be a good idea."

She scans the demiplane and decides to head over to - Valentine looks busy, so - maybe the Osirians? Yeah. She can go ask the Osirians about how free Liars do marriage.

"Hi."

" - hi. How're you doing?"

"Coping. Uh - Fëanáro thought maybe I should ask some of the free Liars here about their conceptions of marriage, since - I guess it's possible that mine are pretty shaped by slavery, and stuff."

"That makes sense. Uh, I know a lot about how marriage works in Osirion and a little about how it works in other places in our world."

"I guess both of those would be pretty good to hear about, then."

"In Osirion women marry shortly after they become adults, usually. Men marry later, when they're around thirty. That's because men and women have different responsibilities in marriage, and women are usually ready for theirs when they're twenty and men usually aren't. When someone is ready to get married, they go to their parents for advice; their parents will look for suitable people for them, and they'll meet those people and spend time together and talk about what's important to them and figure out whether they might do as a husband or wife. If everyone thinks it's a good match, they'll start to plan a wedding, which is a ceremony where the man and the woman make promises to each other about how they mean to live their lives.

The man promises that he will honor his wife, and protect her and provide for her and for her children, and be good to her and greet her with love. And the woman promises that she will be faithful to her husband, and take guidance from him, and obey him and use his money wisely and raise his children to honor him, and be good to him and greet him with love.

And then they are married, and they usually move into the husband's home but sometimes they get their own place to live together, if they can afford it, and they are married until one of them dies except under very unusual circumstances."

"Huh. I guess most of that makes sense. Why does only the woman promise to be faithful and to obey and to use money wisely?"

"Under some circumstances men can take another wife - they usually shouldn't, it's only right under exceptional circumstances, but it's sometimes permitted so the vows don't rule it out. Women cannot take another husband. In Osirion, men mostly earn money but women mostly spend it, because looking after the needs of the household is their responsibility, so he promises to provide and she promises to use the money he provides wisely. Women obey their husbands because they have more perspective, and more education, and a good husband will be a good person to look to for guidance. If a man doesn't seem worth obeying then one shouldn't marry him."

"Huh. Most of that makes sense too, I guess, although women always promising to obey their husbands seems... bad? Why are men more educated?"

"The government pays to make education free for men, and there are lots of apprenticeships available to them, because they're going to work outside the home their whole lives and will need the skills to do it. Women in Osirion spend most of their adult lives pregnant and raising children, so they mostly don't work outside the home. I imagine that's different in your society since people make slaves work whether they have children or not."

"Yes. But if they're not working outside the home, then if you educated the women, then they could educate all of the children."

"It definitely seems like it would be better for women to get more education. I don't know how it would be accomplished but I'm sure it'd be good if it were."

"I don't really see why it would be hard? I'm sure you're working under constraints that we don't have, though."

"How would you do it?"

"Starting from a place where women have no skills or knowledge not strictly necessary for raising children, and where there are no Alteri pulling people out for training, require children to attend storytelling sessions about specific subjects,  so that all of them have a chance to hear histories and other important poems, and encourage them to participate, so that people get used to listening to girls at an age when there shouldn't be any gap in ability, and so that the girls and boys of that generation are equally good at poetry. Really in a society that has women do all of the daytime childcare you'd want women to be better at it, since they ought to have more practice telling stories to children, but I'm assuming they're not. Have the sessions in both spoken and visual languages, so that all of the kids become fluent in both and can pick up literacy in a couple hours later. If the boys are off doing other kinds of education, have the girls talk to the community elders for more stories, and then they'll have something to teach their brothers when they come home, and the boys won't think it's a waste of time to talk to them.

"Once the gap in poetic ability has been lessened, you can include lectures on math and logic and the sciences in the storytelling sessions, in the same manner, and then girls'll have access to most everything that boys do except specific vocational training, which nobody thinks is very important for making household decisions. - at least I wouldn't expect them to."

"- pick up literacy in a couple hours? It takes years and years for kids to learn to read."

" - no? Not if you raise them with a visual language and the orthography makes any sense. Maybe if you're like the Quendi and you only have written forms of spoken languages?"

"What do you mean by a visual language?"

"Confederate One's a visual language," she says, and does some hand signs to demonstrate. "Alteri do it with lights, and we have to use our fingers, but they're only different symbols for the same thing, all of the underlying mechanics are the same. If a child knows Confederate One lights and hand signs, you can teach them to read the written form in a couple hours."

"Huh! We don't have that. Some adventurers use hand signs but it's not a whole language."

"Huh. Can you not talk when someone else is speaking, then?"

"Not really. It's a useful concept, a visual language, but I don't know of any human societies with widespread fluency in one on our planet."