Sow Breaking

Adelaide's world was one of relative modernity and progress. No longer the backward apparatus of inequality and inhumanity that had thrust upon so many an existence of pure drudgery and inautonomy, the world that Adelaide had inherited was one where the sweet dew upon the spindle of fortune dripped down her tongue favouringly; and rather than the bitter decades of struggle and opposition which tore at the pillars of the oppressive systems of the past in agonizing slowness, Adelaide was able to bypass all this by mere merit of the circumstances of her birth.

Adelaide knew only a world of relative equality, a world of comforts and pleasures. She had not witnessed the Voruta crackdowns on the 500, as her grandmother long before her. Neither, was she made bare to her mother's role in the dismantlement of the breast tax in the Upper Pinsk. And yet, Adelaide often daydreamed of the days of yore, when women were beneath the beasts of the Earth and worth less than individual droplets of water. Adelaide knew her situation was not ideal either. Many unsavoury relics of the past were hard to wipe clean, many of the older generations kept firmly to the same prejudices passed down from father to son, and imposed on mother and daughter. Women were still forbidden from certain career paths and recieved a mere fraction of Man's pay. Women were limited in the financial opportunities they could eek out in Man's world and had to comply to Man's will. They were limited in the amount of purchases they could make a day, the amount of hours they could spend on the streets, the amount of loans that were availiable for lease. They were forbidden from boarding high-speed rails and high-end jetliners, and still needed to respect the courtesy that a man could accuse a woman of , at any given time, and would have to answer to the full arm of the law, whether found guilty or innocent.

Adelaide shielded her gonads as a brisk breeze caught them in its frost. While female nudity was no longer compulsory, many women found it hard to adjust to the garments of the rougher sex. Female fashion had all been obliterated for the past few centuries, and many surviving manuscripts from the age before the Great Collapse were purposely doctored or destroyed to present the narrative of the eternally-nude female. As such, many women freely chose to forego the tight, stuffy trousers and dress shirts of their male counterparts and return to their natural state of blissful nudity. Often, Adelaide would dream of long cloaks of linen, draped over the female form in the shape of cut sheets, but dismissed her thoughts as childish fantasy.

Sometimes, she yearned for the past and dreamt of the age long gone.