Swanscombe
Swanscombe is the site of an unusual about-face in the history of discrimination. Swanscombe was originally the site of a rather large Roman Catholic convent that housed several hundred nuns. Over time, a city grew from the small village established around the original convent site. Most of the city’s leaders were evacuated on the last shuttles when Earth abandoned her colonies, leaving behind a highly volatile power vacuum.
During the ensuing Reconstruction period, a radical matriarchal government took power, backed by the city’s now numerically superior female population. Almost overnight, the status of men changed. They were now denied the right to own property or hold public office, thereby reducing them in status to second-class citizens. This was for the community’s own good, the government said, as men in power brought nothing but conflict and greed. The government’s policy’s were and still are clearly discriminatory, but after ten generations, a chauvinistic ideology has become widespread among the city’s population. Every once in a while, a few disgruntled men lead a revolt against the government. These uprisings are brutally suppressed by the city-state’s all-female police force.
Like many of the other cities that joined the UMF after its founding, Swanscombe signed a deal allowing it to keep its existing municipal government while adopting the democratic league framework. This offer was made as part of the UMF expansion into the Tershaw Cooperative Alliance (TCA), the buffer league of which Swanscombe had been a member. Mercantile diplomats proposed that Swanscombe could limit male impact by maintaining the female monopoly on property — and hence electoral vouchers. This final argument, along with the implied might of the UMF, brought Swanscombe into the Federation and led directly to the collapse of the TCA. Even today, men may only cast votes if they are asked to proxy for some of the votes owned by their wives, mothers or sisters.
Swanscombe’s matriarchy remains Jerusalemite in faith, following a “reformed Roman Catholicism,” as they call it. This has caused some conflict between Swanscombe and the Revisionist mainstream in the North, with some people seeing a Jerusalemite theocracy as unacceptable. Grand Marshal Victoria Edden-Smythe, military leader of the CNCS, is a native of Swanscombe who converted to Revisionism in her teens. A hero of the War of the Alliance and the most powerful women in the CNCS, she is a heroine to many locals, but her fervent faith makes the Mother Superior and her entourage suspicious.