Women in a Post-Apocalypse

I will point out here a single fact that makes a mockery of all the 'protect the females' sexist scenarios... the radiation dosage needed to damage and/or sterilise sperm is about 10, to 20 times lower than the dosage need to do the same thing to eggs.

Putting it simply, sperm are little packages of DNA with no ability to self-repair, unlike eggs, and a male's testicles are rather more exposed than ovaries.

To be blunt, after any nuclear war, there's going to be a lot more infertile men than women. In point of fact, in virtually any apocalyptic scenario that does genetic damage and/or cellular stress, [disease, environmental stress, anything that involves lots of running and poor diet etc.] men's reproductive health generally fares worse than women's, simply because it's evolved to be throw-away... the species as a whole doesn't need that many men to survive.

So, essentially the reality is that post-apocalypse, there'd probably be more women then men, and far more fertile women than men. It's pretty much a given that the women would be doing the rebuilding, at least in terms of numbers.

But as you say, people make post-apocalyptic scenarios suck worse. I can see some group of alpha-male types taking that as license to have a harem.

A lot depends on the degree to which radiation is a long-term problem after a nuclear war. It would obviously be a problem in the countries actually involved in the war, and those directly downwind of them (which would suffer primary fallout and whose populations would thus be injured by it in the month or so right after the war), but it would be less of a problem in countries which were affected only be secondary (stratospheric) fallout. L. Sprague de Camp was right, I think, in his Viagens Interplanetaris universe -- if a nuclear war was fought mostly in the Northern Hemisphere, some large neutral Southern Hemisphere nation (most probably South American) would dominate the postwar global culture.

About that, you might like the take of http://www.amazon.com/Maerlande-Chronicles-Elisabeth-Vonarburg/dp/0888782942 (here sterility is affecting both genders, but if I recall fertile males are way rarer).
I cannot vouch for the English translation, but the original French was stunning.

of course, people in real life make pre-apocalyptic settings suck much more than necessary on a routine basis....

The classic cliche weird post-apocalyptic setting had to be all the post-nuclear war worlds of 1980's science fiction movies, in which for some inexplicable reason all luxury arts had collapsed, save for hairdressing.

Human nature is such that, given a large die-off, as soon as the situation improved sufficiently for there to be some hope, we would breed like mad to fill the available space. Note what happened in Europe after the Black Death. The same thing did not happen to American Indians after the Columbian plagues, but that's because the white conquerors followed hard upon the plagues in most cases.

My point being, there's no sane reason to force women to have lots of children. No "force" would be required, and it would be counterproductive to most inheritor culture's other social interests. Especially because a big mostly-empty world makes flight a distinct option available to the dissatisfied.

Things might be worse in an extreme catastrophe, where the survivors all lived in a shelter of some kind for decades. A lot would depend on the sanity of the leadership, in that case.

I'm writing a post-apoc and have been thinking on this stuff a lot. No nukes involved though.

However, it is very much a man's world 5 years down the road. Some places have decent equality, the university area for one. Most are pretty much male-dominated. One place has gone all female with males admitted for breeding purposes and no more. In a world where women are trade-goods, and one settlement has decided to live out John Norman's Gor, it seems the only way to stay free. Mobile gangs of (male) outcasts--mostly gay--serve as vigilante police, circuit court judges, circuit riding preachers and traders. Pregnant women are a valuable commodity and bring the gangs a high price.

Just as my romance characters will never hesitate to throw away love for obsession, so too, I believe groups of humans will never hesitate to fuck things up as much as possible.

Found this through valarltd's reply to my post on DW and I'm glad you found the article interesting!