My SO has a theory that if the group of people lived in a harsh environment, ie. having to work for what you had with no guarantee of food or safety, etc, it was common for women to work just as much as men. Such a society needed all hands on deck, so to speak. But, when we start becoming “civilized”, and things started getting made for us, (as opposed to an individual making it themselves.) Women and men start having diverging roles. Essentially, there’s just not enough work, so womens role turns into raising the babies, to fill the time. Eventually, for whatever reason, “civilized” society just forgot about the hard times and assumes women have always been there just to raise babies.
Disclaimer: This is based on absolutely nothing. Maybe some random information that explain that women did “men” jobs too, once. Idk.
I promise you that there remains ‘enough work’ in early sedentary societies. The work, in fact, is endless - moreso than in a hunter-gatherer society, which is more reliant on circumstance than labor.
Divergence of roles seems to be connected to control of social power. As men come to dominate one sphere (typically warfare, since the average woman in the pre-modern period is intermittently disadvantaged in that by several months of pregnancy numerous times throughout her life), that power imbalance is used to strip power from women in other spheres (social, economic, sexual, etc).
This was more my take. I mean, like women just sat there and said, “Whelp, there’s nothing to do. Let’s just take care of the kids.” It’s not some natural evolution. And, for all the people studying the past (in the past) to just be like, “Men hunt, women gather,” is ignoring how women ended up in those roles in the first place. The fact that they needed “evidence” of this is, before comming to that conclusion is…disappointing, but not surprising.
My SO has a theory that if the group of people lived in a harsh environment, ie. having to work for what you had with no guarantee of food or safety, etc, it was common for women to work just as much as men. Such a society needed all hands on deck, so to speak. But, when we start becoming “civilized”, and things started getting made for us, (as opposed to an individual making it themselves.) Women and men start having diverging roles. Essentially, there’s just not enough work, so womens role turns into raising the babies, to fill the time. Eventually, for whatever reason, “civilized” society just forgot about the hard times and assumes women have always been there just to raise babies.
Disclaimer: This is based on absolutely nothing. Maybe some random information that explain that women did “men” jobs too, once. Idk.
It’s called the neolithic revolution.
I promise you that there remains ‘enough work’ in early sedentary societies. The work, in fact, is endless - moreso than in a hunter-gatherer society, which is more reliant on circumstance than labor.
Divergence of roles seems to be connected to control of social power. As men come to dominate one sphere (typically warfare, since the average woman in the pre-modern period is intermittently disadvantaged in that by several months of pregnancy numerous times throughout her life), that power imbalance is used to strip power from women in other spheres (social, economic, sexual, etc).
This was more my take. I mean, like women just sat there and said, “Whelp, there’s nothing to do. Let’s just take care of the kids.” It’s not some natural evolution. And, for all the people studying the past (in the past) to just be like, “Men hunt, women gather,” is ignoring how women ended up in those roles in the first place. The fact that they needed “evidence” of this is, before comming to that conclusion is…disappointing, but not surprising.