Much of the game consumed in those societies is small game, and both sexes can hunt that. The hunting of large game is where the sexual division of labor is sharpest (for obvious reasons).
And here’s the rub, sort of. Domestic duties that a woman would traditionally do at home such as take care of children, clean, and whatnot is a form of work. What it lacks is a wage or salary system. Women didn’t receive a formalized salary or wage from their husband in the sense that a girl could say “Well, I think I like John - he’s cute, loves kids and his little sister says he treats women very honorably, but he only pays $500 a year. Bill isn’t as nice and he drinks too much but he pays $700 plus free health care from his dad the doctor.”
I do believe it was common or at least socially acceptable for a woman or girl to hire herself out as a domestic servant (e.g. maid) to a richer family where she would receive a formalized salary or wage (e.g. $x a month or $y an hour). This very practice is found in some Victorian/Edwardian novels. Did women hold farmhand jobs in those days, or was that for guys only?
Of course farmers would be considered to work according to the way the word “work” is used in everyday speech. I stayed away from using the home as a criterion because it would imply that an accountant or telemarketer who works from home isn’t working. I also stayed away from wages because profits and rent should also count.
Really, why refuse to understand the term in the same way that one would understand when it’s used in everyday speech? In everyday speech, you would not doubt that a farmer (of any gender) works.
In this article: Winning the case for women in work: Saudi Arabia's steps to reform - BBC News
“Women are banned from driving in the kingdom - despite protests last year by activists hoping to force change - and they need permission from a close male relative to be able to do simple things like travel or work.” and "Most families are not willing to let the women work. It’s out of the question.”
You would not say: “No, that’s not true, they don’t need a permit to do laundry and dishes in their home and their families don’t stop them from doing that.” You would understand quite well what is meant.
And, family farms are, in many or most ways, effectively family businesses where everyone is “working”. The secretary in a law firm may not actually be directly drumming up money from the outside by directly billing customers, but they are an indirect cost that certainly counts as a “worker”. Thus, a woman who spent most of the day indoors sewing and cleaning on the family farm while her husband and sons were outside plowing the fields and negotiating deals to sell X bushels of apples to a company in the city was still working in the family business.
The novel Anne of Green Gables includes unmarried related adults living together as a major plot point. Matthew and Marilla, the farming family that adopt Anne, are actually siblings. It may be easy to miss, but it’s established in the book that Green Gables was their parents’ home/farm before them, implying that neither of them really left home at all and just lived with their parents until their parents died. Marilla had a fight with a boyfriend when she was a young girl and basically swore off romance, and Matthew states that he never actually ever dated at all.
[QUOTE=robert_columbia;15966827 ]
Thus, a woman who spent most of the day indoors sewing and cleaning on the family farm while her husband and sons were outside plowing the fields and negotiating deals to sell X bushels of apples to a company in the city was still working in the family business.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t necessarily disagree, but then why is the woman who spends most of the day indoors sewing and cleaning when her husband and sons go off to work in a factory not working in the same way? She’s doing the same work regardless of what kind of work they do.
I do not think farm women spent their days cooking and cleaning while men were out in the fields. They would have been tending small gardens, milking cows, tending the poultry, tending to any livestock that weren’t free range, and as I stated above working many of the same farm duties as men.
Because the way the word is used in everyday speech is inconsistent (although it generally implies that wages are being received). In agricultural societies, most of the labor that is being performed (by either sex) is not earning any money (or profits or rent either). In the usual way we 21st century folks use the word “work,” no one in he farm family is working.
He works, but he doesn’t go to work. In pre-Industrial life, there wasn’t this home/work divide we have now. Harvest and planting times, everyone was in the field. Winter, everyone (including the livestock, for many times and places) was in the house. There was no sense of “work” as a separate sphere of your life. So before you can talk about when and where and which women “worked”, you first have to talk about when and where and which men “worked”.
These days, I suspect farmers do feel like they’ve “gone to work” when they leave the house and step onto the land, but that’s a back-formation, an attitude that developed in the cities, where it made sense, and has now permeated all sorts of things where it doesn’t quite fit–like the examples you listed of the self-employed. In fact, most modern people who work from home strongly prefer a separate space so they can get into “work mode”. That whole way of thinking is comparatively very very recent (300 or so years old).
Because you’re in a forum frequented by many people with at least a passing knowledge of history and anthropology, and your question is, essentially, an anthropological one. Thus, your audience says, “Define ‘work’ first.”
I doubt you would have found any/many female hired farmhands. That’s more of a muscle job (although as Manda Jo alludes to, there would be times of the year when every single pair of hands would be out harvesting/haymaking/whatever needed to get done in double-quick time).
Women, or rather girls, in the main, might go into domestic service. But they got the sack as soon as they got married. So for the majority of women, that would represent a fairly short blip in their lifetime work history, before the serious business of raising children, running a household, and possibly being involved as support person in their husband’s business.
yeah, I simplified 
My point was, the modern pattern of get a job, be self-sufficient, move out - that’s what’s missing from earlier ages. The point that Matthew and Marilla (or indeed other similar couples in literature - Uncle Andrew and Aunt Letty from The Magician’s Nephew come to mind) never moved out of home is the significant bit. There would be other exceptions to the rule too - widows for instance. But if you had a family, generally, you lived with them (absent compelling reason otherwise) until you married and started a new family
Girls did frequently get hired for household help, and they’d get fired if they got married…or “lost their reputation”, that is, if they came up pregnant. A female domestic had a pretty little problem, then, if one of the male members of The Family (or a male guest of The Family) wanted to have sex with her…if she complied, she might get pregnant and get fired. And if she refused him, she’d almost certainly get fired.
And also frequented by dudes who rather argue about the defintion of "work’ rather than answer the question posed by the OP. :rolleyes:
The definition of “work” is central to the question. What people have been trying to point out to the OP is that it’s the definition of work that has changed, not women’s labor patterns (which have always been centered on domestic activities, at least since we ceased to be hunter-gatherers). Women kept doing what they’d always been doing, it just was redefined as “not working.”
Data point:
American white middle class equated “wife working” with “man does not make enough money to feed his own family” = “pathetic excuse for a man”
This held up to WWII and after.
At this time women “didn’t need” the same wages as men because her hubby was paying most of the bills - she was just looking for “pin money” or “mad money” - trivial amounts of disposable income.
That one is still with us.
I’ll posit another: women used to work until they got married and pregnant, whereupon they would stay home with the kids. This was not only a fact but a near-universal supposition among employers - if you want a worker who will stick around, don’t hire women. Yep, still around (Joanie applying to law school, Doonesbury).
I’ll posit that that worked until the boomers hit the housing market and pushed up housing prices to the point that it now REQUIRES 2 incomes to buy a house.
Boomers now pay more for cars than our parents did for the houses in which we were raised. That kind of inflation could only be supported by double income households.
Married women were not allowed to teach in many communities. So any female teacher who got married said good-bye to teaching.
It wasn’t until the 1970’s that a single, working woman, no matter how good her salary, couldn’t get a mortgage without a male co-signer, the implication being that she might get married and stop working. There were tales of women taking their demented fathers out of nursing homes to co-sign a home loan. Apparently the only qualification for the guy was having a penis.
Several good points:
Before agriculture, hunter-gatherer societies, men would hunt and women would gather. In general (!) men had the muscles to chase down and killgame, and women often had problems like pregnancy and kids to watch that limited mobility. Althugh, once a large animals was killed, it was not unusual for the whole group to join uin the “food processing”. Also, men having the dominant position were not above unloading the “no fun” hard work on women.
Before the industrial revolution, agricultural societies - everyone pulled their weight. Again, muscles figure into it. When heavy lifiting was required, men di the work (usually). When it was a chore that women could do (milking the cows) women did it as often as men.
keep in mind the mentality of the society too. Women could just as easily watch the sheep, but in the days before police forces, leaving a woman out in the middle of remote pasture on her own was asking for trouble - either consensual or nonconsensual. Thus we tend to hear that stories revolve around the younger boys being given the shepherd or goatherd role. (The boy Who Cried Wolf). The girls are kept close to home. A woman when she was old enough moved in with her spouse and his family, who then took care of any children.
With the industrial revolution, there were fewer chores to share, but someone still had to look after the household and the children.
As mentioned above, the amount of work to run a household without labour-saving devices was - a lot. Anyone who’s spent an hour doing the dishes by hand should consider how much fun the same chore would be without hot and cold running water or modern grease-cuting detergents. Laundry by hand was a several-hour affair, and there was no such thing as “wrinkle-free” clothing. You worked every piece of clothing over a washboard (after fetching the water from the well) or beat them on the rocks by the stream. Cooking over a fire (or even woodstove) is more complex and more work than a gas range, and everything was made by hand. Before refrigerators, you went out and bought the supplies every day or two; you didn’t keep meat, eggs, milk or butter in the fridge for a week. And you walked to market.
So there was plenty of “work” to keep the householder busy, even if she did not earn money for it. Men who were not married paid a housekeeper (female) to do this chore for them.
The industrial revolution happened too around the time of Victorian modesty - so women who did have jobs should not be pregnant in public. Even as late as the 50’s when I love Lucy showed a couple with twin beds, a woman was often fired from her job when she married n the assumption that she would shortly get pregnant and if she did manage to get someone to babysit and come back, she would go off on maternity leave 3 or 4 times.
So the OP answer is “it evolved during the industrial revolution” with the proviso that generally, women and girls DID have wage-earning options, but usually only until they married; then there was eough work to keep them home even if a few kids did not. A few were ucky and had help (spinster sister, mother) to wacth their kids so they could go back to work.
That male domination issue is also a factor - if the wife earned more than the husband, it suggested he was “not much of a man”. Hence, the “ghetto jobs” where women predominated, but because they had no real choice, wages were extremely low.
Today’s world has thrown the situation upside down. To live a decent lifestyle - house car(s) big-screen TV and cellphones, fancy vacations and all the other toys - you need two incomes, unless one spouse is making a heckuva lot of money. Domestic work is simpler and faster and easier (don’t let my wife hear me say that!). You toss the laundry in a machine, come back an hour later. meals are 3/4 made to start if you don’t get take-out, and you only need to shop for groceries every week, and daycares are common-place.
*Pretend a wife has just said: “My husband won’t let me work.” You would never reply: “But of course he lets you work, he wants you to do the laundry and clean!”
Actually that sounds like exactly what I would reply.
Sequestering women has always been a high-status affection. Rich Chinese men preferred women who had crippled themselves and could not walk, and keeping such a woman as a wife of concubine was a powerful symbol of status and wealth. In other areas, well off men kept their wives in strict seclusion, allowing them to rarely leave the house or interact with greater society. Some rich men kept vast harems, sealed off from the world and nearly completely idle. Some of these harems included more women than the man could realistically meet, much less have any pleasurable interaction with. In all these cases, it is ultimately about showing off that you are so rich that you can support (and to some degree control) many economically unproductive people. It’s the family version of conspicuous consumption, not much different than the guy who drives his Hummer to work.
Even today, many of our ways of signaling status in women- long nails, long hair, suntans, toned figure, fussy clothes, high heels- are partially about signaling that the woman is not doing hard labor. Even the opposite- the crunchy granola communities where women wear camping clothes- is showing that the women has leisure time and is not confined to an office. It’s very easy to trace the point where pale skin stopped being fashionable and suntans became desirable. It’s exactly the point that “working” shifted from the fields to the office. Even Islamic purdah is influenced by modern economic forces. Poor women have always had to work in the fields. It’s modern wealth that has made actually completely secluding women a reality for ordinary families. Unsurprisingly, it’s the richer countries that practice the most extreme forms, rather than the poor ones.
Anyway, for most of history, it was tough enough for an entire family going full force to support themselves, and only a tiny faction of the population could support idle family members. But with the increased productivity of the industrial revolution, there was a short window where this became available to the middle class. The modern economy has shifted again to absorb that excess, and the scene has changed again.
Certain jobs around a farm were seen as women’s work. Unmarried girls, like Tess of the D’urbervilles might hire themselves out as dairymaids for example. At busy times like the harvest just about every able bodied young person was working out in the fields.
Right, but our point is that until the industrial revolution/urbanization, no wife would have made that statement. It would have been meaningless. There is no home/work distinction on the farm: there’s just an endless list of tasks to be done, and they weren’t gender divided into home/living/wife vs farm/working/husband. No one said an 18th C farmer “supported” a wife and kids: they would say that that family made a living, or scratched out a living, or did well out of the farm. No one would have described what she did as “keeping house” as if that were separate from the all-consuming business of generating enough food not to starve to death. There was a strong assumption that the man was in charge, but no sense that he was the Earner and the wife was the consumer/supporter.