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James Horton, PhD.'s avatar

To your point here: The book of Proverbs actually has a lengthy passage describing the perfect wife and according to it she is an entrepreneur who runs her own business and is a leader in her community: In fact she sounds substantially more productive than her husband, if I'm honest. But maybe the passage starts with the assumption that he's a winner, too, rather than a random schlub who got lucky.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2031%3A10-31&version=ERV

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G. M. (Mark) Baker's avatar

What both sides seem to miss in these debates is the massive role of technology in shaping human roles. I have two DK books, one called Forgotten Arts, which describes field and workshop crafts traditionally performed by men, and the other called Forgotten Household Crafts, which describes crafts traditionally performed by women, though the first book includes a number of women's crafts as well. What this tells us is that for most of history, men and women both practiced a number of physically and mentally challenging tasks that added equally to the wealth of the family. The women's tasks were a little lighter (though most modern men, myself especially, would be exhausted by half a day of traditional women's work), and that they were practiced closer to home, where, of course, the children would have been.

Technological development over the last few millennia has gradually shifted us from a craft economy, in which you largely made things for your own family's use, to a trade economy, in which you made things for sale and brought the things your family needed. That trend greatly accelerated through the 19th and early 20th century, with the effect that it turned the home from a place of production into a place of consumption. All those complex, challenging, productive tasks that had occupied women through the centuries were eliminated. To be productive, a woman then had to leave the home, which, of course, meant leaving her children.

That is the conundrum we find ourselves in today. It was not that women suddenly started to demand challenging and productive occupations after millennia of being content with unproductive idleness. It was that the industrial revolution stripped away the challenging and productive occupations that had been theirs for millennia.

Not that women would want those old occupations back (though they do still do some of them as hobbies). No more would men want their old occupations back. They were a hard slog for rewards that would seem very meager to us today. But men, at least, still leave the household to work as they always did. It is women who have been placed in a bind between going out and leaving their children, and staying at home without adequate occupation. The fabled 1950s were not the end of a long period do domestic bliss. It was a brief episode in the ongoing struggle to adapt to the fact of the home being a place of consumption rather than production -- as was the Victorian struggle over access to the professions.

But perhaps if we were to recognize the role that technology played in bringing this situation about, and acknowledge the genuine nature of the dilemma it creates, we might lower the velocity of the ideological brickbats we hurl at each other's heads.

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