Comment by monocasa
5 hours ago
Except that kind of work would have been split up by gender. The etymology of "woman" is literally "weaving person", and those kinds of tasks were up to the mostly adult women who also wouldn't have been working in the fields, so it ends up being a wash when painting with a wide brush.
> The etymology of "woman" is literally "weaving person"
[citation needed]
>Except that kind of work would have been split up by gender.
It's still work. It doesn't magically have zero value because it was done by women. The methodology cited by the book counts only counts hours worked if it's farming or wage employment, but doesn't count any household labor, which means anything that's shifted from being made at home to being bought would could as extra hours worked, even if it saves time overall.
> It's still work. It doesn't magically have zero value because it was done by women. The methodology cited by the book counts only counts hours worked if it's farming or wage employment, but doesn't count any household labor, which means anything that's shifted from being made at home to being bought would could as extra hours worked, even if it saves time overall.
Nobody said it had zero value. The point is that labor roles were extremely gender striated, and the record is mostly kept only for men's labor. So saying that they worked more because of the example task you gave doesn't make sense when societally that work was put onto others.
Women were working fields and were working with farm animals too. They did not done work that required physical strength unless they had no choice, but that does not mean they did not "worked fields".
Second, work being split by gender does not matter here. Women are, by definition, people too. And weaving, sewing, candles crafting were all literal necessity. A weaving woman would sell or exchange results of her work if she had an excess of it. They were not bored SAHM hobbies they way they would be now. This was economic activity just like any other.
The point is that the data we have is on men's work. No one said that women were bored SAHM hobbies. Just that pointing out extra tasks that need to be done in addition to the record we have of men working 150 days a year doesn't make much sense when that additional work wasn't done by men.
And I am saying that going by available historical records, you are plain wrong.The additional work was done by men too. Conversely to women worked fields", we have plenty of records of men doing work outside of fields.
We have records of both.
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