I hope this following piece I put together contributes a meaningful drop to that bucket. I wrote it using information from Elizabeth Wayland Barber's wonderful book Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. I think it helps to make sense of patriarchy in a prehistorical setting - and may also complicate the notion of patriarchy at that stage in human history. I would cherish resources that present solid discussions of patriarchy at different stages in history.
Why did Women Weave and
Cook?
In prehistorical times, all over the
world, it was usually the mans job to hunt and perform other dangerous tasks, such as
practicing metallurgy. Many people assume this is
because men are faster and stronger. While it is true that male and female bodies differ in important ways, women can hunt and perform other dangerous tasks quite well. If we look around us, we can observe with our own eyes that although the fastest and strongest people in the world are men, there are many women who are faster and stronger than most men. Very few men on this planet can outrun the fastest women or out-lift the strongest. Why haven't fast, strong women been given the role of performing dangerous tasks throughout history? Why haven't men who are less fast and strong been given roles such as weaving and cooking?
The answer
doesn’t have to do with one genders body being tougher than the other. It has to do with raising children. Before modern times, most women in the world
breastfed their children for two years, and often three, which is far longer
than we do today. Women had to do types
of work that allowed them to care for their children at the same time.
Scholar
Elizabeth Wayland Barber, in her book Women’s
Work: The First 20,000 Years, describes four things that most women’s work had
in common, all across the globe:
1) Women’s work usually doesn’t require
focused concentration over long periods of time. Imagine that you’re out hunting. You
would have to stay very still and quiet for a long time. You couldn’t do this with children. They might not stay quiet. And if they needed help you would have
to break your concentration.
2) Women’s work can be easily
interrupted and easily resumed. This is true for cooking and sewing, but not
for hunting or other dangerous tasks.
3) Women’s work does not place children
in danger. This is why men would do work
like casting melted metal into weapons and farm tools. Notice that this kind of metal work is also
not interruptible and requires a great deal of focus!
4) Women’s work usually does not require moving
far from home. This not only means that
women did not hunt, it also means that women did not usually trade.
These four features of
women’s work were true all over the globe before civilizations, but also
after. Once civilization started, what
kinds of work could women do, and what could they not do based on these four
points? How might women's roles in the world be limited by these four? Do you consider some of them more limiting than others?
