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8:38am June 16, 2014

soilrockslove:

slashmarks:

I really wish I’d remembered to clarify that cooking, cleaning, and childcare ARE in fact work, women just weren’t actually limited to those three things in the middle ages in that post that’s now getting reblogged

Yes!  Throughout most of human history - making sure the house was in working order and taking care of children was half of the work in any given community.  And for the most part it still is.  But it doesn’t get called “work” and it doesn’t get paid. 

I mean, for example, someone has to harvest plants from the field - but someone also had to make that pile of plant into something edible and nourishing and good-tasting.  This is called cooking.

Seriously.

And no, in medieval times all women weren’t stuck doing just that set of jobs.  And there were cultures that were even more fluid about how the work was distributed.*

*(See many Native American cultures.)

And even in cultures where women were expected to take care of the children, that’s not all they were doing.  My dad was just writing about how things were for my grandparents growing up on farms, and the mother would set the babies under the cotton plants while she picked the cotton, because all available family members had to be ready for picking.  (This had tragic results in my family, unfortunately, because the pesticide used on boll weevils got into the babies who played with the underside of the cotton plants, and the babies died, at least two in a row.)