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430 points mhb | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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PeterHolzwarth ◴[] No.46179223[source]
"A woman's work is never done."

In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the time said that men worked the field, women ran the home. And that later job was brutal, never-ending, and consumed all waking hours until the day she died.

Men broke their backs in the field, women consumed their lives doing the ceaseless work that never ended, every waking moment. (And occasionally helped out in the field, too).

Running a family was a brutal two-person job -- and the kids had to dive in to help out the second they could lift something heavier than a couple pounds.

We forget so easily that for the entire history of our species - up until just recently - simply staying alive and somewhat warm and minimally fed was a hundred-hour-a-week job for mom and dad.

There are important downsides, but the Green Revolution - and dare I say it, the industrial revolution - was truly transformative for our species.

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1. tmoravec ◴[] No.46179855[source]
Exactly. You might also enjoy Bret Devereaux' recent series of how life was really like for pre-modern peasants. Also includes parts focusing on women in particular. https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...
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2. glaugh ◴[] No.46180199[source]
That series of blog posts is incredible, as is all his work. One thing that stuck with me is that while our deep evolutionary past is very important, the majority of humans who have lived have been peasants in an agrarian society
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3. chrismatic ◴[] No.46181846[source]
Came here to post the same resource and to point out that based on it it rarely was a "two person's job" only.
4. Balgair ◴[] No.46182107[source]
That stuck with me too.

The modal human experience was a farmer, far and away. Not the mean, not the median, but the mode. We have the numbers to easily back it up.

5. potato3732842 ◴[] No.46186612[source]
His blog posts are very high quality. It seems however that the average reader ignores his prolific disclaimers about how his work doesn't necessarily generalize and attempting to do so is fraught with peril and attempting to do so any later than the early modern period is laughable.