The past was not that cute

"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.

A small nitpick that doesn't take away from the rest of your comment: staying alive and fed was not necessarily a laborious activity for hunter-gatherers living in good climates [0]. It's our expansion into less hospitable environments that made it so.

> Woodburn offers this “very rough approximation” of subsistence-labor requirements: “Over the year as a whole, probably an average of less than two hours a day is spent obtaining food.”

> Reports on hunters and gatherers of the ethnological present--specifically on those in marginal environments--suggest a mean of three to five hours per adult worker per day in food production.

[0] https://fifthestate.anarchistlibraries.net/library/370-fall-...