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.

> 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.

This was not true in the society my grandparents grew up in between 1900 and 1970. Both of my grandmothers and great grandmothers helped out tremendously on the farms, and my grandmother and mother were part of the new businesses when they immigrated to the US.

Based on all the women I have personally seen working in farms, and in videos, and in written accounts, I suspect your quote is only true for a very small slice of the world in a very small slice of time that was developed enough to have large farms with large machinery and scale such that the farm was earning enough profit to use automation to not need the women and allow them to only focus on the home, or hire poorer women so the farm owner could solely focus on the home.

Hell, I bet even today, even in the US, a good portion of farms need the labor of both spouses.