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"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 l

"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.

missedthecue 10mo ago
I don't know if any of you have washed soiled clothes by hand, but that's shockingly intensive labor.
danny_codes 10mo ago
You seem to be ignoring the vast majority of human history before we developed farming. Agriculture societies are a relatively brief period of our collective history.
- margalabargala 10mo ago
  People moved from a hunter gatherer society to an agrarian society because the latter was easier.
  - euroderf 10mo ago
    And also beer became possible.
  - UltraSane 10mo ago
    Initially but the excess food allowed population to increase and the only way to feed them was to keep farming. So in a way humans trapped themselves.
    - LanceH 10mo ago
      The population increased because half of it wasn't dying off immediately. You have to include the half that dies off early in the calculations of QoL for hunter/gatherers.
    - rhubarbtree 10mo ago
      “Trapped” in a life that meant women didn’t have to regularly murder their children. Such nonsense the idea that farming was a trap. I think it was Sapiens that propagated this myth in recent times.
      - strudey 10mo ago
        I think there’s a version of the Malthusian trap that has explanatory merit - the idea that as population increased, you got diminishing returns from more people farming the same land. Population would therefore increase until famine, after which there would be good times until the cycle repeated. This cycle was broken by the industrial revolution.
        kzrdude 10mo ago
        Isn't this the same "trap" that any living life "falls into"? It gets many offspring, and only those survive who can feed themselves. Exponential growth fills up the niche until there are no more resources: any successful species is trapped against some kind of resource or environmental ceiling, unfortunately. Is there a ceiling in the industrial revolution era? Famously the 1972 book Limits to Growth says yes for that question.
        UltraSane 10mo ago
        Humans should be able to act smarter than bacteria.
  - bandrami 10mo ago
    Not easier, lower-risk. Agriculture produced a standard of living with a lower mean but a much thinner left tail.
    - tor825gl 10mo ago
      This wisdom is preserved for us in the story of Esau and Jacob. Esau was a hunter and Jacob was a farmer. When hunting went badly, Esau's desperation for protein, which Jacob could guarantee a supply of by cultivating lentils, was such that he gave up his whole birthright in exchange for the food. The era in which humans chose whether to continue with a hunter gatherer life or join the new farming communities also seems to have influenced the stories of Adam and Eve ("cursed is the ground because of you; through toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it will yield for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread") and Cain and Abel. Some have also suggested that archaic prohibitions against eating the food of fairies were a taboo designed to warn off young people from leaving farming or herding groups and joining hunter gatherer communities. They would be 'enchanted' by the easy going lifestyle but then end up hungry and sick. The need to spend hours every day working a field, in a season when food was plentiful, in order to prepare for another season 6 or 9 months away, must have been a huge cultural crossroads, possibly a bigger break from our close animal ancestors than tool making, and its influence is still with us. Rules around not eating animals who are needed to supply milk and to reproduce the herd similarly cast a long shadow.
      - decremental 10mo ago
        [dead]
      - truegoric 10mo ago
        That is a very interesting take. Would you mind sharing some sources, preferably academic, that discuss the topic of agrarian/hunter-gatherer relations and its influence on historical stories and myths?
        andsoitis 10mo ago
  - andsoitis 10mo ago
    > People moved from a hunter gatherer society to an agrarian society because the latter was easier. Agriculture began from a convergence of climate stability, resource abundance, sedentary living, population pressure, and co-evolution with useful plants and animals. Hunting and gathering alone cannot feed everyone. Farming is harder, less healthy, more labor-intensive but yields more calories per acre. As a population grows, farming becomes the least bad option.
  - kzrdude 10mo ago
    It looks more like agrarian society outcompeted hunter gatherer society because the agrarians got more surviving kids. This replacement and assimilation happened in Europe, for example, where it's visible in genetic and linguistic history.
    - margalabargala 10mo ago
      Yes, because it was easier, to not have your kids die among other things. Hunter-gathering doesn't scale. What is fine when it's one person, collapses the whole society when it gets too large.
- mcmoor 10mo ago
  But it also contain the most people. Industrial age contains even more people but it hasn't defeated agricultural age yet because it's still so recent.
lovich 10mo ago
Even in agricultural societies it wasnt a nuclear family as implied by "Running a family was a brutal two-person job..." Most human societies were much more interconnected until relatively recently(last 80-100 years)
nowittyusername 10mo ago
When humans domesticated animals and started tending to the fields is when IMO it all went down hill. That change brought in modern civilization with all its advantages but moreeso its disadvantages and maladaptive behaviors of the human mind. We shoulda stayed hunter gatherers, I am almost certain we would have been happier.
- PeterHolzwarth 10mo ago
  You first. And no cheating by bringing antibiotics with you.
  - nurettin 10mo ago
    To be fair, antibiotics are needed much more now that we have billions of hosts these organisms can evolve on rapidly.
  - defrost 10mo ago
    A lack of antibiotics wasn't sufficient reason to stay in western society for those members of the Pintupi Nine and other hunter gather families that came in, looked about, and left again. Some can't imagine life without antibiotics, others can't fathom living with everything else that comes with it.
    - Aloha 10mo ago
      They had a place that was familiar and comforting to go return to. Anyone who is of a modern industrialized society who is waxing poetically about becoming a hunter gatherer is both, looking at history thru very rose colored goggles and welcome to go find a place to do just that.
      - defrost 10mo ago
        Alternatively they grew up with a foot in both worlds, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c Many people that have lived side by side with indigenous people across northern australia, the islands, PNG, et al have a clear idea of exactly what living off the land entails. A good many have done exactly that for extended periods, dropping in and out from one to the other. They would have done this sans any condescending permission from those wishing them well - such opinions count for naught.
a_bonobo 10mo ago
If you can, read Robert Caro's The Path To Power (Caro's The Power Broker has been a HN favorite ever since Aaron Swartz recommended it). It's the story of the first ~30 years of Lyndon B Johnson's life. I forget which chapter it is, but Caro takes a detour where he describes the life of women during Johnson's childhood in the dirt-poor valley he was from: no electricity, no waterpower, everything in the house was done by women's hands, 24/7. There's a passage that stuck to me about how women in their 30s in that area looked like other area's women in their 70s, just a brutal life.
- dtjohnnyb 10mo ago
  Exactly what I thought of reading this, that chapter is genuinely one of the most affecting things I've ever read. The horror of it keeps growing as he continues to describe awful manual task after the other.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- leobg 10mo ago
  Chapter 4 - The Father and Mother > Transplanted, moreover, to a world in which women had to work, and work hard. On washdays, clothes had to be lifted out of the big soaking vats of boiling water on the ends of long poles, the clothes dripping and heavy; the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands; the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday.
  - jnsaff2 10mo ago
    And what he left out of this book (and included in the memoir or in some interview) was that there was a scientific study of women in the area at the time which discovered that a very high percentage of women had birthing complications serious enough for hospitalization that went untreated as they had to go back to their chores next day and there was no hospital anywhere close.
tmoravec 10mo ago
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-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/ https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...
- glaugh 10mo ago
  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
  - Balgair 10mo ago
    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.
  - potato3732842 10mo ago
    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.
- chrismatic 10mo ago
  Came here to post the same resource and to point out that based on it it rarely was a "two person's job" only.
gradus_ad 10mo ago
The industrial revolution is the most transformative event in this history of life since the Cambrian explosion. It's that significant.
- loup-vaillant 10mo ago
  It is also on track to be nearly as… impactful as the Permian extinction. That stuff cuts both ways unfortunately.
  - andsoitis 10mo ago
    > It is also on track to be nearly as… impactful as the Permian extinction. why do you say that?
  - potato3732842 10mo ago
    A hell of a lot of stuff survived the permian extinction. Now I'm not saying it's gonna be fun, but I'd bet a lot of money on humans and the species we find most useful surviving the next/current one.
- baq 10mo ago
  It was also an extremely lucky coincidence.
indubioprorubik 10mo ago
The green revolution was vitally dependent on oil-gas based fertilizer trade - which means, doing away with manchester-style centralized trade empires who used cutting off trade as a tool of suffocating opponents. The past never went away, it caught up to the present. All poverty is energy poverty - and exponential humanity, always fills that "gap" to the ressource roof with people. The old, pre-harber-bosch world was a grim dark all against all where empires (themselves devices to keep civilization afloat in a few centralized places, while extracing at great missery elsewhere) fought wars of fertilizer and used one sided trading and food-exports to starve colonies out like vampires. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chincha_Islands_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chincha_Islands_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Nama_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Nama_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maji_Maji_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maji_Maji_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_Mount_Lebanon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_Mount_Lebanon the whole all against all, no free-trade madness culminated in the two new comer empires copy-pasting the concept dialed up to eleven in their "new colonies". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Japan
Etheryte 10mo ago
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-2005-the-original-affluent-society https://fifthestate.anarchistlibraries.net/library/370-fall-...
- rocqua 10mo ago
  I believe the reasons we "regressed" into agriculture from hunting and gathering are much more complicated than "we moved into more marginal land". It does appear that the median hunter gatherer life was better than the median farmer life. But I'd wager that to be true in most areas.
  - logicprog 10mo ago
    It isn't true. https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf
- acessoproibido 10mo ago
  So if we go back much further life was super chill and romantic? I dont buy it tbh, it feels to me just as unrealistic.
  - Etheryte 10mo ago
    Not necessarily back, but to the right environments. As quoted above, we see the same today in isolated tribes that live off of hunting and foraging. All of this also doesn't account for the lack of all other modern convenience such as medicine, hygiene, etc. So it isn't about chill and romantic, but rather the time commitment specifically.
lukan 10mo ago
"and the kids had to dive in to help out the second they could lift something heavier than a couple pounds" Earlier. Picking berries, seeds or ears of grain is something very small hands can do. "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." But no. You are talking about a primitive (poor) agrarian society. That only started a couple of thousands years ago, while our species used fire since over a million years in a semi nomadic live style. And those tribes in good territory, they did not had so much back braking work, as long as big land animals were around. (Also, hearding cattle was for the most part a very chilled job as well, but that also started rather recent)
- Aunche 10mo ago
  > And those tribes in good territory, they did not had so much back braking work, as long as big land animals were around The population of paleolithic humans never reached anywhere close to that of agricultural humans, suggesting that many died before reproductive age. Multiple nomadic cultures independently decided to not only spend several hours a day picking and grinding grass seeds to eat, but also to cultivate them for thousands of years into grains that would still be barely palatable by the standards of today. Nobody would choose this life unless if they had to.
  - etothepii 10mo ago
    Being stationary and cultivating grains allows a surplus that is much harder to achieve with hunting. This allows the formation of a priest class that can tell you what the sky father wants you to do. They may have had to but it need not be because it led to more calories for them.
    - watwut 10mo ago
      Hunters have priests and supersticions. A lot of them.
      - 10mo ago
nshm 10mo ago
> 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. Orphanes did struggle but most families were not just two person, families were big and supported by community.
motoboi 10mo ago
Life in the field, from the land, in the past, meant death from starvation. Some unsung heroes: - the person that discovered how to fix nitrogen in the soil saved more lives than every other people in history, combined. - Norman Borlaug, father of the green revolution, saved more than 1 billion people from starvation.
- mythrwy 10mo ago
  Borlaug was a very important figure in global food security but he was a plant breeder, not the guy(s) who figured out how to fix nitrogen from the air into fertilizer. Nitrogen people were Haber and Bosch. Millions of probably do owe their very existence to these men though, agree with that. However part of me (maybe a slightly misanthropic part?) wonders if it might be a bit like feeding stray cats, and now we have a huge herd of cats that are rapidly outstripping the ultimate carrying capacity of their environment and it doesn't end well. But since I'm one of the cats, I say we just go with it and see what happens.
  - motoboi 10mo ago
    Im sorry. That was supposed to be a list but the formatter ate the lines.
    - mythrwy 10mo ago
      I see makes sense. Sorry for being "the well actually" guy.
tim333 10mo ago
From travelling to different places I'm not sure about the women's work was brutal bit. The ones not in paid work tend to spend their time looking after the kids and cooking and cleaning and stuff regardless of the style of living. The main thing that's hard seems to be the kids going "mum! I want..."/"don't want to..." at all hours but that's human nature which doesn't change much.
- habinero 10mo ago
  That's because you haven't done that work and don't value it. Women in agrarian societies do difficult manual labor like hauling water, milking, preserving food, tending livestock, laundry. Laundry before machines was backbreaking work nobody wanted to do, which is why the poor did it or women took in laundry if they needed money. If you had a hand free, you spun wool. Also, they did all that while constantly pregnant or nursing, which is really hard on the body. Sure, women didn't have to go to war, but men didn't have to live with the fear that this year's baby might be the one that finally kills them.
JohnCClarke 10mo ago
Not 100 hours a week. More like 50. Taxes to the local baron, lord, monastery, or whoever took the other 50.
marzell 10mo ago
There's good arguments for the case that gatherer communities actually had generally better health and far more free time than farmers and agrarian society. Farming provided the calories necessary for a population that hunting and gathering could not support (so no going back) but required basically working all day to make it work and survive less than ideal conditions. But prior to farming people often had significant more free time.
hermitcrab 10mo ago
I have read that hunter-gatherers generally had an easier life than peasants in agricultural societies. But the hunter gatherer lifestyle can only support small groups with a low overall population density. So the hunter-gatherers always lost out to agricultural societies, when they came into contact/conflict. Not sure how prevalent this view is amongst professional anthropologists.
- al_borland 10mo ago
  I wonder if the hunter gather societies could have grown larger if they put in the same level of work as the agricultural societies? One could debate what leads to a better quality of life. Is it more downtime and community, like we see with hunter gatherers. Is it the modern conveniences we end up with through larger societies and more work effort? I watched a video of a polyglot who learned the language of a hunter gatherer tribe to spend some time with them. It was amazing to see how well adapted they were to the environment, both in terms of their bodies and skills. The outsider was getting eaten up by bugs and cut by every little branch or thorn, while the locals had thicker skin and seemed completely unaffected by all of this. They were running through the forest at night and it seemed effortless. While hunting they needed a bag at one point, so someone grabbed some stuff off a tree and quickly wove one together like it was nothing. What ends up being a survival realty show for us ends up looking quite convenient for them. If I need a bag I need to work to earn money, then depend on a whole supply chain to grow/manufacture the raw materials, weave the fabric, cut and assemble the fabric into a bag, and a retailer to sell it to me, as well as all of the shipping on trucks, boats, and planes along the way. It’s actually pretty crazy how much work goes into everything we buy.
  - hermitcrab 10mo ago
    >I wonder if the hunter gather societies could have grown larger if they put in the same level of work as the agricultural societies? I think it is about organization and population density. A hunter gatherer society is not going to be able to field an army of tens of thousands of people, as an agricultural society can. Hunter gatherers are also limited in their technology by their continual movement. The Mongols were a nomadic society and very successful militarily (for a while). But they kept large numbers of animals and weren't hunter gatherers.
wahnfrieden 10mo ago
This repeats several myths that Graeber and Wengrow have made compelling arguments against
KineticLensman 10mo ago
> Running a family was a brutal two-person job -- and the kids had to dive in to help In many societies before (say) the 18th/19th Century, extended families would have been the norm, e.g. with elderly relatives living in the same household, helping with food preparation and clothes making. Harvests may have been community-wide affairs. Children would have had to dive in, as you say, but they wouldn't have had school to go to, and there would have been a wide age spread. Maternal mortality (death due to childbirth) was high, and many widowed fathers would have remarried, extending the family further (incidentally this is partly why there are so many step-sisters and step-mothers in folk stories).
- mbajkowski 10mo ago
  Agreed, but I don't think you need to go as far back as the 19th century, even early 20th century it was the same in some places in eastern Europe. Out of 7 siblings in my Dad's family only one went to college. The spread between oldest and youngest was about 12 years. All went to school which was dismissed much earlier, after which children were expected to help in the fields with animals, house work, etc. before doing homework. The one pause, and really only time they wore nicer clothes, was on Sundays for church. The person who went to college would be back each summer to help with the grain and potato harvests. My life by comparison is a life of luxury.
  - fsckboy 10mo ago
    Out of 10 siblings in my grandfather's family, only 5 lived. the eldest, my grandfather, was sent to America on his own at age 14 to work and send money home. college? who's got time to finish high school?
    - mbajkowski 10mo ago
      Yup. Also elementary school was often fewer grades than it is today. It was the norm to finish your education after elementary school to help the farm/household. Individuals, especially from the country side, were an exception to finish secondary education and go on to college.
lotsofpulp 10mo ago
> 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.
fleroviumna 10mo ago
[dead]
xkcd-sucks 10mo ago
Theres a nice and comprehnsive treatment of this topic in https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-v-life-in-cycles/ https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an... > [A] series ... looking at the structures of life for pre-modern peasant farmers and showing how historical modeling can help us explore the experiences of people who rarely leave much evidence of their day-to-day personal lives.
nikanj 10mo ago
But by feodal times, you also had to also work a number of hours for your liege. Which modern idiots have perverted with the whole ”a peasant had more free time than you”-meme, where they only count the hours of mandatory service and ignore the hundred-hours-a-week part of keeping your own home running
coldtea 10mo ago
>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. On the plus side, they also didn't have to do the hard dangerous jobs like mining coal, building houses, and the like, nor did they have to go to the army, fight to defend their country (at least not as soldiers), and many other things. Running the house was hardly "brutal", neither did it consume "all waking hours until the day she died".
- catlover76 10mo ago
  The fuck? Who do you think built the houses? > army, fight to defend their country (at least not as soldiers), and many other things. In most places and times, didn't all men just get conscripted into war frequently? > Running the house was hardly "brutal", neither did it consume "all waking hours until the day she died". Why do you think it didn't consume all waking hours?
  - coldtea 10mo ago
    >Who do you think built the houses? The men. Again, I'm writing there about what women didn't have to do. >In most places and times, didn't all men just get conscripted into war frequently? Yes, and thus what I wrote is that women didn't have to do it. (My point was: "yes, women did the house tasks, but on the plus side, they didn't have to do those other far more dangerous and hard things"). >Why do you think it didn't consume all waking hours? I don't think it didn't, I know it didn't. For starters it was shared among larger family units (including several kids). And even when it wasn't, like some people living on their own, it hardly took a few hours each day, and that's including maintaining a fire, cooking, some cleaning, feeding some nearby hens, bringing water, and things like that. Modern people over-dependent on modern conveniences overestimate how hard all those things were, as if it was some horror survival movie. In these here parts, people in the country did all the same things people did in the 19th century or the 15th century well into the 20th century (with cars and electricity not reaching many places until the late 1950s), all with plenty of time to spare and socialize.
timeon 10mo ago
> There are important downsides, but the Green Revolution - and dare I say it, the industrial revolution - was truly transformative for our species. And left-wing movements that followed industrial revolution.
deleted 10mo ago
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Archelaos 10mo ago
> In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the time said that men worked the field, women ran the home. I come from a family of farmers, and I can assure you that the women worked the field too, even one-hundred years ago. And the children ...

missedthecue 10mo ago

I don't know if any of you have washed soiled clothes by hand, but that's shockingly intensive labor.

danny_codes 10mo ago

You seem to be ignoring the vast majority of human history before we developed farming. Agriculture societies are a relatively brief period of our collective history.

margalabargala 10mo ago
People moved from a hunter gatherer society to an agrarian society because the latter was easier.
- euroderf 10mo ago
  And also beer became possible.
- UltraSane 10mo ago
  Initially but the excess food allowed population to increase and the only way to feed them was to keep farming. So in a way humans trapped themselves.
  - LanceH 10mo ago
    The population increased because half of it wasn't dying off immediately. You have to include the half that dies off early in the calculations of QoL for hunter/gatherers.
  - rhubarbtree 10mo ago
    “Trapped” in a life that meant women didn’t have to regularly murder their children. Such nonsense the idea that farming was a trap. I think it was Sapiens that propagated this myth in recent times.
    - strudey 10mo ago
      I think there’s a version of the Malthusian trap that has explanatory merit - the idea that as population increased, you got diminishing returns from more people farming the same land. Population would therefore increase until famine, after which there would be good times until the cycle repeated. This cycle was broken by the industrial revolution.
      - kzrdude 10mo ago
        Isn't this the same "trap" that any living life "falls into"? It gets many offspring, and only those survive who can feed themselves. Exponential growth fills up the niche until there are no more resources: any successful species is trapped against some kind of resource or environmental ceiling, unfortunately. Is there a ceiling in the industrial revolution era? Famously the 1972 book Limits to Growth says yes for that question.
        UltraSane 10mo ago
        Humans should be able to act smarter than bacteria.
- bandrami 10mo ago
  Not easier, lower-risk. Agriculture produced a standard of living with a lower mean but a much thinner left tail.
  - tor825gl 10mo ago
    This wisdom is preserved for us in the story of Esau and Jacob. Esau was a hunter and Jacob was a farmer. When hunting went badly, Esau's desperation for protein, which Jacob could guarantee a supply of by cultivating lentils, was such that he gave up his whole birthright in exchange for the food. The era in which humans chose whether to continue with a hunter gatherer life or join the new farming communities also seems to have influenced the stories of Adam and Eve ("cursed is the ground because of you; through toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it will yield for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread") and Cain and Abel. Some have also suggested that archaic prohibitions against eating the food of fairies were a taboo designed to warn off young people from leaving farming or herding groups and joining hunter gatherer communities. They would be 'enchanted' by the easy going lifestyle but then end up hungry and sick. The need to spend hours every day working a field, in a season when food was plentiful, in order to prepare for another season 6 or 9 months away, must have been a huge cultural crossroads, possibly a bigger break from our close animal ancestors than tool making, and its influence is still with us. Rules around not eating animals who are needed to supply milk and to reproduce the herd similarly cast a long shadow.
    - decremental 10mo ago
      [dead]
    - truegoric 10mo ago
      That is a very interesting take. Would you mind sharing some sources, preferably academic, that discuss the topic of agrarian/hunter-gatherer relations and its influence on historical stories and myths?
      - andsoitis 10mo ago
- andsoitis 10mo ago
  > People moved from a hunter gatherer society to an agrarian society because the latter was easier. Agriculture began from a convergence of climate stability, resource abundance, sedentary living, population pressure, and co-evolution with useful plants and animals. Hunting and gathering alone cannot feed everyone. Farming is harder, less healthy, more labor-intensive but yields more calories per acre. As a population grows, farming becomes the least bad option.
- kzrdude 10mo ago
  It looks more like agrarian society outcompeted hunter gatherer society because the agrarians got more surviving kids. This replacement and assimilation happened in Europe, for example, where it's visible in genetic and linguistic history.
  - margalabargala 10mo ago
    Yes, because it was easier, to not have your kids die among other things. Hunter-gathering doesn't scale. What is fine when it's one person, collapses the whole society when it gets too large.
mcmoor 10mo ago
But it also contain the most people. Industrial age contains even more people but it hasn't defeated agricultural age yet because it's still so recent.

lovich 10mo ago

Even in agricultural societies it wasnt a nuclear family as implied by "Running a family was a brutal two-person job..." Most human societies were much more interconnected until relatively recently(last 80-100 years)

nowittyusername 10mo ago

When humans domesticated animals and started tending to the fields is when IMO it all went down hill. That change brought in modern civilization with all its advantages but moreeso its disadvantages and maladaptive behaviors of the human mind. We shoulda stayed hunter gatherers, I am almost certain we would have been happier.

PeterHolzwarth 10mo ago
You first. And no cheating by bringing antibiotics with you.
- nurettin 10mo ago
  To be fair, antibiotics are needed much more now that we have billions of hosts these organisms can evolve on rapidly.
- defrost 10mo ago
  A lack of antibiotics wasn't sufficient reason to stay in western society for those members of the Pintupi Nine and other hunter gather families that came in, looked about, and left again. Some can't imagine life without antibiotics, others can't fathom living with everything else that comes with it.
  - Aloha 10mo ago
    They had a place that was familiar and comforting to go return to. Anyone who is of a modern industrialized society who is waxing poetically about becoming a hunter gatherer is both, looking at history thru very rose colored goggles and welcome to go find a place to do just that.
    - defrost 10mo ago
      Alternatively they grew up with a foot in both worlds, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c Many people that have lived side by side with indigenous people across northern australia, the islands, PNG, et al have a clear idea of exactly what living off the land entails. A good many have done exactly that for extended periods, dropping in and out from one to the other. They would have done this sans any condescending permission from those wishing them well - such opinions count for naught.

a_bonobo 10mo ago

If you can, read Robert Caro's The Path To Power (Caro's The Power Broker has been a HN favorite ever since Aaron Swartz recommended it). It's the story of the first ~30 years of Lyndon B Johnson's life. I forget which chapter it is, but Caro takes a detour where he describes the life of women during Johnson's childhood in the dirt-poor valley he was from: no electricity, no waterpower, everything in the house was done by women's hands, 24/7. There's a passage that stuck to me about how women in their 30s in that area looked like other area's women in their 70s, just a brutal life.

dtjohnnyb 10mo ago
Exactly what I thought of reading this, that chapter is genuinely one of the most affecting things I've ever read. The horror of it keeps growing as he continues to describe awful manual task after the other.
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leobg 10mo ago
Chapter 4 - The Father and Mother > Transplanted, moreover, to a world in which women had to work, and work hard. On washdays, clothes had to be lifted out of the big soaking vats of boiling water on the ends of long poles, the clothes dripping and heavy; the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands; the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday.
- jnsaff2 10mo ago
  And what he left out of this book (and included in the memoir or in some interview) was that there was a scientific study of women in the area at the time which discovered that a very high percentage of women had birthing complications serious enough for hospitalization that went untreated as they had to go back to their chores next day and there was no hospital anywhere close.

tmoravec 10mo ago

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-and-the-peasant-part-i-households/ https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...

glaugh 10mo ago
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
- Balgair 10mo ago
  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.
- potato3732842 10mo ago
  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.
chrismatic 10mo ago
Came here to post the same resource and to point out that based on it it rarely was a "two person's job" only.

gradus_ad 10mo ago

The industrial revolution is the most transformative event in this history of life since the Cambrian explosion. It's that significant.

loup-vaillant 10mo ago
It is also on track to be nearly as… impactful as the Permian extinction. That stuff cuts both ways unfortunately.
- andsoitis 10mo ago
  > It is also on track to be nearly as… impactful as the Permian extinction. why do you say that?
- potato3732842 10mo ago
  A hell of a lot of stuff survived the permian extinction. Now I'm not saying it's gonna be fun, but I'd bet a lot of money on humans and the species we find most useful surviving the next/current one.
baq 10mo ago
It was also an extremely lucky coincidence.

indubioprorubik 10mo ago

The green revolution was vitally dependent on oil-gas based fertilizer trade - which means, doing away with manchester-style centralized trade empires who used cutting off trade as a tool of suffocating opponents. The past never went away, it caught up to the present. All poverty is energy poverty - and exponential humanity, always fills that "gap" to the ressource roof with people. The old, pre-harber-bosch world was a grim dark all against all where empires (themselves devices to keep civilization afloat in a few centralized places, while extracing at great missery elsewhere) fought wars of fertilizer and used one sided trading and food-exports to starve colonies out like vampires. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chincha_Islands_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chincha_Islands_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Nama_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Nama_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maji_Maji_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maji_Maji_Rebellion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_Mount_Lebanon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_Mount_Lebanon the whole all against all, no free-trade madness culminated in the two new comer empires copy-pasting the concept dialed up to eleven in their "new colonies". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_Japan

Etheryte 10mo ago

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-2005-the-original-affluent-society https://fifthestate.anarchistlibraries.net/library/370-fall-...

rocqua 10mo ago
I believe the reasons we "regressed" into agriculture from hunting and gathering are much more complicated than "we moved into more marginal land". It does appear that the median hunter gatherer life was better than the median farmer life. But I'd wager that to be true in most areas.
- logicprog 10mo ago
  It isn't true. https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf https://kk.org/mt-files/reCCearch-mt/kaplan-darker.pdf
acessoproibido 10mo ago
So if we go back much further life was super chill and romantic? I dont buy it tbh, it feels to me just as unrealistic.
- Etheryte 10mo ago
  Not necessarily back, but to the right environments. As quoted above, we see the same today in isolated tribes that live off of hunting and foraging. All of this also doesn't account for the lack of all other modern convenience such as medicine, hygiene, etc. So it isn't about chill and romantic, but rather the time commitment specifically.

lukan 10mo ago

"and the kids had to dive in to help out the second they could lift something heavier than a couple pounds" Earlier. Picking berries, seeds or ears of grain is something very small hands can do. "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." But no. You are talking about a primitive (poor) agrarian society. That only started a couple of thousands years ago, while our species used fire since over a million years in a semi nomadic live style. And those tribes in good territory, they did not had so much back braking work, as long as big land animals were around. (Also, hearding cattle was for the most part a very chilled job as well, but that also started rather recent)

Aunche 10mo ago
> And those tribes in good territory, they did not had so much back braking work, as long as big land animals were around The population of paleolithic humans never reached anywhere close to that of agricultural humans, suggesting that many died before reproductive age. Multiple nomadic cultures independently decided to not only spend several hours a day picking and grinding grass seeds to eat, but also to cultivate them for thousands of years into grains that would still be barely palatable by the standards of today. Nobody would choose this life unless if they had to.
- etothepii 10mo ago
  Being stationary and cultivating grains allows a surplus that is much harder to achieve with hunting. This allows the formation of a priest class that can tell you what the sky father wants you to do. They may have had to but it need not be because it led to more calories for them.
  - watwut 10mo ago
    Hunters have priests and supersticions. A lot of them.
    - 10mo ago

nshm 10mo ago

> 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. Orphanes did struggle but most families were not just two person, families were big and supported by community.

motoboi 10mo ago

Life in the field, from the land, in the past, meant death from starvation. Some unsung heroes: - the person that discovered how to fix nitrogen in the soil saved more lives than every other people in history, combined. - Norman Borlaug, father of the green revolution, saved more than 1 billion people from starvation.

mythrwy 10mo ago
Borlaug was a very important figure in global food security but he was a plant breeder, not the guy(s) who figured out how to fix nitrogen from the air into fertilizer. Nitrogen people were Haber and Bosch. Millions of probably do owe their very existence to these men though, agree with that. However part of me (maybe a slightly misanthropic part?) wonders if it might be a bit like feeding stray cats, and now we have a huge herd of cats that are rapidly outstripping the ultimate carrying capacity of their environment and it doesn't end well. But since I'm one of the cats, I say we just go with it and see what happens.
- motoboi 10mo ago
  Im sorry. That was supposed to be a list but the formatter ate the lines.
  - mythrwy 10mo ago
    I see makes sense. Sorry for being "the well actually" guy.

tim333 10mo ago

From travelling to different places I'm not sure about the women's work was brutal bit. The ones not in paid work tend to spend their time looking after the kids and cooking and cleaning and stuff regardless of the style of living. The main thing that's hard seems to be the kids going "mum! I want..."/"don't want to..." at all hours but that's human nature which doesn't change much.

habinero 10mo ago
That's because you haven't done that work and don't value it. Women in agrarian societies do difficult manual labor like hauling water, milking, preserving food, tending livestock, laundry. Laundry before machines was backbreaking work nobody wanted to do, which is why the poor did it or women took in laundry if they needed money. If you had a hand free, you spun wool. Also, they did all that while constantly pregnant or nursing, which is really hard on the body. Sure, women didn't have to go to war, but men didn't have to live with the fear that this year's baby might be the one that finally kills them.

JohnCClarke 10mo ago

Not 100 hours a week. More like 50. Taxes to the local baron, lord, monastery, or whoever took the other 50.

marzell 10mo ago

There's good arguments for the case that gatherer communities actually had generally better health and far more free time than farmers and agrarian society. Farming provided the calories necessary for a population that hunting and gathering could not support (so no going back) but required basically working all day to make it work and survive less than ideal conditions. But prior to farming people often had significant more free time.

hermitcrab 10mo ago

I have read that hunter-gatherers generally had an easier life than peasants in agricultural societies. But the hunter gatherer lifestyle can only support small groups with a low overall population density. So the hunter-gatherers always lost out to agricultural societies, when they came into contact/conflict. Not sure how prevalent this view is amongst professional anthropologists.

al_borland 10mo ago
I wonder if the hunter gather societies could have grown larger if they put in the same level of work as the agricultural societies? One could debate what leads to a better quality of life. Is it more downtime and community, like we see with hunter gatherers. Is it the modern conveniences we end up with through larger societies and more work effort? I watched a video of a polyglot who learned the language of a hunter gatherer tribe to spend some time with them. It was amazing to see how well adapted they were to the environment, both in terms of their bodies and skills. The outsider was getting eaten up by bugs and cut by every little branch or thorn, while the locals had thicker skin and seemed completely unaffected by all of this. They were running through the forest at night and it seemed effortless. While hunting they needed a bag at one point, so someone grabbed some stuff off a tree and quickly wove one together like it was nothing. What ends up being a survival realty show for us ends up looking quite convenient for them. If I need a bag I need to work to earn money, then depend on a whole supply chain to grow/manufacture the raw materials, weave the fabric, cut and assemble the fabric into a bag, and a retailer to sell it to me, as well as all of the shipping on trucks, boats, and planes along the way. It’s actually pretty crazy how much work goes into everything we buy.
- hermitcrab 10mo ago
  >I wonder if the hunter gather societies could have grown larger if they put in the same level of work as the agricultural societies? I think it is about organization and population density. A hunter gatherer society is not going to be able to field an army of tens of thousands of people, as an agricultural society can. Hunter gatherers are also limited in their technology by their continual movement. The Mongols were a nomadic society and very successful militarily (for a while). But they kept large numbers of animals and weren't hunter gatherers.

wahnfrieden 10mo ago

This repeats several myths that Graeber and Wengrow have made compelling arguments against

KineticLensman 10mo ago

> Running a family was a brutal two-person job -- and the kids had to dive in to help In many societies before (say) the 18th/19th Century, extended families would have been the norm, e.g. with elderly relatives living in the same household, helping with food preparation and clothes making. Harvests may have been community-wide affairs. Children would have had to dive in, as you say, but they wouldn't have had school to go to, and there would have been a wide age spread. Maternal mortality (death due to childbirth) was high, and many widowed fathers would have remarried, extending the family further (incidentally this is partly why there are so many step-sisters and step-mothers in folk stories).

mbajkowski 10mo ago
Agreed, but I don't think you need to go as far back as the 19th century, even early 20th century it was the same in some places in eastern Europe. Out of 7 siblings in my Dad's family only one went to college. The spread between oldest and youngest was about 12 years. All went to school which was dismissed much earlier, after which children were expected to help in the fields with animals, house work, etc. before doing homework. The one pause, and really only time they wore nicer clothes, was on Sundays for church. The person who went to college would be back each summer to help with the grain and potato harvests. My life by comparison is a life of luxury.
- fsckboy 10mo ago
  Out of 10 siblings in my grandfather's family, only 5 lived. the eldest, my grandfather, was sent to America on his own at age 14 to work and send money home. college? who's got time to finish high school?
  - mbajkowski 10mo ago
    Yup. Also elementary school was often fewer grades than it is today. It was the norm to finish your education after elementary school to help the farm/household. Individuals, especially from the country side, were an exception to finish secondary education and go on to college.

lotsofpulp 10mo ago

> 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.

fleroviumna 10mo ago

[dead]

xkcd-sucks 10mo ago

Theres a nice and comprehnsive treatment of this topic in https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-v-life-in-cycles/ https://acoup.blog/2025/10/17/collections-life-work-death-an... > [A] series ... looking at the structures of life for pre-modern peasant farmers and showing how historical modeling can help us explore the experiences of people who rarely leave much evidence of their day-to-day personal lives.

nikanj 10mo ago

But by feodal times, you also had to also work a number of hours for your liege. Which modern idiots have perverted with the whole ”a peasant had more free time than you”-meme, where they only count the hours of mandatory service and ignore the hundred-hours-a-week part of keeping your own home running

coldtea 10mo ago

>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. On the plus side, they also didn't have to do the hard dangerous jobs like mining coal, building houses, and the like, nor did they have to go to the army, fight to defend their country (at least not as soldiers), and many other things. Running the house was hardly "brutal", neither did it consume "all waking hours until the day she died".

catlover76 10mo ago
The fuck? Who do you think built the houses? > army, fight to defend their country (at least not as soldiers), and many other things. In most places and times, didn't all men just get conscripted into war frequently? > Running the house was hardly "brutal", neither did it consume "all waking hours until the day she died". Why do you think it didn't consume all waking hours?
- coldtea 10mo ago
  >Who do you think built the houses? The men. Again, I'm writing there about what women didn't have to do. >In most places and times, didn't all men just get conscripted into war frequently? Yes, and thus what I wrote is that women didn't have to do it. (My point was: "yes, women did the house tasks, but on the plus side, they didn't have to do those other far more dangerous and hard things"). >Why do you think it didn't consume all waking hours? I don't think it didn't, I know it didn't. For starters it was shared among larger family units (including several kids). And even when it wasn't, like some people living on their own, it hardly took a few hours each day, and that's including maintaining a fire, cooking, some cleaning, feeding some nearby hens, bringing water, and things like that. Modern people over-dependent on modern conveniences overestimate how hard all those things were, as if it was some horror survival movie. In these here parts, people in the country did all the same things people did in the 19th century or the 15th century well into the 20th century (with cars and electricity not reaching many places until the late 1950s), all with plenty of time to spare and socialize.

timeon 10mo ago

> There are important downsides, but the Green Revolution - and dare I say it, the industrial revolution - was truly transformative for our species. And left-wing movements that followed industrial revolution.

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Archelaos 10mo ago

> In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the time said that men worked the field, women ran the home. I come from a family of farmers, and I can assure you that the women worked the field too, even one-hundred years ago. And the children ...