7 ms·

that ratio completly ignores 'women's work' which was half the labor. you don't have much a village if the naked people freeze to death, and most people like ni

• Retric 10mo ago
  Women and children very much participate in farming back then, harvest was a “all hands on deck” situation. Similarly by adding ‘and clothe bodies’ that captures well over half of a typical woman’s labor back then. Drop spindles sucked up an enormous amount of labor before you even had cloth.
  • bluGill 10mo ago
    At times it was all hands on deck for harvest - but most of the time it wasn't and that rest is an important part of village life missing. As you say, drop spindles suck.
    • ab5tract 10mo ago
      If you aren’t reaping of sowing, your labor isn’t in the fields anyway. People don’t understand that there are ebbs and flows to a farming life. There is always work to do but no one is out in the fields much unless it’s harvest or seeding times.
      • bluGill 10mo ago
        Many crops are not hands off. wheat chokes out weeds, but you need to weed the garden. You need to water crops in a drough - if you could get water (from a well or river). rice needs a lot of labor to manage water levels
  • eapressoandcats 10mo ago
    Bret Deveraux linked to estimates that 70% of producing clothes is spinning, 20% is weaving, and 10% is sewing. We tend to think of weaving as the time consuming thing but that’s because the spinning wheel had been around for a while by the time the Industrial Revolution happened.
• chongli 10mo ago
  Women may have done half the labour but they didn't spend all their time weaving cloth and making clothing. You're forgetting about all the food preparation and preservation that women did. Women cooked meals, baked bread, preserved fruits and vegetables, and brewed beer, in addition to all the farm work they did (feeding chickens, collecting eggs, milking cows, working vegetable gardens, harvesting). Of course, women didn't do all of that work alone, they taught their children how to do it and supervised their labour. Large families were preferred because children are inexpensive (cheap to feed and clothe) relative to the labour they produce under proper supervision. Expensive entertainment and education for children was still centuries away.
  • bluGill 10mo ago
    Cooking was always divided in all cultures. Men too often left the village for long enough that they had to cook their own meals. Weaving and tailoring was often men's work. of course harvest would be all hands on deck to farm, and preserving the harvest was part of that. However mostly that was not done. women's work is mostly using a drop spindle - it took every woman in the village 10-12 hours a day, every day, working a drop spinele to get enough thread for their clothing. This was however an activity compatible with stopping to nurse a baby or otherwise care for kids. you are thinking 1800s when the spinning jenny made thread in a factory. Or slightly before then when the spinning wheel (which should have been invented 1000 years before it did if inventors thought about it at all) which greatly freed up women's lives. not to say that women couldn't do other the things. Different cultures had different splits. but most were making thread - we know because we know how much work that takes and how much clothing someone had (not much!)
    • chongli 10mo ago
      The spinning wheel was in use in Europe in the 14th century [1]. That's a lot earlier than "slightly before" the 1800s. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/An_amorous_encounter_-_Smithfield_Decretals_%28Decretals_of_Gregory_IX%29_%28c.1340%29%2C_f.139_-_BL_Royal_MS_10_E_IV.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/An_amoro...
• legitster 10mo ago
  Yes, but also the other side of the ratio includes everything like guilded craftsmen, monks, merchants, etc. Not exactly people who weren't doing work themselves.