Amazing, really, the lies women have been told about who they are and why they are primarily responsible for domestic work, why they have long belonged in the home. About why they have lower pay and narrowed or blocked routes to power.
It’s the natural way, the natural order of things.
After all, for centuries men hunted and women gathered, right? How often were you told that, growing up? Men spear, women cook. Men go out and earn money, women keep house. (Today, women go out and earn money too, but still seem to keep house.)
Illustration: John ShakespeareCredit:
The idea that men roam – and rule – the world, wielding weapons, trying to procure food for their families, while women stay closer to home, gathering around the fire and caring for their brood, has been one of the most pervasive and influential explanations for the patriarchy in history – ancient and modern.
That was how, we heard, the world evolved. Rather, how men evolved through hunting game and how women benefited from it. As anthropologist William S. Laughlin wrote in 1968, “Man’s life as a hunter supplied all the other ingredients for achieving civilisation: the genetic variability, the inventiveness, the systems of vocal communication, the co-ordination of social life.”
Thanks, men!
A hunting Homo erectus became iconic, somehow morphing into Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, even Crocodile Dundee and those who shop at Hogs Dogs Quads and subscribe to Bacon Busters, “Australia’s top-selling pig hunting magazine”, as women swept the hearth.
It’s just a fact, we’re told, endlessly. Men hunt. Women gather.
Until female scientists decided to go back and have a good look at the evidence again. And found, shockingly, this is wrong.
Men hunt, women gather, right? No, let’s spear this myth
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16.12.2023
Amazing, really, the lies women have been told about who they are and why they are primarily responsible for domestic work, why they have long belonged in the home. About why they have lower pay and narrowed or blocked routes to power.
It’s the natural way, the natural order of things.
After all, for centuries men hunted and women gathered, right? How often were you told that, growing up? Men spear, women cook. Men go out and earn........
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