alt Hacker News"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.
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"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)
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.
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-...
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-an...
>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".
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.
Theres a nice and comprehnsive treatment of this topic in 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.
I don't know if any of you have washed soiled clothes by hand, but that's shockingly intensive labor.
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.
> 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 ...
The industrial revolution is the most transformative event in this history of life since the Cambrian explosion. It's that significant.
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/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_and_Nama_genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maji_Maji_Rebellion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State
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/Empire_of_Japan
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Not 100 hours a week. More like 50. Taxes to the local baron, lord, monastery, or whoever took the other 50.
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
This repeats several myths that Graeber and Wengrow have made compelling arguments against
> 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.
> 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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> 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).