Women in Economic History

by HARRY LEE SMITH

    Women have been responsible for most of the world’s economic wealth. There is considerable evidence to support this sweeping allegation. Their past contribution to economic growth is a measure of their potential.
     Except for a short hiatus during the past 200 years, women have always been part of the work force. Women’s productivity in pre-industrial society was obvious when they labored in the fields side by side with their men. In certain peasant societies of South America and Asia they still do. In addition to farming, they raised children and kept house, which is just as much a part of economic activity as production for the market. But most importantly, women were not destructive. Their male counterparts destroyed a good deal of the wealth created by both sexes through wars and political turmoil.
     Women’s accomplishment in creating and preserving wealth has gone unrecognized due to an anomaly brought about by the Industrial Revolution. During the past two centuries, the work patterns of Western Civilization have changed drastically, particularly those of women. The development of the factory system removed the work place from the home for the first time in history. This separated women from their children, putting a strain on family ties and adversely affecting female productivity.
     Economic conditions during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution were such that entire families worked in the factories. Early attempts at restricting child labor were fruitless since they merely put less bread on the table and left the children unattended. But the wealth created by the Industrial Revolution rapidly increased living standards so that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, men were earning enough to retire their wives and children from the work force in vast numbers. It is this process, started only 200 years ago, that gave rise to the mistaken concept that women have always stayed at home doing nothing more than domestic chores. This myth was driven home by newly developing sciences such as anthropology, biology, sociology, and ethnology among others.
     Nearly all the scientific disciplines have evolved during the past 250 years and were therefore heavily influenced by conditions brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Some anthropologists such as Des-mond Morris have even projected twentieth-century cultural patterns back into the Stone Age.^[1] They developed the myth of the Great Hunter, a primitive hominoid, who left the cave in search of food while his mate waited patiently at home, taking care of the children, willing to exchange sex for food, and doing little else. This myth has been effectively exploded by British anthropologist Elaine Morgan in her insightful book (whose title parodies Darwin), The Descent of Woman.^[2]
     In primitive times the fundamental family unit consisted of a mother and her children living with older members of the family. Apparently men were less aware of their function and responsibility as fathers than were some advanced animals. More often than not they lived apart from the women and children, banding together in hunting-foraging groups, leaving the females to fend for themselves. These bands were the precursors of modern fraternities and other androcentric organizations.^[3]
     Women had high status in primitive societies. Historian Will Durant wrote: “Since it was the mother who fulfilled most of the parental functions, the family was, at first (so far as we can pierce the mists of history) organized on the assumption that the position of man in the family was superficial and incidental, while that of the woman was fundamental and supreme.” At the time, most gods were feminine, dedicated to human fertility. In primitive society woman’s status was higher than in Periclean Greece and she would have to wait until modern times to regain that social station.
     While it is true that primitive man was a hunter, primitive woman was far more than a baby sitter. She can be credited with skinning animals for clothes and tents, spinning cotton and wool, sewing, weaving, woodworking, and making baskets and pottery. She used fire to defeat the darkness, to keep warm, and to break down inedible foods into a wide variety of digestible meals through cooking. She preserved food through salting and drying. In short, she provided the necessities of food, clothing, and shelter in which she specializes to this day. She also exchanged the products of her labor and initiated trade.  
    Men were too proud or busy as hunter-warriors to dig in the soil. But women, puttering in the back yard, discovered the relationship between seeds and crops. Will Durant put it bluntly: “Most economic advances in early society were made by women rather than men.” He goes on to point out that “women made the greatest discovery of all—the bounty of the soil.” In short, women were responsible for the Neolithic Food Revolution which was, and still is, the greatest economic advancement in history. This development, which started some 10,000 years ago and still continues, increased the human carrying capacity of the earth from five million to a billion inhabitants.^[5] This ratio was not exceeded by the Industrial Revolution. It is an excellent measure of wealth creation. 

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