In a survival scenario, do you think traditional gender roles would come back?

[Nickolai77]

No..

Firstly, it's based on a flawed understanding of social history.

'Traditional' gender roles are an artificial construct too. Do you think women in feudal serf villages had the luxury of sitting indoors cooking and cleaning for their husbands all day? That division of labour only becomes possible when the wealth and social infrastructure exists to support it. For Europe (Britain specifically) the introduction of the family wage in the 19th century is generally seen as the major turning point in this direction, and that's only 200 years ago. Before that, it was only middle and upper class women who could afford to sit indoors doing the housework.

Well, prior to 1800 i think people had a conception of a division of labour of sorts. For instance, there is a 15th century Ballad titled the "The ballad of the Tyrannical Husband", and it is about a peasant husband whom gets into an argument with his wife over whom has the easier work- working out in the fields or working in the home. What presumably happens (we only have the first few dozen stanzas) is that the husband and wife switch rolls, and the husband fails miserably at the demanding work tasks faced by late-medieval women. In the poem, the tasks of the wife included:

Raising children
Milk cows, turn them out to the field
Make butter
Make cheese
Feed hens, chickens, ducks, capons.
Bake
Brew
beat and swingle flax
spin wool
salt meat

What seems to be happening is that the male peasants would do tasks such as sheep sheering, slaughtering animals, and maintain the fields. The peasant women would then work with the raw materials provided by their husbands and turn it into a consumable product- i.e- making cheese and brewing ale.

In an industuralised society, these tasks that the women did came to be done in the factories, before that, everything else was a cottage industry. If the events apparently described in James Knustler's novel did occur, then i wouldn't be surprised if these pre-industrial gender rolls for women returned because quite simply, it was an arrangement which worked at the time, and would probably also work if society reverted back to that era.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

Do you think this would happen?

Hell no! If the Apocalypse happens (and I survive it) I'm gettin me a 12-gauge shotgun and murdering anyone who suggests I should do the washing up.

The only reason any of that existed was because women are slightly less strong than men, and thus less able to murder one another with big sticks. We have guns now - strength is no longer an excuse.

Cause, let's face it, in those early days women were raped all the damn time. No way in hell I'm letting that happen while guns and bullets still exist.

 

[Wolfram23]

1) World Made by Hand is fucking awesome and everyone should read it.

2) Yes, I do think they would.

 

[Iwana Humpalot]

A lot of people have said "not completely".

I think we would dissolve back to them, sort of. I don't think women would need to wear dresses all the time and blah, blah. I think men would still do a lot of the heavy lifting (as we are more fit to do, like it or not) and women would have to do the childbearing (seeing as to how men can't get pregnant).

However, the days where it was always, always a man's duty to do this and a woman's duty to do that, and the two were not interchangeable, I think those would be gone. If a woman was caught, say, helping with the farming or a man was caught cooking dinner, I don't think there would be any shame on either.

The rigid social views are just how society worked back then. It did work, well enough - obviously, since we're still here - and we would probably take a whole lot of ideas from them, but men and women would still be equal. But different

Exacly like this. Expect that whole equality thing might change over time as the time passes over generations.

 

[Terminal Blue]

A vast amount of ethnographic and archaeological evidence demonstrates that the sexual division of labor in which men hunt and women gather wild fruits and vegetables is an extremely common phenomenon among hunter-gatherers worldwide, but there are a few documented exceptions to this general pattern.

Bolded.

It should be said that relatively few societies are purely hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gathering can only support a very small static population without risk, so the actual proportion of people worldwide who live in hunter gatherer societies is virtually insignificant.

Besides, even in hunter gathering societies it's not like the women are sitting indoors washing and cleaning every day. Most studies actually suggest that the 'gathering' side of things tends to produce the bulk of the food in such societies, and hunting functions much more as a leisure and social activity.

Well, prior to 1800 i think people had a conception of a division of labour of sorts. For instance, there is a 15th century Ballad titled the "The ballad of the Tyrannical Husband", and it is about a peasant husband whom gets into an argument with his wife over whom has the easier work- working out in the fields or working in the home.

Interesting, you learn something new every day.

However, most of those tasks are not 'domestic' tasks. They are not washing, cooking, cleaning and caring. They are actual economic labour. I guess what I was objecting to was the idea that in the good old days women just sat in the home endlessly cleaning it and raising the kids.

The family wage meant that for the first time it was economically viable for working class women not to work, or at least to work much less than their husbands. Before that, women (and children) were doing economic labour all the time. Maybe different labour, but labour nonetheless.

 

[Seives-Sliver]

It's a scary idea, yes, but it's a likely scenario if everything just went down and humans were pushed back into the dark ages, there wouldn't be a nice society with clean water, pleanty of food, and comforts, we'd have to rebuild all of it over again which means everyone would have to relearn society and remake it.

 

[Jian-Li]

The only part I think would stay the same is childbearing. Though I think the amount of children reared would go up. Women and men can usually do just as good at the same jobs. If we were forced to start rebuilding our society again than we'd still be eons ahead of even the most well equipped neanderthal because we'd still have the knowledge stored in our brains. And the knowledge that women can do just as good a job as men will put us ahead.

 

[oldskoolandi]

A vast amount of ethnographic and archaeological evidence demonstrates that the sexual division of labor in which men hunt and women gather wild fruits and vegetables is an extremely common phenomenon among hunter-gatherers worldwide, but there are a few documented exceptions to this general pattern.

Bolded.

It should be said that relatively few societies are purely hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gathering can only support a very small static population without risk, so the actual proportion of people worldwide who live in hunter gatherer societies is virtually insignificant.

Besides, even in hunter gathering societies it's not like the women are sitting indoors washing and cleaning every day. Most studies actually suggest that the 'gathering' side of things tends to produce the bulk of the food in such societies, and hunting functions much more as a leisure and social activity.

I think there's certainly some truth to that last statement, gathering is just as important. I never suggested it wasn't, nor did I say women were sitting indoors washing and cleaning. My point was that it's still common in some societies for there to be a division of labour based on gender.