Are The Historical Respective Roles Of The Genders Relevant Today?

Well, the first question to ask would be 'Have all human cultures for the past 6 millenia had the same gender roles?' If not, then the idea that one set of gender roles has worked well for everyone up till now would be obviously incorrect.And a brief investigation will find that gender roles have varied throughout history. Some cultures have allowed women to hold political power, others have forbidden them any public role. Roman women could own property independently, and some became quite wealthy businesswomen; while women in Athens a few centuries earlier were forbidden to engage in financial transactions bigger than those needed to feed her family for the immediate future. In Europe a couple of hundred years ago, children would have remained the resopnsibility of the father in the case of a couple splitting up; in pre-European Iroquois society, they'd stay with the woman. Clearly, gender roles and relations have not been fixed historically.The second question to ask is, assuming there has been a dominant pattern of gender roles throught history, whether this is any reason to assume it's the best way to continue. Modern science is a very recent invention, and a departure from much of history. It would seem silly to say it would have been better to rely on superstition instead of science, as this worked so well for much of human history. Science, as a method of finding out about our world, has worked better, and produced the practical benefits to show it. Equally, slavery has been commonplace throughout much of human history, but no one would consider this an argument for maintaining it as a legal institution today.If you want to argue that a particular form of gender roles would be better for society, you need to explain why. Whether or not it's been common in the past is irrelevant.

Is this actually how things are in Rwanda? A brief glance at the UN Data website reveals that. ten years ago (the most up-to-date statistics they have), a third of Rwandan women were employed in the formal, non-agricultural economy. When we consider that 90% of the labour force is employed in agriculture, this is a interesting figure, as it implies that there could well be more women employed in industry and services than men.If we take total employment statistics for women, we can see that 80.5% were employed in 2007, down from a height of 86.2% in 1993. Note that the 2007 figures are slightly higher for women than for men, only 79% of whom had employment.This may seem like nitpicking over a minor point, but I think it's important to note that our sweeping generalisations about what traditional gender roles are and how genders behave in different cultures aren't necessarily true. We can't just talk airiliy about 'the way things have been for all cultures for 6 millenia' as if 1950s America is the standard model of gender relations and household economics - it's not.

He's not just referencing a time when women weren't allowed to hold leadership roles - he's referencing the whole history of human civilisation. He's referencing the time of Boudicca; the time of Aethelfled, Lady of the Mercians; the time of Queen Mathilda; the time of Elizabeth I; the time of Victoria. He's referencing the Empress Isabella, the Dowager Empress Tzu-Hsi and Catherine the Great. He's referencing a vast host of women in leadership roles that don't roll of the top of my Anglo-centric head, including cultures where it was standard practice for certain women to hold positions of responsibility.Nowadays is not the first, nor the only time that women have been able to hold leadership roles. Certainly, it's more common and accepted in many parts of the world than it has been for much of their history; but the 20th century is certainly not 'the only time in history when women have held these roles'.Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

What do you mean by 'traditionally'? The implication from your previous posts seems to be that it means 'for all of human history prior to the last few decades', but if it does then this is simply not true. Even in cultures where this might have been considered the acceptable way for things to work in polite society, economics meant that women did go out to work in practice. In Victorian Britain, when your idea of 'traditional' would have been touted as the correct way, only the women of the upper-classes stayed home and kept house all the time (well, stayed home while their servants kept house, anyway). Most women were engaged in wage-labour - often as domestic servants in the homes of the rich; but also in textiles, metal-working, pottery, retail etc. etc.Devil's Advocate discussed just a few posts back women working in colonial America, and in prmarily agricultural socieites work is almost always shared by both genders. 'Traditionally'', if anything, women have done more of it.Sorry if it seems like I'm just making the same post over and over again, but a lot of people don't seem to be taking the message on board at all. The traditional roles in the household considered proper in 1950s America were far from universal then, and are not the way societies have been organised for most of human history.

Strangely enough, the passage you quoted only mentions household work once. The rest of the time it discusses a woman who appears to be sole proprietor of a small textile business, handling procurement, manufacturing and retail; somehow with time left over for philanthropy in the middle of all this.