This is the fifth dish of the fourth course of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers, who made up a majority of all of the humans who have ever lived. We are trying to grapple here with what has thus been the most typical, most common human experience historically. Over the last several weeks we’ve been looking at this lifestyle through the perspective of subsistence and labor and last week we began to turn to the labor of women in peasant households, beginning by laying out the basics for productivity estimates in textile production, one of the key tasks that women performed in most peasant farming households.
But women were also, in most of these societies, expected to manage a wider range of tasks essential to keeping the household, as both a family and economic unit, functioning. These tasks were no less necessary to the survival of the household than the work of agriculture and textile production already detailed. So to get a full sense of what the workload of a peasant woman might look like, we need to try to consider all of these tasks together and then return to our households to think through what the overall labor situation for these households is.
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Women in the Fields
We first need to start by removing one of our simplifying assumptions: so far, we’ve been assuming that all agricultural labor is done by men. That is a useful simplifying assumption but fundamentally incomplete, because women did engage in significant amounts of farming labor. My sense is that the amount of agricultural labor regularly done by women varies by region and culture, but in the wheat-farming cultures of the Mediterranean we can see a fairly basic pattern whereby women are in the fields mostly in two circumstances, one usual and one unusual.
The unusual is, of course, in periods of sharp labor shortage, to the point that having women engaged in socially a-typical labor can be used in the sources to signal economic hardship or labor shortages. And there’s something to that – it is fairly well documented, for instance, that the labor shortage created by the Black Death, for a time, pulled more women out into the fields to make up for the labor of the men lost in the plague. And that labor shifting pattern makes sense in this context. As you will recall from the last part, the wages women could command spinning and weaving, because those tasks were almost all labor with very little capital and because these societies are long on labor (and thus it is cheap) and short on capital (which is thus expensive), as a result those wages were low. So a household with under utilized capital – that is, farm land – would want to get that capital (land) into production first before aiming to sell any of its labor unaugmented by capital. In short, a woman in economic distress whose household still has land could get more for her labor farming that land than spinning, so that’s what she does.
Peasants, you must recall, are not idiots: they are canny survivors. They will not sit and passively starve if there are other options. While farming is a labor intensive task, it’s perfectly clear that adult women are physically strong and capable enough to do every part of the farming task, so if no one else is available, they will do it.1
That said, under normal conditions, peasant women have a lot of responsibilities and so labor specialization is going to keep them out of the fields for much of the year. The exception are periods of peak labor demand. Whereas hard labor shortages are unusual – they imply some sort of failure in the system – the labor demand peaks for farming households are going to occur every year at predictable times and those predictable times are the harvest.
The harvest demanded a lot of labor in a relatively short period of time: ripe crops in the fields need to be harvested and processed fairly quickly. In the fields, they’re exposed to pests (not just insects, but birds and other animals for whom a field of wheat is a massive banquet), weather and so on and also the thing you are harvesting are seeds, which you want to harvest before the plant does the thing seeds are designed to do and scatters them. Generally for wheat, ideally a farm wants to get the entire harvest reaped, threshed and stored in just a few weeks, around a month. Following Columella’s estimates (de re rustica 2.12.1), that compresses about 15% of his estimated labor (in reaping; he doesn’t consider threshing or winnowing) into just c. 8% of the year. In practice, Columella is probably underestimating harvest labor demands by at least half,2 and comparative evidence from the medieval and early modern world suggest that the labor demands of the harvest could be anywhere from two to four times as much as during the rest of the year.3
That interaction is in turn borne out in the sources and artwork from these societies: we tend to see women in the fields during periods of distress or, far more frequently, during the primary crop’s harvest, where their labor is most important.
That would probably mean something on the order of two extra working days borne by the women of the household per iugerum, to provide the doubling of labor required in that short period of time. Going back to our estimates of the amount of land these households need to work and the number of adult women in these households, we can get a sense of what this labor looks like. Farming (excluding fallowed land) somewhere between 14 and 32 iugera (the former subsistence, the latter respectability), the Smalls need anywhere from 28 to 64 days out of Mrs. Smalls and whatever little Jane Smalls (age 6) can help with. The Middles have two adult women and need anywhere from 40 to 88 days out of them (so 20-44 days per adult woman) while the Biggs have four female laborers: two prime age women (Mrs. Maddie Biggs at 33 and her sister-in-law Martha Biggs at 22), one older woman (Widow Biggs at 50, who may not be doing full labor anymore) and an adolescent girl, Matilda Biggs (age 12), and ideally needs anywhere from 72 to 152 days out of them, so probably ~25-50 days from the prime age women each (making up about 2/3rds of the total) with the rest provided by Matilda and Widow Biggs.
In practice, of course, some of those come out to more days than are in the harvest window, suggesting the family is going to be pushing hard against its labor constraints, but that really just leads to my point here, which is that these numbers suggest all of the women of these households will probably be in the fields for basically every working day for around a month. Assuming a twelve-hour agricultural working day during the harvest (sun up to sun down) we might then just roughly suppose that every woman in our model is going to be in the fields for 30 days or so, for roughly 360 hours of agricultural labor annually, on top of their other tasks. In practice this is effectively a minimum; it’s very clear that some societies expected women to do more agricultural labor than this, based on local social assumptions and also the labor demands of the crops in question, but I have not yet found the agrarian pre-industrial society which leaves many hands out of the fields during harvest time. Naturally, that’s going to be a month where not a lot gets spun or woven, which will have to be made up over the rest of the year.
But we’re not by any means done, because households do not maintain themselves.
Maintaining Households
That leaves us with ‘domestic’ labor, narrowly defined: the basic work of keeping a household running. There’s often a categorical divide here that I think is unhelpful, between ‘productive’ labor (producing food or cloth) vs. ‘household’ or ‘domestic’ labor, as if the latter is somehow unproductive when it is in fact quite necessary. Worse yet, the suggestion that individuals doing a lot of domestic labor ‘aren’t working’ or that it isn’t labor at all. I want to try to avoid all of these pitfalls, so I am going to shift around our metaphor a bit: this is maintenance labor.
If you have a factory, a lot of the labor in the factory is directly related to producing things – churning out widgets, say. But there’s also a lot of labor in the factory that is necessary but does not directly produce widgets: the widget machine has to be greased, the tools maintained. The factory lunch room needs to be kept clean. Some very large factories might even have a canteen or mess to provide on-site meals for workers, which of course requires not just cleaning, but cooks and a whole food-handling logistical apparatus. None of those tasks produces widgets, but without those tasks being done, you still aren’t getting very many widgets.
The peasant household is a family unit, of course, but it is also an economic unit: it is effectively a ‘factory’ for food – both in a figurative sense, but also in a very literal sense in that the living spaces of the farmhouse are also work and storage spaces. And like our imaginary factory about the peasant household requires significant maintenance if it is going to keep producing food and cloth. This work is not optional and it is work, so I propose understanding it not as ‘domestic’ labor or ‘unproductive’ labor or what have you, but as maintenance labor for the household as both a family and economic unit.
Unfortunately, quantifying this sort of labor is really hard because our sources for the ancient and medieval past are profoundly uninterested in it. Those sources, after all, are generally free wealthy male writers, interested in the doings of people who are free, rich and male, but this sort of maintenance labor was done by people who were poor and female and in many cases in the households of the very wealthy, non-free. So while this kind of labor is happening continuously, it is rarely commented on and to my knowledge we never get the kind of detailed days-of-labor-per-fields-of-crop estimates that we get for agriculture. Meanwhile, unlike textiles, there isn’t as much of a traditional craft-practitioner community for things like cooking or cleaning tasks. Even in living history projects, where some of that work may be done in traditional ways, the folks doing them tend to, you know, go home at the end of the day to modern homes, so you don’t get the full picture of this sort of household maintenance labor.
Still, we can begin to get a sense of the demands that might be involved by looking at some of the quantification that did happen and was studied in the late-1800s and early-1900s, before a lot of our labor-saving devices came in, but late enough that we can get some kind of time-labor statistics. That is, I must stress, necessarily very imperfect because of course a lot is going to change in terms of household expectations, tools and time. But a few data points of this sort can help us get a sense, at least, of the basic order of magnitude we’re dealing with.
We can start with cooking: food preparation in these societies is a major non-optional time-sink. As many raw milk aficionados seem to be learning the hard way (you didn’t drink raw milk as a child, boiling milk was simply a standard part of its preparation for a farming household with cows), this sort of preparation was mandatory to avoid illness.4 Grain needs to be milled – as time goes on, more and more of this work would have been done in large wind/water/animal powered mills, but household ‘hand mills,’ worked by the women of the household never go away. Just about everything needs to be cooked, vegetables need to be washed and so on and when you are done all of the cookwares and such need to be cleaned.5
Getting a firm handle on how much all of those food related tasks would take is robustly difficult, because cooking methods and technologies varied from one society to another and – as noted above – none of our sources are interested in documenting the time these processes took. However, we can turn to more modern data for something like an ‘order of magnitude’ estimate. A study of household labor performed in 1900 concluded that the average American woman spent 44 hours per week on food preparation and clean-up from that food preparation.6
Meanwhile, there’s also a lot of non-food related cleaning work that needs to be done: cleaning household spaces – including work spaces – and clothing. Once again, the time investment here is going to vary significant from one society to another. If you have ever investigated pre-industrial clothing, one thing you swiftly notice is that clothing was often worn in layers not just for temperature, but to limit cleaning: a linen under-garment could soak up a lot of the sweat of the day, sparing heavier woolen over-garments, while things like aprons to avoid soiling primary clothes were also ubiquitous. For tasks that involve mucking about in fields, you’ll often see tunics and skirts girded or gathered up to keep them clean. So there is a substantial effort here to avoid generating cleaning tasks.
But of course, some amount of cleaning needed to be done! The idea that peasants – especially medieval peasants – never bathed or washed their clothes is, of course, a myth, so we know these tasks were happening and in some significant quantity. But of course modern machines for the purpose did not yet exist; returning to that same 1900 study, it noted some the average American woman in 1900 spent 14 hours on laundry and household cleaning. Again, not a perfect data-point, but a decent ‘order of magnitude’ estimate to begin with.
Now the problem with these two figures, of course, is that by 1900, most American women were not making textiles at home and we need to be on guard that changes in the labor intensity of one task may cause other tasks to ‘fill the space.’ That is, women in 1900 may have had more time for cooking and cleaning than women in, say, 1400 or 400 because they were no longer spinning their wool by hand from scratch (though of course in many parts of the world women were still doing that many decades later). Still, as a relative sense of labor intensity and a rough ‘ceiling’ the figures are more helpful than blind guessing.
Carrying water would have been a regular and perpetual task for all but the wealthiest Greek women.
One task often left out of this, which we do have to consider is fetching water. These peasants do not have hot and cold running water either. Instead, their water likely comes from local watercourses (rivers, springs) or wells.7 Those watercourses, of course, are not necessarily conveniently located for our peasants, while wells demand time spent drawing the water. So you have both labor in drawing the water but also in carrying it by hand to the household where it is to be used.
Once again, we know this was a significant labor demand – lower-class women moving water in jugs (that’s what the women balancing pitchers on their heads are doing in pictures you may have seen – moving water from the well to the house) is a quite common motif for these societies, but I haven’t been able to find a secure historical source estimating it for antiquity or the Middle Ages. However, Fintan O’Toole, writing about rural 1960s Ireland – largely pre-electrification – notes that that getting water might consume something on the order of 550 hours per year done by hand, which is to say around 1.5 hours a day, every day.8 It seems difficult to imagine that fetching water before the advent of such pumps – which were popular devices in their day for a reason – could have taken any less time.
Finally, there is childcare. While it is certainly the case that childhoods in these societies were quite short and pre-industrial parenting strategies tended to be fairly ‘hands off’ or ‘free range’ by modern standards, there is also just an unavoidable bedrock of time and care demands for very young children. For children under the age of two – because remember, these societies control fertility in part by extending breastfeasting relatively late – nursing can take a fair bit of time. Here, modern guidelines for parents can actually be useful, as the biology of infants hasn’t changed a great deal in the last few centuries. Newborns need to feed very frequently (albeit the sessions are often very short), while older infants space our feedings more: for a newborn in the first few weeks, breastfeeding can take on the order of 4-5 hours per day, though by six months or so that figure tends to coast down to 1-2 hours a day. Still, for a nursing mother – and two of our three households have one, which should not surprise given the fertility patterns here – that’s a significant time demand that has to be met in between everything else.
And of course, children do not become entirely labor-free just because they’re entirely weaned onto regular foods (ask the parent of literally any toddler). So while our peasant mothers are likely not – by modern standards – ‘intensively’ parenting (because they simply cannot afford to, there are too many crucial demands on their time), there is a ‘floor’ of time demands that must be met.
Putting it all in a model
Modeling all of that is tricky, especially because our data-points are so late and so difficult to just plug directly in to a formula the way we could use actual ancient estimates for agriculture. Still, we can try, in order to get a sense of exactly how much work we’re dealing with here.
First, we need to figure out how many hours our peasant women and girls have. As is rapidly going to become apparent, they work more days and hours than their menfolk once all of these tasks are accounted for. That said, they do not work every daylight hour: we need to account for things like market days, festival days and religious observances. We gave our farmers between 270 and 290 working days a year accounting for weather, festivals, religious observances, markets, rest periods after the harvest and so on. For our peasant women will still, of course, have their festivals and so on, but in many cases that isn’t a whole day off for them: food still needs cooking, children watching and so on (for some festivals, there might need to be a fair bit more of these things). We might instead, assess a lot of those as something like half days and figure a calendar that instead has something like 310 full work days.9 That suggests, assuming 12 hour days (sunup to sundown on average), about 3,720 hours a year per adult peasant woman, though we should be aware that there’s some wiggle room on this figure depending on household needs.
What we’re going to do is basically calculate a ‘floor’ for time spent in agriculture, food preparation, cleaning and laundry, water collection and childcare and then assume that textile production fills basically all of the remaining space. Of course in practice these activities can overlap: the peasant woman who is keeping one eye on the children while the soup cooks and with her hands working a distaff (if she has a drop spool, she can even move around during all of this) as the pot bubbles. But in a lot of cases the time demands of these tasks cannot be infinitely ‘stacked’ – a woman laundering clothes in a stream is not also cooking or spinning at the same time and so on. Likewise, some childcare tasks, as any parent can attest, demand one’s full attention.
We’re going to formula labor demands on a household basis for the sake of simplicity, but here we have to be careful: doubling the size of a household may increase its labor tasks, but does not necessarily double them. It takes more time to cook for 8 than for 4, but not anywhere near twice as much time. So very quickly, here are our labor assumptions in each category:
- Agriculture. As noted above, we’re assuming every working-age female is going to be spending roughly a month focused on agricultural labor, a time demand of 360 hours annually.
- Food Preparation: A ‘floor’ of 40 hours per week to prepare food for the first four people, with each additional person (excluding nursing infants) adding an extra 5 hours per week. That’s a very rough approximation (and rather a fair bit less than our 1900 figure above), but it suggests the Smalls need 40 hours a week, the Middles 45 (remember Freida Middles is a nursing newborn) and the Biggs 65 hours a week (remember that Melanie Biggs is a nursing infant).
- Cleaning and Laundry: Again, a ‘floor’ of around 14 hours a week for a four person household is a decent enough place to start. But while household cleaning time might not shoot up with additional household members, laundry is probably most of this time demand and it does more or less increase linearly adding people (with the technology they have, these folks need to be individually washing clothes). We might then figure 3 additional hours for each person beyond the first 4 (this time newborns and infants not excluded; anyone who has had either knows they generate plenty of ‘cleaning tasks.’), so the Smalls need 14 hours, the Middles 20 and the Biggs 32 hours of cleaning and laundry labor, roughly.
- Water Fetching: Here I rather suspect that water-time, at least on the scale of our households, is going to demand more labor in a more-or-less linear relationship, as we’re already at the scale of water demands where trips to the well or spring are being fully utilized. In a lot of cases here ‘more labor for more water’ may just mean two people heading down to the well together to double the amount of water moved on a single trip. Trying to hew closely to the data from O’Toole (2021) above, we might guesstimate something like 2.5 hours per person per week, so the Smalls might need to spend 10 hours a week on water, the Middles 15 and the Biggs 25 hours.
- Childcare: Here, age matters quite a lot. As noted, childhood ends early in these societies, so we may assume that dedicated, focused childcare time is minimal after age 7 or so (at which point most children will be fully engaged in assisting adults in their tasks). Below that, we might assume 4 hours per day for a nursing newborn, 2 hours for a nursing infant, and perhaps 1 hour a day roughly for children 6 and younger. That would mean that the Smalls require 7 hours of childcare per week (for Jane, age 6), while the Middles need a lot more, 35 hours per week (for newborn Freida and four-year-old Fanny Middles) and the Biggs in between with 21 hours per week (for nursing infant Melanie and young four-year-old Michael).
That’s a lot of hours! But how much labor do our families have to address those needs (plus the needs of textile production)? Obviously a prime age woman in this model counts as one unit of her labor, with 3,720 hours available per year, of which 360 go to agriculture (so 3,360 hours available after that is accounted for). But the older women and the young girls aren’t idle in these households either. What I’ve assumed is that elderly women – defined here as 50 and over10 work at 75% of the rate of a prime-age woman. I assume children start taking on significant tasks at age 6; from 6 to 11, they are assigned 50% of an adult woman’s labor and from 12 to 16, 75%, as they’re increasingly fully physically capable, but may still be learning how to efficiently do tasks like spinning or cooking.11 Again, these assumptions are absurdly rough, but they’ll do.
Under those assumptions, here’s how our families pan out on women’s labor:
| The Smalls | The Middles | The Biggs | |
| Hours (Unadjusted) Before Agriculture | 7,440 per year | 7,440 per year | 18,600 per year |
| Hours (Unadjusted) After Agriculture | 6,720 per year (720 hours to agriculture) | 6,720 per year (720 hours to agriculture) | 16,800 per year (1,800 hours to agriculture) |
| Age-Labor-Speed Adjusted Hours (after Agriculture) | 5,040 per year | 6,720 per year | 13,440 per year |
| Annual Labor Demands by Task: | |||
| Food Preparation | 2,080 | 2,340 | 3,380 |
| Cleaning and Laundry | 728 | 1,040 | 1,664 |
| Water Drawing/Carrying | 520 | 780 | 1300 |
| Childcare | 364 | 1,820 | 1092 |
| Total Maintenance Labor Requirements | 3,339 | 4,171 | 6,355 |
| Age Adjusted Labor Hours Remaining | 1,701 | 2,549 | 7,085 |
| Maximum Implied Textile Production (128.5 hours per m2) | 13.25m2 96% of Subsistence | 19.8m2 105.6% of Subsistence 52.8% of Respectability | 55.1m2 169.5% of Subsistence 84.8% of Respectability |
Women’s Work
We can notice a few things immediately. None of these households meet their ‘respectability’ estimated needs for fabric; the Smalls don’t even quite get to their subsistence needs. This is another space where horizontal ties probably matter a great deal, for as you will recall, the Smalls, while falling short of their respectability fabric needs were the only household with enough (male) labor to meet their respectability needs in terms of agriculture. It’s not hard to imagine, then, Mrs. Smalls looking for ways to trade that agricultural surplus with Mrs. Middles Jr. or Mrs. Maddie or Martha Biggs for a bit more fabric, or help watching the children or similar tasks, in order for her to meet those subsistence requirements. In a sense, after all, the Smalls’ fabric shortage is a product of the same factor giving them an agricultural surplus: their household is somewhat ‘male shifted’ (with two adult males, but just one adult woman and one young girl), while the other households are a bit more balanced (the Middles have two adult men and two adult women laborers, along with two children who could be of any gender for the model here, given their age) or female-shifted (the Biggs have three women and two working-age girls, against three working-age men). That sort of informal ‘banquet your neighbors‘ exchange could thus be very helpful in balancing out those differences.
We should also note that these women work an enormous amount. We estimated, you will recall, working hours for our male peasants on the order of 2,500 to 3,500 working hours per year, massively more than modern full-time employment (40 hours per week is ~2000, typically around 1,750 hours after sick time, vacation, holidays and such). By contrast our peasant women are working in this model 3,760 hours per year, significantly more than their fathers, husbands and brothers and wildly more than modern workers. Now of course that figure is in theory something of a maximum, but that’s what our model is for: it demonstrates that they can’t really be working much less, since their margin over minimum subsistence is so narrow even working those many hours. Indeed, we might instead imagine many peasant women might be working more, eating a little into the dark hours cooking or spinning (as Lucretia famously does in Livy, 1.57.9-10, leading the women of her (aristocratic) household in wool-working by lamp-light) or into the time we’ve given her ‘off’ on those festival days, just to keep up with all of the tasks that need doing.
Of course that ‘free time gender gap’ remains in modern societies today, but the quantity of leisure available for either gender is at a different order of magnitude: the women in that study linked earlier in the sentence report 26 hours a week of leisure time – less than the 28 their husbands have, but a lot more than the implied ~15 our male peasants and ~10 our female peasants seem to have, following our work hour assumptions here.12
It is thus perhaps not surprising that those silly ‘you work harder than a peasant’ memes always focus on male peasants. To be clear, you don’t work as hard as a male peasant farmer, but you really don’t work as hard as the wife of that male peasant farmer. The labor demands on both halves of the peasant household are very high, but it is a striking if unsurprising comment on the way we understand labor that we often spend most of our time talking about the half of the gender ledger which is probably working less.
More broadly, I do want to caution in reading our two models – one for male-gendered labor and one for female-gendered labor – that these models assume better-than-average conditions. Our male-focused agricultural labor model, after all, assumes a decent crop, but some years, the harvest fails, while our female labor model assumes these women are entirely focused on labor, non-stop, from sunrise to sunset, every day, which is simply not how humans work. There’s no real way to account systematically for idle chat, daydreaming, moments of rest or distraction (or moments where work needs to be redone because of an error) and such in our model because that varies so much person to person and task to task, but the value obviously isn’t zero. I considered adding something like a flat ‘productivity’ reduction in the model of hours by 20% or so to account for this, but decided to leave the model more or less as is instead.
If we did add that 20% ‘distraction reduction,’ it’s worth noting that the Smalls end up at a bit less than half of their textile subsistence needs, the Middles right around half; only the Biggs stay ahead of their subsistence requirements. What I think that suggests is that for most of these households, the demands of simply maintaining the household as both an economic and family unit were full time and demanding jobs: Mrs. Smalls, Widow Middles and Mrs. Middles Jr. (and their daughters) cannot really ‘slack off’ very much if they expect to keep their households at a minimum expected standard of food, cleanliness and clothing. The women of the Biggs household have a bit more leeway, but not much and it comes at the cost of their household being unusual tight on male labor, which may well mean that extra time is consumed by having the Biggs women in the fields more often outside of the harvest to help make up the difference.
On the other hand, The Smalls provide a good example of how these households pass through cycles as a result of their aging.13 Mrs. Smalls is at most likely to have perhaps one more child who survives to adulthood, but her son John is already working age and her daughter Jane is going to be more and more help around the house shortly. The next few years will likely represent the peak of the Smalls’ labor potential: right now Mrs. Smalls is struggling to maintain the household’s basic needs, but this is the one household running a comfortable agricultural surplus and in a few years as Jane gets older, it’ll slide into the same surplus on the textile-side of the ledger too. But that shift is temporary! At some point, after all, Jane will marry and exit the household, shrinking it again, while at some point Mr. Smalls is likely to pass away, leaving John Smalls (likely by that point or soon after married) as the householder expecting a new crop of small children.
In short, these models show how these households – at these moments in their continuing process of formation – can cope in a normal-to-good-year with the demands of farming, textile production and household maintenance. But not every year is a good year and with such relatively thin margins over subsistence on both sides of the gendered-labor-ledger, a bad year could easily push these households into modest but meaningful deficits.
Next time, we’ll start wrapping this series up by returning back to some of our original questions and thinking about how our model can help us to understand the rhythms and cycles of peasant life, the stresses these households are under and the tactics they use to cope with them.
- On this, see Erdkamp, op. cit. 87-90, especially the notes which gather together some scattered scholarship. Note also W. Scheidel, “The Most Silent Women of Greece and Rome” in two parts, G&R 42.2 and 43.1 (1995/1996).
- On this, see Spurr, Arable Cultivation in Roman Italy (1986).
- Erdkamp, op. cit., 72.
- As an aside, the link there is to Sarah Taber’s YouTube channel. If you’re interested in understanding contemporary farming, it’s a good place to go.
- From films which just assume ‘people in the past were dirty’ I imagine there are some folks thinking this cleaning work was less necessary, but obviously our peasants do not want to be food poisoned all the time.
- Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century (1993), 50-1.
- My sense of hand-pumps, of the sort that become ubiquitous in the early modern period in Europe and the United States, only start showing up late in the Middle Ages (late 1400s and onward) and only unevenly, but I can’t speak on that topic with confidence.
- O’Toole, We Don’t Know Overselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland (2021). 59-60.
- My thinking here is 6.5 full days in a typical week, with a half-day on Sunday or the nundinae (so 338 days a year), minus 40 half days and five full days (so 25 days) for festivals, which gets us to something like 313, rounded to 310 for ease. Obviously this is a really approximate estimation, but such a rough approximation is the best I can do. It’s clear that women’s labor didn’t stop on every festival day, so there must be more of it, but ‘how much more’ must have varied a lot.
- Only Widow Biggs is in the category; note that her calorie intake is similarly markedly lower.
- So our ‘half-unit’ girls are Jane Smalls, Fanny Middles, and Mary Biggs while our ‘three-quarters-unit’ girl is Matilda Biggs.
- The calculations here are somewhat ugly: the Pew numbers seem to be out of ~78 hours total (they add up to 79 for men and 77 for women), so 11 hours out of the day (with some of the remaining hours of the day presumably filled with things like sleeping, eating, showering, etc.). What I’ve done here with our numbers is convert them into weekly figures and subtract them from 80 (roughly the number of daylight hours in a week) to create a rough equivalent to those modern figures. It’s ugly, but I think the comparison is useful in demonstrating how large the gap is.
- In particular, this is Chayanov’s family cycle, Chayanov, The Theory of Peasant Economy, ed. D. Thorner, et al. (1966); while subsequent scholarship has added a lot of complexity, the basic observation that households change in composition over time, with implications for their labor value is a significant one.
No time accounted for cutting, gathering, and hauling firewood? The water must boil somehow, right?
I don’t have a good way to quantify that labor, so I’ve left it out of the model. But yes, clearly a significant and ongoing task.
I think that would mostly fall under the male side of the equation? It’s a task that involves going a fair distance from the house and hacking at things with an axe, which is solidly male-coded, so I guess it shrinks the gap a bit.
For a lot of peasant farmers, going out into the woods and hacking down entire trees with a large axe would not be their only or main means of getting firewood. Fallen branches (which may require at most some hatchet work to cut them up into manageable chunks) and smaller timber (such as can be gathered by children with at most a knife to cut it with) play a big role. In many cases the peasant legally does not have the right to fell trees without permission, as the forest is property of some big man who views it as a long-term investment.
There are common rights of turbary (right to cut peat) and estover (right to gather furze, small branches and deadfall). Some forests were held in common, and managed for timber, fuel, mast (beech-mast and acorns) and as part of water management.
Coppicing and pollarding being the main sources of firewood (and light timber in general, for tools and construction alike), rather than cutting down mature trees, has been mentioned before on the blog. Some of the woodland serving this purpose is likely to not be afforested in the legal sense, and some of the wood wouldn’t be in the form of “a forest” (extending in both directions) but a line of trees (separating fields, and partly formed into hedgerows).
As someone from relatively rural, but also traditionally reasonably affluent England, you can still SEE pollarded trees along certain boundary lines along the edge of town, as when it fell out of practice for anyone to do it for their own wood, the wealthier folks in some of the larger nearby houses just got the council to maintain them in situ as part of the ‘rustic charm’. Decades or more later, and it’s just an odd quirk of municipal tree management, but the trees are old enough that it would have been for firewood originally.
“I think that would mostly fall under the male side of the equation? It’s a task that involves going a fair distance from the house and hacking at things with an axe, which is solidly male-coded, so I guess it shrinks the gap a bit.”
I don’t know about this. My impression is that gathering firewood is a big part of the workload of women in Africa, and it is in a lot of places a mainly or entirely female task.
Of course it’s also one of the two biblical tasks of the slave: “Hewers of wood and drawers of water”.
I had never thought of that verse as referring differentially to male and female slaves, but maybe. That verse is the source of the McGarrigle line: “Putting wood in the stove and water in the cup/You work so hard you die standing up.”
Other than those parts of Europe dominated by conifers, firewood was generally sourced via coppicing. An actual peer-reviewed paper noted that “Young coppice shoots (generally referred to as underwood) were ideal for firewood: they could be harvested with minimal energy input and put straight on the fire.” I quoted a lot more from that paper nearly two months ago.
https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iva-subsistence-and-a-little-more/#comment-87019
“the peasant household requires significant maintenance if it is going to keep producing food and cloth. This work is not optional and it is work, so I propose understanding it not as ‘domestic’ labor or ‘unproductive’ labor or what have you, but as maintenance labor for the household as both a family and economic unit.”
A key and useful clarification.
“Unfortunately, quantifying this sort of labor is really hard because our sources for the ancient and medieval past are profoundly uninterested in it. Those sources, after all, are generally free wealthy male writers, interested in the doings of people who are free, rich and male, but this sort of maintenance labor was done by people who were poor and female and in many cases in the households of the very wealthy, non-free. So while this kind of labor is happening continuously,”
Not universally.
Since maintenance like cooking food needed to be done continuously to keep people functional, it needed to be done by people or groups of people no matter what their sex composition was. Family households, but also single sex nonkin communities of either sex.
A community of free males living together is an army camp. As one of your earlier posts mentioned, good generals are commonly praised for driving out camp followers.
Driving out camp followers means free men in the army are forced to do what is otherwise regarded as women´s work. Might attract some interest.
“A study of household labor performed in 1900 concluded that the average American woman spent 44 hours per week on food preparation and clean-up from that food preparation”
“the average American woman in 1900 spent 14 hours on laundry and household cleaning”
“getting water might consume something on the order of 550 hours per year done by hand, which is to say around 1.5 hours a day, every day”
Very well. You just said this work is “not optional”.
Convert it to day. What I get is
*6,5 hours per day for food preparation and clean-up from that food preparation
*2 hours on laundry and other cleaning
*1,5 hours on fetching water
all of these tasks are indeed not optional, no matter which sex the consumer, and they total 10 hours per day…
*children are left behind at home, so 0 here, but…
*the camp specific tasks then. Digging the ditch every day.
*And then the actual marching and fighting!
How many hours per day do all-men army camps need to actually reserve for the not optional maintenance labour like carrying water, cooking and laundry?
Check out the post on logistics!
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/12/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-iii-on-the-move/
The answer is apparently a lot of soldiers’ time needs to be dedicated to maintenance labor.
Also, I assume things that humans can tolerate while marching is very different than what can be tolerated for years, e.g. I can suffer miserably through gross clothing for a few weeks, but I’d rather put a bullet in my head than wear the same unwashed clothing for the rest of my life!
“Zero camp followers” was more of an ideal to be approached than something any pre-modern army could realistically achieve. Pretty much every pre-modern army had some number of non-soldiers doing useful work to keep the soldiers alive; well-organized ones just had a better soldier-to-follower ratio. For women’s work, these people were mostly women.
Army life also offers some shortcuts- you can do less cleaning in a camp that you are planning to march away from than you would in your home, you can do less prep when you’re looting food from the enemy instead of harvesting it yourself.
Even so, army life was probably quite rough even by the standards of peasant life. Traditional European folk songs are full of warnings to young men not to trust the recruiting sergeant who offers you an escape from the drudgery of farm life by joining the army.
“you can do less prep when you’re looting food from the enemy instead of harvesting it yourself”
Can you though? Armies are going to mostly acquire forage in whatever form peasants are storing it in long-term, if the foragers arrive at just the right time of day they might chance upon a pot of stew that was left boiling when the peasants fled, but mostly they are finding food stocks in whatever form keeps well long-term and needs to be subject to the daily tasks of food prep.
Personally, my suspicion is that the circa-1900 numbers are just not applicable to many pre-modern societies. Our host mentions that cooking and cleaning may have expanded to fill the time available, but I suspect that happened quite a substantial amount, not just a little. Minimal food prep time is “throw it in a pot of boiling water and wait a bit”.
Similarly, the textile industry meant people had more changes of clothes, which makes it easier to always be wearing clean clothes, which makes minor stains more embarrassing, which means you spend more time doing laundry (especially if a bunch of time has been freed up by no longer needing to *make* all your own clothes). Which is not to say medieval peasants never did laundry—just that the standards may have been laxer.
“Throw it in a pot of boiling water and wait a bit” makes me think of “pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold.” A household could save some time by cooking a large batch that would last several meals (though surely not the nine days of the rhyme). The tradeoff is that several straight meals of porridge would get boring, but perhaps a side dish of greens would help.
Though expectations of variety would be less than we in the West expect. There are large parts of the world where a meal pretty much definitionally includes rice or cornmeal mush. If that is not a component of what you are eating, then it is not considered a meal.
For that matter, many peasant households would just keep a pot of soup or stew cooking, putting in food and taking it out as needed.
That said though, in my experience boiling water over an open fire takes a lot longer than boiling it over my modern gas stove.
The Roman army was certainly willing to harvest! I remember this being specifically called out somewhere when discussing siege capability or tooth-to-tail ratios.
Harvest season is a prime opportunity to do some warfare. If you come upon some ripe wheat fields during your foraging, you reap em, you thresh em, and then everyone is expected to mill the grain themselves.
I think you’d have a better hope of getting answers by studying medieval monasteries (where I gather that in at least some cases the monks were doing significant manual labor themselves, including things that were traditionally women’s work). An army on the march is so different from a peasant household in its requirements that it would make a very dubious benchmark.
Another group to consider is households of Big Men. Which did vary in composition.
Some Big Man households were overwhelmingly of women. Odysseus came home to a household of 50 slave women, 1 free woman (Penelope), 1 adult man (just 20 year old Telemachos) and no children to care between the 51 adult women. The man slaves lived in separate households. 1st millennium AD Irish big men also lived in households packed with women – not only secular kings (who were polygamists) but also clergy (who were generally reputed as chaste).
But other Big Men households were overwhelmingly male. Like English noble households from 12th to 16th century. Cleaning… cooking down to scullions… all done by men and boys. There were a few women. A few maids of the lady of the house, and interestingly laundresses. But even households specifically of ladies were overwhelmingly male.
So, again, households documented better than peasant households. Question is – how many of the grooms of Pantry, Acatry etc. etc. were functionally needed, how many were there just for prestige, and as effectively a garrison?
Do we also have examples outside of literature for that? As I wonder whether that might have been artistic licence.
I had the impression that one of the factors making slave women so valuable had been that they could make new slaves, to the point there had been a Roman slaveowner who had promised his slavewomen freedom if they birthed three new children to be slaves of his. Though, I might have overestimated how important that was to people in general.
…In The Iliad, Homer had notoriously screwed up how the chariots had actually been used. I doubt very much household numbers from The Odyssey are any more representative than “a tribe of giant cannibals called Laestrygonians”.
https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/03/13/did-the-trojan-war-really-happen/
Though, I suppose the most important takeaway for modern readers should be not so much that this Ithacan household in The Odyssey could have had existed in the Ancient Greece, but rather that those Greek audiences considered no contradiction between rooting for the main character who owns so many people – indeed, see it as a mark of his success. Moreover, there is the coda – Odysseus and his son do not “merely” kill all the suitors, but after they are done, they first get Odysseus’ wet-nurse Eurycleia (and another slave, obviously) to identify every enslaved woman who had ever slept with any of the suitors, force them to clean up all the blood and guts and drag away the bodies of their former dalliances – and then hang them all anyway.
I must say, if Nolan actually uses his current golden-boy-can-do-whatever-he-wants status in order to adapt that part of the tale as well, to force the cinemagoers to come to terms with what kind of a man is celebrated at what is nowadays commonly described as the wellspring of Western civilization, and to recognize just how distant Ancient Greece actually was from us in terms of morals, then I suppose I would have to take back pretty much anything negative I ever said about his other films (which I am sure I did a lot more often than the median viewer.) The scene after that, where the relatives of the suitors predictably arrive to wage war on Ithaca (but are defeated anyway, because of course) would be a nice bonus, though a meh consolation prize if Nolan only adapts that.
Of course, there’s about 95% the film would be about as “crowd-pleasing” as possible and include neither, and so the opportunity to examine what we are actually celebrating would be lost yet again, in favour of the whitewashed version which lets people continue to celebrate the comfortable but false idea of a continuity of values in a single ever-growing edifice. I would be glad to be proven wrong in the comments, but so far, I don’t think any filmaker had dared to go this far with The Odyssey. I.e. the one adaptation from like 1980s which I saw at school definitely did not show it (although one maid got shot while opening the doors for the final suitor, the two of them impaled together.
Earlier this year, Umberto Pasolini The Return tried to make an ultra-gritty low-budget drama about suitor-killing part only, but for all his directing flair (and it’s a really well-shot film), chickening out entirely on the part with the maids also reduces the most interesting suitor’s motivations to a total mess. (He also got renamed for a reason I cannot surmise, so I’m just not using the name.) As in, in the original, he tried his best to convince Penelope of his love, but was actually planning to have a child with her most trusted maid, and then make that child his heir, getting rid of Odysseus’ son Telemachus after that. In this one, he genuinely loves Penelope, apparently only sleeps with the maid to relieve frustration of being rejected, and just hates Telemachus because the latter was mean to him once, so now he’s planning to kill him, apparently not seeing how his mom is not going to appreciate it? Poor Marwan Kenzari does his best with that material (decisively outacting Telemachus’ Plummer along the way), but it’s really not enough.)
Hmm, now I find myself wondering whether certain other Ancient cultures might actually have been less ‘distant from us in terms of morals’.
For example, whilst Ancient Persia or Egypt would nowadays be considered ‘outmoded’ patriarchal cultures, the Ancient Greeks succeed in making them look like feminists in comparison.
I likewise had the impression that the Ancient Egyptian and Persian elites had less of a tendency of being ‘too lazy to work and need slaves to do everything’ compared with the Ancient Greek elites*.
I also had been told that infanticide was much more common in Ancient Greece.
However, that were only a few measures. Maybe there are enough other characteristics were those ancient cultures were even more ‘distant from us in terms of morals’ than Ancient Greece, that one could argue that the Greeks were still less extremely distant.
* Only the elites of course, as most could not afford enough slaves for a life of idle leisure.
“Odysseus came home to a household of 50 slave women, 1 free woman (Penelope), 1 adult man (just 20 year old Telemachos) and no children to care between the 51 adult women. ”
More than one adult man! What about all those suitors?
If I recall correctly, Mycenaean palaces were full of enslaved women who produced the fine cloths that were prestige gifts (serving like the arm-rings given by Norse chiefs to buy the loyalty of their subordinates). Does not Nestor in the Iliad boast of those in his house on Pylos?
Now I’m curious how does this article compare to maintenance labor of army camps. Someone somewhere must care for it since it’s critical for their marches.
“all-men army camps”
LMAO.
There were pretty much always women in any large army camp. They may not have had an official role, but they were there.
I think what your argument misses is the idea of economies of scale. Cooking a meal for fifty does not take ten times as long as cooking a meal for five. Cleaning a tent containing thirty does not take five times as long as cleaning a house containing six.
And of course a military unit would have animals and equipment to make that bulk work even more efficient. Instead of sending lots of men on foot carrying buckets, why not send four men with an ox cart full of buckets (or amphorae or whatever) down to the river, and come back with two hundred gallons of water?
Sure, you’d send four men and an ox cart to gather water — and 40 men in armor and weapons to guard them. Ambushing foraging parties was a classic way to attrition your enemy down, and no good general is going to pass up the opportunity to inflict some friction on the enemy. So when you’re figuring out how much time soldiers spend foraging for food, or water, or firewood, you also have to factor in the number of soldiers protecting them.
“For children under the age of two – because remember, these societies control fertility in part by extending breastfeasting relatively late – nursing can take a fair bit of time.”
Please leave this magnificent typo in place. I remember my three kids at that age. A fortuitous accident indeed.
“We estimated, you will recall, working hours for our male peasants on the order of 2,500 to 3,500 working hours per year … By contrast our peasant women are working in this model 3,760 hours per year, significantly more than their fathers, husbands and brothers and wildly more than modern workers.”
A statistic that has me wondering just how many male peasants were doing “womens” household tasks on the side. If they were, how would we know?
“A statistic that has me wondering just how many male peasants were doing “womens” household tasks on the side. If they were, how would we know?”
One case where we should know is households that did not contain women. These should show up in census/prosopographical information.
Obviously men could not nurse. Does not mean that single fathers were not common… widowers! Remember, considerable maternal mortality. How did peasants comment on single fathers?
There was a practice of “wet nursing” where women nurse for someone else’s child. I’ve only heard of it in connection with the very rich, but it seems reasonably likely that when a mother died in childbirth but the child survived someone else in the community could be found to nurse.
Also, a lot of men who still had young children would remarry.
It was common among French bourgoise (not rich but middle class) to outsource nursing to country women. The mortality rate was so high the contractors arranging this were nick-named ‘angel-makers’. So a disguised form of infanticide among a group on the precarious edge of respectability.
Wait, mortality was much higher with the wet nurses than with the mothers?
Yes. Because infants need more than food. If not cuddled and otherwise interacted with they ‘fail to thrive’. But the wet-nurses were in it for the money, and the contractors more so.
Every peasant widower who *has* a local sister or sister-in-law, has a family member who is close enough to their last birth that they can produce milk. In fact, the loss of labor potential represented by the death in childbirth makes the whole extended family more precarious, so the reduction in fertility for the family member taking on the burden of nursing is a desirable net benefit.
I grew up in a rural agricultural community. Men were CONSTNATLY doing “women’s work”. Big, burly men with Purple Hearts were also embroidering their daughter’s flour-sack dresses. Every man had a few recipes that he was proud of (my grandfather’s was egg dishes, my dad’s was grilling). Men washed dishes and cloths. There are families–such as Carder, Miller, Weaver–named after “women’s work”, which tends to indicate they engaged in quite a bit of it. I mean, think about it for a moment. Do you REALLY think a peasant woman who’s working 18+ hours a day is going to let her husband sit around doing nothing while she works her butt off? In the cases where the men really hated the chores, or couldn’t do them due to illness or disability, the men found things to do during that time, like making spoons/bowls, doing minor repairs on the houses, or otherwise being useful during that time. I used to go deal with the compost pile and garden when my sisters washed dishes, for example. Even the leisure activities were often either directed towards production or maintenance. Fishing provided food; gambling could bring in money; gossip let news travel and maintained those horizontal ties.
And it works both ways. Women were constantly doing “men’s work”. In England men were often forbidden from the dairy, and the poultry was the woman’s domain (the men could help there, particularly when it came to mucking it out or moving the mobile ones, but the woman kept the profits). I know plenty of women who could swing a hammer or handle a saw as well as any man, and more than a few who took pride in butchering skills. There were PLENTY of women in the fields hauling away rocks or pulling weeds–both because it needed done, and because a lot of what we call weeds had medicinal uses.
My interpretation is that the hard line between “men’s work” and “women’s work” is largely 1) a cultural ideal, which was very seldom actually met, and 2) a lot of it is the product of mid-20th century affluence. That’s not to say that there was no division, but among the poor farming class it’s always been a matter of emphasis, not a hard line. The hard fact is, when you’re not terribly certain where your next meal would come from you don’t have the luxury of saying “That’s not my problem.” Basically EVERYTHING about a poor peasant’s life was directed, in one way or another, to making sure they had something to eat tomorrow, for both genders. This is why “Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings” (or however you learned the saying); if you weren’t doing something productive you were either super rich or actively a danger to the household.
There’s also the point that while there is stuff that is almost always women’s work and stuff that is usually men’s work there’s a whole lot of slack…. but also sometimes the “division” is kinda the point, rather than the specific work. There are huge differences about what *specifically* is women’s work and men’s work. (in some cultures guarding livestock is done by men, in others by women, f.ex.)
Though I don’t think we should go to the other extreme either. Like there would be very few people of either gender who couldn’t do basic cooking or fieldwork or sewing. But that doesn’t mean a typical day doesn’t look *very* different for them, at least with the 1700s/1800s US I am most familiar with. Even when they are doing similar tasks there is often a semi-arbitrary division of roles. The split of gendered work might be more like 80-20 vs 20-80 than total, but it is very strong. Of course the precise ratio is likely to vary depending on family structure and circumstances.
Heck in a modern ‘traditional’ family where the husband works and the wife stays at home, the husband likely does some dishes in the evening and sometimes keeps an eye on the kids. But we’d probably consider that fairly strong gender roles none-the-less.
“Though I don’t think we should go to the other extreme either.”
Oh, absolutely not. A lot of the skills involved have to be learned from an early age. Like, spinning isn’t something girls learned to do around the time they were old enough to hold a spindle. By the time they were of marriageable age they had over a decade of experience at it. Likewise, boys started helping in the fields around the time they were on solid foods–they could gather grain, gather nuts, run messages, do light work, etc (read “Farmer Boy” if you want more info). And again, by the time they were old enough to wed they had over a decade of experience in these roles.
That sort of thing is going to have a profound impact on society. Someone with a decade of experience at spinning and weaving is going to be better at it, more efficient at it, and more comfortable doing it than someone who can’t tell warp from weft. After a certain point it becomes part of who you are–if you sit down you just naturally start spinning (or carving a spoon, or pulling some edible plants out of the garden, or whatever). And that will necessarily impact labor distribution, in ways that benefit both the individuals (who are doing work they enjoy/are comfortable with/are good at) and the household (an expert is more efficient at any task).
Like I said, it’s going to be a matter of degrees, with everyone contributing to most things and each family ending up somewhere unique on the n-dimensional spectra that is “domestic labor”, with an overarching cultural ideal defining a lot of it.
Or, as I put it in paleontological terms: Global forcing mechanisms are translated through regional factors into local outcomes. Global forcing mechanisms=metabolic needs of humans and farms; regional factors=local customs and ideas; local outcomes=how each individual household ran.
Also in this scenario, the husband is out of home all noon. They literally can’t touch what the women are doing, and vice versa.
I know plenty of women who could swing a hammer or handle a saw as well as any man, and more than a few who took pride in butchering skills.
right, like i mentioned in the other thread, I’ve seen women in India (and not particularly young or modern-looking ones either) doing heavy industrial labor with sledgehammers, and you can definitely find men doing traditionally “women’s” jobs like washing clothes, cooking etc.. Economic necessity is often going to outweigh cultural gender roles.
“Do you REALLY think a peasant woman who’s working 18+ hours a day is going to let her husband sit around doing nothing while she works her butt off?”
Well, not particularly. Especially as we started off by defining “women’s work” as work that was especially suitable for women because it did not conflict with childcare arrangements. We started off by defining it as convenient for women, not unsuitable for men. So I couldn’t think of any particular reason to think that men wouldn’t do it if need arose.
“Do you REALLY think a peasant woman who’s working 18+ hours a day is going to let her husband sit around doing nothing while she works her butt off?”
Depends on the intensity and scope of the local patriarchy. I had a friend whose humanitarian work with the Shilluk in what’s now South Sudan included gendered hour-by-hour time use studies. She found that the women worked incredibly hard, all the time, including most of the agricultural labor. The men — even during times of acute food insecurity — spent several hours most days on chilling out together, drinking and talking about past and prospective cattle raids.
The acceptability of that kind of disparity is going to vary a lot by time and place — and will be not unrelated to norms around gender-based violence. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3599371/
@Joel,
Depends on the intensity and scope of the local patriarchy. I had a friend whose humanitarian work with the Shilluk in what’s now South Sudan included gendered hour-by-hour time use studies. She found that the women worked incredibly hard, all the time, including most of the agricultural labor. The men — even during times of acute food insecurity — spent several hours most days on chilling out together, drinking and talking about past and prospective cattle raids.
I’m not disagreeing with your friend here- especially as I know many people who have made similar critical observations of other cultures. But, I would say there’s a difference between a pathological failure mode that cultures can slide into, and the standard way that premodern village economics are *meant* to work. Especially in times of transition to modernity.
I can imagine a society for example where the women farm and the men specialize in hunting. If the central government in that country made hunting illegal, maybe for conservation reasons, then you’d suddenly have a lot of male idleness. But, I would expect that to be a temporary transition state. In the long run, you would have pressures for cultural norms to change so that men were gainfully employed in some other way- the pressures might take the form of economic competition, state coercion, whatever. I would agree though that the transition period required for norms to change might take years, decades, or even centuries, and in that time you would have a lot of male idleness and exploitation of women’s labour.
Yes, it has been commented that one effect of colonialism, by restricting both hunting and warfare, was to reduce the men in pre-modern societies to standing around “leaning on their spears.” (Don’t remember the source of the quote.)
“restricting both hunting and warfare”
Hunting at least can potentially be productive. But if warfare (active fighting or preparing for it) was a really huge sink of male time, then we still have the problem of lots of men being ‘idle’ with respect to economic production, even if they weren’t sitting around drinking and gambling as when the anthropologists go to them.
In any given situation of seemingly high “idleness,” I’d not be surprised by an analysis that suggested that it was a temporary artifact of external interventions. Especially in a place like South Sudan, where everything has been impacted by colonialism, dictatorship, and war.
At the same time, I don’t think a situation where leisure time accrues disproportionately to men *demands* that kind of analysis, or even necessarily invites it.
One of the themes in these posts is that peasants can be (much) less than maximally efficient in how they work because they believe, entirely rationally, that throwing more effort into production isn’t going to transform their lives, and they prefer to take a certain amount of leisure instead. (This can take even more bleakly fatalistic forms in the context of war.)
In no society is that kind of leisure opportunity allocated equally; and in the overwhelming majority of social structures, the ones we call patriarchal, gender is a central factor determining who gets to enjoy more “idleness.”
Overall, patriarchy is a (much) stronger force than economic efficiency. As someone with generally egalitarian values, I wish I believed that the “economic competitiveness” (and overall wellbeing) boost from more equal social arrangements would push patriarchy to the margins over time. But that’s not what I see in history, even modern history. Extremely inegalitarian social orders exploit many other “competitiveness” factors to persist and indeed dominate over more egalitarian ones, despite the fact that their inegalitarianism hobbles a huge share of their human capital.
@JoelHafvenstein,
Oh yes, I’m not claiming that is necessarily the case, just that it could be, in some situations. (And of course I’d also say that a culture where one of the main male occupations is war or raiding is also a big problem, just in a different and maybe harder to solve way).
You also make a good point that cultural norms like patriarchy can be really strong, and can sometimes persist even when they’re economically irrational or politically repressed. After all, even in as hyper-capitalist a country as America, people still make “economically irrational” choices all the time, because sometimes we place more weight on our values than on material cost/benefit calculations.
@ey81,
Agreed, although in this case I think it’s more about modernity in general than about colonialism or post-colonialism specifically. Even a post-colonial government that fundamentally disagreed with the values of the former collonial oppressor would still have to ban or heavily restrict stuff like hunting. In the modern world there are just too many people and not enough wildlife for commercial hunting to be sustainable except for a small number of people (or outside of some unusual situations like invasive wild boars in the US and Canada, and even then it’s kind of a fringe thing at a societal level).
“Women work a lot and men laze around a lot” seemed to crop a lot in studies cited in the book _Stone Age Economics_. Along with lots of peoples seeming to live on 50% of their potential labor.
Most of the examples were hot climates, African or Polynesian, so I wondered if not needing much clothing was part of this. Plus, for more modern studies, access to industrialized cloth.
Chayanov apparently found that Russian peasants had a lot of leisure too; “don’t need much clothing” doesn’t work there but “industrialized clothing” might.
I can’t speak about possible disruptions, like maybe anthropologists were studying lots of societies where the old extractive class had been removed and not replaced.
It’s not just farming though; the book said that estimates of the carrying capacity of hunting and pastoralism were higher than observed densities, too.
When harness looms with thrown shuttles came to New World cultures that were traditionally women weaving on back strap looms or frame looms, the new European tech became man’s work in some areas. Chinese peasants paid tax in textiles, so inventions to get spinning and weaving done faster were invented there.
Lovely Series, Very much in the background of my mind was all viva, Revolution memes, as well as so THATS why Communisim in response jokes.
but the in theoretical perfect enough working conditions in a good year we might be fine…..
Aaaaannnnnddddd our Super Big Man just Pissed off that other Super Big Man and the Fucking Blue Bloods are getting us all killed. Fuck.
Communism never caught on in America because when you tell an American,”his grandfather starved your grandfather to death,” it’s a *metaphor*.
Unless one of them is non-white.
More like “unless both of them are immigrants or descendants of recent immigrants”. Remember the final scene of “Marathon Man”?
But if you said that about your American grandfathers, you’d have to be very old indeed.
I am not expert on USA history, but of various evils USA slavery had – starving slaves to death was a fairly rare and unusual event.
(unlike German Third Reich slavery and Russian/Chinese efforts)
I was thinking of food-denial strategies during the Indian Wars rather than anything happening around slavery.
But many owners provided only a non-nutritious, monotonous diet — particularly in the Caribbean, which made it impossible for women to get pregnant, carry a child to term, for the child to live, early death for the woman. Particularly when this inadequate diet combined with the hellish levels of labor demanded by sugar.
President Polk did this on his Mississippi plantations — so mismanaged, but he could never understand that it was HIS policies that caused his slaves to always be sick and dying, and never see a profitable crop of cotton.
Some areas, such as particularly the upper South, with the less arduous conditions of climate and the labor of tobacco, provided opportunity for the labor force to have food plots of their own. There was also access to hunting game in the woods, and to fish. All done of course during the bit of time provided to sleep. This allowed then, for the natural increase, as it is called, of the labor population. But particularly in the arduous opening labor for plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi, and in the Caribbean, it was cheaper just to have them worked/starved to death, than keep buying replacements.
This is extremely common, documented information in History these days.
While one could, if one chose, be skeptical about the argument that women worked harder than men, simply based on the fact that the error bars for women’s labor are so much higher, I would point out that it makes a lot of intuitive sense, based on the simple fact that one thing we can be sure of is that men did more things that weren’t subsistence labor than women did. Warfare is probably the most prominent example, but also administration, attending universities, writing treatises, etc, etc. Indeed, the fact that the error bars for women’s labor are so much higher is in and of itself an argument that women’s subsistence labor requirements were higher, because it was men that had the spare time to write up detailed estimates for male labor.
I think it’s pretty clear that the numbers given here are squishy enough along several dimensions to not really speak to the question “did peasant women work harder”. Based on this presentation of major tasks I tend to suspect that they did work somewhat longer hours, because their tasks seem to have been on average less physically strenuous and some of them did not depend on natural light. The women’s work presented here is simply more feasible to expand to longer hours, both routinely and under stress.
Something I particularly wonder about, considering this subject, is to what extent a skilled spinner actually needs light to spin. There aren’t that many things to keep track of and it seems like a highly tactile process even under daylight conditions, and it’s not physically strenuous. If an experienced spinner could work blind or by moonlight reasonably well, if her household were low on serviceable clothing and winter was encroaching, nothing would necessarily stop her from repeatedly pulling 20 hour workdays to try to catch up.
Christine de Pisa noted that men made fun of women for always spinning (spindle era spinning). B. While low-sighted and blind people can spin, it’s generally on flyer wheels. Very fine thread was spun on supported spindles in the Americas and in India until the invention of the charka wheels (Gandhi’s favorite tool for peaceful disobedience since the British banned all Indian domestic or factory cloth production to get fiber for British mills). Spinning after midnight was problematic. Try treadling a flyer wheel 20 hours while spinning. Or treadling a floor loom and throwing a shuttle for the same amount of time.
May I ask what time period that was referring to?
Under the British East India Company India was the largest textile exporter of the world and at the start of the 20th century* the country had one of the world’s largest industrial textile sectors. So, it cannot have been one of those two periods…
* However, during the 20th century India lost market share to Japan because the Japanese industry had higher productivity growth. Whilst one could argue the British should blamed for this; then that would have been because they had not done enough to support industry** instead of any imaginary ban.
** For example, the Japanese government was much more likely to send in the police to bust unions and deal with workers going on strike against attempt to make them work more machines per person, something the British Raj as a rule was only willing to do for British-owned industries with the result the Indian-owned cotton mills in West India had stagnant productivity growth unlike both British-owned jute mills in East India and the textile industry in Japan. Or that had been claimed here: (https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/).
“(Gandhi’s favorite tool for peaceful disobedience since the British banned all Indian domestic or factory cloth production to get fiber for British mills”
I think you’re misremembering the details of the Homespun Movement. The British never banned domestic cloth production in India. The point of the Homespun Movement was to make, buy and wear (legal) Indian-made cloth in order to boycott British-made cloth, which was cheaper.
I spin on drop spindles for fun, and while I’m nowhere near as competent as a random peasant, I can in fact spin in low or no light. In fact, in a E. J. W. Barber book (The Dancing Goddesses) there is an anecdote about Russian peasant men deliberately destroying their wives spinning, at which point all the women can do is start it again, often in the dark because their husbands wouldn’t let them have any light for it. Whether or not it’s accurate as told (I think it does smack of “look at how awful THOSE men are to their women, aren’t OUR women so lucky we’re nice?”) it’s definitely an indicator it was possible, if obviously not desirable.
These estimates regard peasant men and women, whereas administration, education and treatise-writing are for elite (i.e. not-peasant) people — it is almost incidental that they happen to be men.
Indeed, there is an interesting deep relationship behind this. As several people have been pointing it out in the comment sections of the last several posts, peasant children learn how to do these tasks in much the same way they learn to speak language. Abstract, classroom education (or things like it, such as instructional treatises on how to e.g. lead an army) is in a sense a fallback option for the things that cannot be learned in the natural way, either because the loops of the trial-and-error cycle are too expensive and/or slow and/or sparse-even-if-fast, or because of another reason. (Our host has mentioned before that remarkably the Romans managed to run something more naturalistic, namely an apprenticeship program, for generalship: they were continuously at war for decades, thus military tribunes could learn in the field (as opposed to at a desk) under guidance of more experienced fellow tribunes and higher officers.) The other reason is that the quantity of information, and the requirement on fidelity of transmission, exceeds the capacity of natural learning. Sometimes this is for excellent reasons (congratulations, your society has accumulated enough knowledge of the natural world for this to be necessary!), sometimes this is an act of competitive wastefulness among elites, done to display that they could put in the work to learn a corpus of what, in an external observer’s view, is random data.
What if someone in this community has a physical or mental disability that prevents them from working? I assume visibly disabled children might be subject to infanticide, but we do have evidence that many sorts of societies cared for the disabled (archaeological evidence of people with disabilities who died at advanced age). And if we assume that most people do in fact love their children, they’ll try to take care of them regardless. At the same time, it doesn’t seem like this society can absorb that level of “unproductive mouths”.
So, are they killed, or are they “the first to go” in starving times, or what? Assume a spectrum here – I’m familiar with accounts by blind people who mastered sewing and other handcrafts, while some people with mental disabilities like autism have high intelligence and can be useful to society in other ways, but there’s also disabled people who are straight-up unable to care for themselves and need constant care for their whole lives. And there are disabilities that are much easier to deal with in the modern day thanks to modern medicine but which would’ve been far more difficult in a premodern society.
Generally? People pooled thier resources together. Care for the indigent seems to have been something religious institutions (and later on the government) put a fair amount of effort into. Many died of couse, but the “village idiot” is a phrase for a reason: The truly sick and/or mentally developed would often be given some degree of care. (at least in early-modern sweden on a rotational basis, IE: They were supposed to “rotate” among different villages) It was also something often done by the parish (who remember, every peasant was giving around 10% of the harvest to)
Note that this doesen’t mean they weren’t put to work: Simple tasks could be delegated, etc. And obviously this care was not up to any kind of modern standard.
Note of course that these kind of people are usually the kind of people who would die off in a famine in any case: Simply because they’re probably in poor health anyways. But the care for the “deserving” poor (IE: the sick, “feebleminded”, etc.) was an ongoing concern for these communities.
If nothing else, it bears remembering that one of the most critical tasks in this society is literally just “go to the well/river/pond, fill this jug, bring it back, pour it into the barrel here in the house, repeat.” Another is “hold this distaff and do a spinny motion with your hand. A lot.”
A lot of people we would now consider mentally handicapped are nonetheless capable of performing tasks like that. This, in turn, saves a lot of time for other people to perform more complicated tasks like “cook dinner” or “watch the sheep and make sure none of them blunder into a swamp and drown or anything absurd like that.”
Today, we have much less use for this kind of repetitive physical labor with relatively low cognitive demand. Likewise, we place much higher demands on people’s cognitive abilities, including abilities that were in far less demand for the medieval peasant.
Today, we might call someone mentally disabled, and consider them rather dysfunctional, if they are incapable of reading, if they are unreliable about arriving consistently on schedule without prompting purely by keeping track of the time with a clock, if they cannot navigate an unfamiliar built environment without getting too badly lost, or if they cannot to talk to strangers and get through a meaningful conversation with them. To the medieval peasant who is fairly likely to be illiterate, who doesn’t own a clock and has no shortage of people who will chide someone for not getting out into the fields fast enough, who lives in the same place all their lives, and who rarely even meets a stranger, a person with these handicaps may still have no trouble contributing enough to “pull their weight.”
Actually, watching sheep is one of the jobs that consistently attracts people who are a bit…odd. I’ve come across a number of accounts of shepherds who have what we would consider OCD – all you have to do is make them count the sheep, over and over again all day.
@Matilda,
Actually, watching sheep is one of the jobs that consistently attracts people who are a bit…odd
I can definitely see that! Especially because like commercial hunting and a few other occupations, it doesn’t require you to be in social situations all that often.
“There’s no real way to account systematically for idle chat, daydreaming, moments of rest or distraction (or moments where work needs to be redone because of an error) and such in our model because that varies so much person to person and task to task, but the value obviously isn’t zero. I considered adding something like a flat ‘productivity’ reduction in the model of hours by 20% or so to account for this, but decided to leave the model more or less as is instead.”
When I took Managerial Theory twenty or so years ago, the average expected productive worktime of a corporate employee was 5 hours out of an ~8 hour day. That’s probably taking things like vacation and holiday time into consideration, but that’s still leaving a lot of room for chit chat, non-productive meetings, and the like.
I went back for an MBA 7 years ago, and that average had dropped to *4* hours.
I’d blame the manglement with their MBAs and their pointless RTO orders for that, though.
Wait and use some military logic.
On the one hand, the peasants are an excellent example of tasks that need sufficiently little organization, and that are sufficiently well understood, that there is very little management to speak of. (Though the foreman, and various other titles from other languages, such as “reeve” from medieval English, are known.) More generally, even if a task is of a sort that hasn’t been done before (e.g. developing a new product), it is quite possible that a group of three people could do it in, let’s say for the sake of the argument, fifteen years.
However, if you find a way for three hundred people to accomplish the same product development task in five years — well, in that case, by spending thirty times as much labor, you may well have taken rather more than thirty times as much value, because you can saturate the market before your competitors get their product ready. (So, obviously, it comes to be the case that the organizations that are your competitors are also trying the same strategy.) Assuming for a moment that the quantity of “truly productive” work hasn’t changed, you can see that now 29x as many labor-hours are going to be spent on e.g. parallel efforts that get discarded, and on coordination, ever so much coordination. Both of which are annoying because they usually feel pointless, but coordination in particular cannot be discarded any more than the “tail” of a military could be dispensed with. Sure, there is an intuitive sense in which a high tooth-to-tail ratio would be “efficient”, but that is not the military that wins the fight.
Indeed. The other point is that in a military unit with a lot of manual tasks, your unit composition is designed so that in the most work-intensive phase of combat, there is a person to do every task simultaneously. Thus, for example, a Napoleonic-era frigate might have 700 sailors, half of them working the guns, the rest working the tackling, while a civilian merchantman with the same set of sails would be sailed with 70 sailors.
On the contrary, in a tank unit, where the most intensive phase of combat is about operating the tank, there is an endemic problem of having too little manpower for maintenance, guard duty and similar household tasks when the unit is out of combat.
I’ve heard that the French military solves the latter issue by, approximately speaking, reasoning “what if we emphasized not tanks’ origins as armored infantry support guns (interwar France made this mistake), which design lineage then picked up the duties of the mechanized antitank gun (a.k.a. tank destroyer), but instead their role as tank destroyers” and mating this with bog-standard WW2 tank destroyer doctrine, mixing scouting vehicles intimately among tanks — down to platoon level, or perhaps notionally even below that (“one tank, one scout” as unequal vehicle-buddies).
” in a tank unit, where the most intensive phase of combat is about operating the tank, there is an endemic problem of having too little manpower for maintenance,”
Indeed. A great example is this: most modern tanks have a crew of four. Driver, commander, gunner, and loader. It would be possible to have a crew of three by using an autoloader to load the gun, but most nations do not do this, and one of the reasons why not is that you then have only three crew per tank and that’s not enough to maintain the thing (especially since it now has one more system to maintain!) or stag on in laager.
It’s not just daydreaming and idle chat, though. What about illness or injury? Those will be fairly common occupancies that not only reduce the output of the ill/injured party, but also requires additional work from others in the form of nursing and care.
I wouldn’t expect reducing working time to 5 hours would make them use all 5 tho.
“working hours for our male peasants on the order of 2,500 to 3,500 working hours per year, massively more than modern full-time employment (40 hours per week is ~2000, typically around 1,750 hours after sick time, vacation, holidays and such). By contrast our peasant women are working in this model 3,760 hours per year, significantly more than their fathers, husbands and brothers and wildly more than modern workers.”
To be scrupulous. Some of what your counting as “labor” for the ancient peasants still exists and isn’t part of full time employment.
To be a fair comparison, you need to add all the time a modern worker might spend commuting, cooking, cleaning, etc.
This probably doesn’t make a Huge difference. Overall modern people probably still work less.
(And we also might want to remove some hours from the 40 hours/week where they are present but slacking off?)
Reading all this in aggregate, I genuinely wonder why anybody went to the trouble of surviving.
You do backbreaking labor every day of your life, until you can’t anymore, and then you die. Literacy is nonexistent, and books are extreme luxury items anyways, nearly all of your food is the same four or five staple crops with no spices (Because those are also insanely expensive luxuries), and all of your neighbors are just as exhausted and miserable as you are. Even when you aren’t working, there is functionally nothing enjoyable that is worth the effort of doing. And the lions share of the crop you grow get’s siphoned off by parasitic nobility holding you at swordpoint.
If you are a woman, you are going to spend basically every single hour working, most of it for the benefit of a man you were forced to marry and who probably hates you and uses you for labor and sex.
You were born into a world where everything sucked, nothing was ever going to get better, and the only source of hope in life was the lie of heaven.
My pet theory is that the reason that christianity and cultures derrived form it have such a strong cultural and theological stigma against suicide is that without it, they simply wouldn’t have a society for very long.
Well the obvious answer is that if life were truly that miserable then everyone would have just killed themselves. Obviously they must have derived some sort of meaning from their lives.
But – nothing enjoyable? Really? There was still singing and dancing and storytelling, religious ritual, not to mention communal festivals or just sitting around at the end of the day talking with your neighbors. People, presumably, had sex, because that’s where children come from.
Life was hard, but they would’ve found ways to psychologically cope, usually the hope of religious reward in the next life. Women may have held a subordinate position in society, but they could cultivate their own spheres of influence over their children and within the home, and many women could also wield power through their husbands.
(This is one reason why patriarchy has been so persistent – women who are allowed power within it don’t want to risk it by defying the system, and especially elite women can get very powerful.)
These people cared deeply about their loved ones and their communities and wanted them to survive and be happy, so whatever work they do is for the purpose of not only keeping themselves alive but the people they care about. People in any society in any time are just as capable of the full spectrum of human experience – love, joy, friendship, but also grief, hate, and spite (and spite is a great motivator). Don’t fool yourself into thinking just because their lives were harder they were less human.
It certainly sucks, but it should be noted that the sucking is relative to our own, much better times that still suck but suck less and/or in different ways, and that the sucking would’ve been the baseline for them. They did not know we would reach our current state of not sucking, and the unattainable not sucking state of nobles would’ve been drilled into them from early life I think.
Although I must note it doesn’t quite suck as bad as you are putting it. Yes, there are no spices, but there are still local herbs to give flavor, and probably onions or garlic for flavoring, or other local plants that are known to them to grant flavor, and those are great. Yes literacy is non-existent, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to want literacy, or books to read, for the simple fact they do not have it and generally it is not taught to them to want literacy or books. Lions share extracted varies, but it’s generally enough to survive, although the baseline is still a tenth or eleventh I think. It would still suck if we or I or any of us in the modern day were to go and live back then though.
Tom Holt’s comic fantasy “Expecting Someone Taller” is about the Ring of the Nibelung, with all the Wagnerian characters still running around in the modern world. A modern man has come into possession of the Ring, but is horrified at its curse, which requires the owner to renounce love.
Alberich tells him that is a very modern attitude, and he has the luxury of holding it. To a peasant in the twelfth century who worked twelve hours a day, had two smocks and a plow to his name, and had to worry constantly that the harvest would fail, giving up love for all the treasure in the world was a no-brainer.
Assumptions there that I question:
1. The bulk of the diet is the staple crops, but a rural peasant might well be foraging berries, nuts, etc on the way to and from the fields or maintaining a kitchen garden with various vegetables and fruits. For one thing, they have a lot more vitamins than grain does. We also know they turned some of that grain into beer.
2. Functionally nothing enjoyable to do. People sang, danced, talked, told stories and jokes. None of these require money or equipment, and only dancing requires physical movement. The verbal ones could be done near constantly while working, unlike a lot of modern jobs which require the verbal parts of your brain.
3. Husband hates you and uses you for sex: I’m sure this happened, but I think it’s a bit grimly uncharitable to assume it was the norm. For one thing, most parents DO care about their children and would want to see them married to someone who would be at minimum kind to them if at all possible. Likewise, we hear lots of advice to young men to choose their wives based on a kind and pleasant temperament, presumably because living with someone you hate is terrible. (see the Biblical book of Proverbs for just SO many examples) Most people WANT to get along with their housemates.
To be clear, this sounds like a very hard life, and the structural unfairness of it is extremely real and we should not go back to it. BUT people are very good at making the best of things.
You might enjoy the documentary series “Tales From the Green Valley” on youtube for a series of historians trying out a lot of these housekeeping and agricultural practices. One gets the picture of a hard and exhausting life with a surprising number of small bright spots.
There is the cottage garden, small birds caught with nets or lime, communal eel or carp ponds and rights to fish, berries and pig in autumn, unlucky lambs in spring, dried fish in winter. All small things to brighten up the coarse bread.
Agree with all this- I think people have a distorted picture of what premodern life was like.
My daughter worked in a small organic farm for while during the pandemic. It was exhausting manual labor, even with modern tools. But she loved that job because of the amazing conversations she and her coworkers had in the field, planting and harvesting (and in the barn, washing and processing the vegetables).
She said that you got to really talk in way that never happens anywhere else in modern life because you had so much time together, which led to tons of laughter but also deep conversations. They’d also sing. There was also a lot of pleasure in being outdoors in a beautiful setting, and the miraculous joy of watching seedlings grow into plants and then into food.
To assume that a hard-working peasant had no joy in his or her life seems like a failure of imagination.
Nah. It’s the result of knowing how vile and horrific work is.
“We also know they turned some of that grain into beer.”
Unfortunately, this is quite misleading. What the peasants did was to frequently eat cereal soup. This was a perfectly normal kind of soup, having negligible alcohol content, and flavored by traditional recipe and/or ingredient availability. It is a regrettable eventuality of history that this practice developed into the modern form of drinking beer.
Ale-wife was a common pursuit in medieval England. Manorial records are full of women being given small fines for brewing bad beer.
The human will to live is extremely strong.
Indeed, it is after all the single most selected trait by evolution.
“If you are a woman, you are going to spend basically every single hour working, most of it for the benefit of a man you were forced to marry and who probably hates you and uses you for labor and sex.”
That’s a bit of a leap in logic. The fact that a marriage was arranged is in no way a guarantee that the partners will hate each other.
“The fact that a marriage was arranged is in no way a guarantee that the partners will hate each other.”
No joke. Especially among the peasantry, I suspect that the vast majority of the time the “arranging” was in-name-only, and more about screening out unsuitable partners than anything else.
You’re correct. The median condition for women was probably having just enough veto power to end up married to a man who did love you but also saw no contradiction between loving you and forcing you to provide labor and sex.
I’m not sure what you mean by “forcing.” Putting sex aside, most of us are “forced” to get up, get dressed and go to work every day, make food for the children and take them to school, and so on whether we feel like doing those things on a given day or not. So if you want to say that the peasant woman was “forced” to labor, fine, but her condition wasn’t different from ours.
And actually, sex is more fun than spinning anyway.
Not necessarily, in that time period the concept of marital rape did not yet exist*. Though, I don’t know whether marital rape was quite rare or common.
* And there still are surprisingly many parts of the world were a large part of population does not regard it as wrong. Apparently, according to a survey ( https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SG.VAW.REFU.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=true ) in certain countries a surprisingly large share of the women agree that ‘a husband is justified in hitting or beating his wife when she refuses sex with him’…
How strong a veto power women had was a matter of society’s economic conditions! As we can see in this series, in an environment where agricultural labor demand was very peaky, an adolescent daughter — by working in the field during the harvest — could bring in enough food to cover a large share of her own food consumption, and then also do other work for the benefit of the household. As such, while these societies may not have had many permanent spinsters (except the late/late ones), the parents could afford to entertain their daughters’ pickiness. (More tenuously and colorfully, marriage rituals in these societies often include a hat-tip to the idea that this might be an elopement or indeed marriage by kidnapping, that the parents may want their daughter back.)
In both those societies where subsistence labor is much less seasonally peaky (and generally the return to additional labor on the available land is poor, e.g. you can’t herd animals harder on a fixed pasture), and in the elites of any complex society, women aren’t self-sustaining in this way because labor is cheap, thus to the parents their daughters are an economic liability apart from their marriageability. This shifts marriage ages younger.
On the other end, when for whatever reason the availability of land is higher, thus agriculture can use a lower quantity of labor, and less strenuous labor (hoe agriculture being the limit case where it is still recognizable as farming), a single mother — with only a little drawing on horizontal bonds — is economically viable, massively expanding her power to veto. Presumably the current situation in the developed world falls here (albeit the respectability (as opposed to subsistence) threshold, particularly regarding childcare — and in our societies enforced by an institution, CPS or its equivalents — has increased absurdly, which I understand is historically unprecedented and thus doesn’t quite fit in this model).
I would like to note that there exists a very strong psychological incentive for a person to conform to te social group where they find themselves in. At its extreme forms, we talk about Stockholm syndrome and cult-like behaviour. However, in practice, it means that most couples (with very notable exceptions) learn to like each other, and often, sincerely love each other. An old Finnish proverb notes that love comes with the fifth child, at the latest.
Secondly, the household is an economic unit, and while women tend to work more, being a married woman was usually quite preferable to alternatives, which meant that you were working at least as hard, and would be enjoying much lower social position.
I’ll be slightly uncharitable and say that Brett’s last few posts are trying to score points by adding up work hours to get to a large number without looking at the intensity of the work. By counting every necessary activity, we can get to intimidating numbers like 3000 or 4000 hours of work, but large chunks of that work might still be effortless, pleasant or fulfilling.
It is possible to overcorrect and romanticize by imagining that field work was actually just a giant party of singing harvest songs and not heavy all-hands labor including exhaustion-related fatalities. But it’s also possible to be a bit too respectful and forget that much of those 4000 hours were “hold this distaff and do a spinny motion”, or walking unencumbered to the water well with a friend.
I do not want to move to that time, it would suck not just because of the work but also because of their dentistry and their food and the small community and and and. But people still had sex, enjoyed interacting with their animals and their neighbors, and had downtime (that may or may not involve spinny motions).
“By counting every necessary activity, we can get to intimidating numbers like 3000 or 4000 hours of work, but large chunks of that work might still be effortless, pleasant or fulfilling.”
Also, you can do more than one thing at the same time. For example, I suspect that spinning while keeping an eye on the three-year-old to make sure he doesn’t toddle into the fireplace or while watching the cookpot is something people are perfectly capable of doing once they have the knack of it.
And, well – people did sing while they worked a lot of the time!
Oh, I’m not suggesting these folks didn’t have moments of joy, didn’t find satisfaction in community, didn’t find comfort in their families and so on. It isn’t all grim misery. It is a lot of work, a lot more work than we do today.
But for them it was simply normal and there was always a feast day, festival, wedding or whatnot to look forward to. We’ll get to some of that in the last part.
For starters I think Brett would be the first to admit that these are all fairly squishy numbers that can be anticipated to be fairly imprecise and that the real numbers would vary between time, place and household.
For the reasons you mentioned I don’t find 4000 working hours per year to be a super intimidating number on its own, though certainly not pleasant. Pretending for the sake of argument that it is perfectly accurate to normal times, the intimidating aspect is that you need to do all that stuff to live, and there will be bad times, and as much labor as you can throw at the problems might still be a battle you’re slowly losing.
Distaffs didn’t spin. Spindles spun. The Mongol women had a hooked drop spindle they could use while riding and get the spindle to act like a yoyo and wind up back to their hands.
Even assuming that things were as consistently terrible as you ascribe, suicide is not a trivial thing. The extremeness and the permanence of it are probably going to be strong sources of aversion to somebody that is otherwise of reasonably sound mind and not truly desperate circumstances. Continuing to live is just kind of the default of a living being.
But as others have said, your perspective on how miserable the conditions would be is not sound.
According to Durkheim’s famous study on suicide (on data on Europeans from around the turn of the 20th C), rural peasants had a lower suicide rate than city people working industrialized jobs. The wealth and educational level of the community was positively correlated with suicide rates. Durkheim concluded that economic development was unhealthy for people because it promoted individualism, isolation, and anomie, rather than community and connection.
AFAIK this kinda adds up since I remember suicide increasing over the early-modern era. (the counterpoint to this is that it increases as violence and especially lethal interpersonal violence, decreases)
I always tend to bring up this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuIX1grFLpY (it’s actually from the 1960’s and is about a farmhand in the late 19th/early 20th century, but the point stands): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuIX1grFLpY
Point is, for all the constant, constant work. There are bright spots. People get drunk, they feast, they fall in love, they have sex, they sing and dance and enjoy themselves. They fought (sometimes for fun, really, there are A LOT of descriptions of people punching each other seemingly for fun) And religon mattered too: The belief in a loving God who will, at the end of things, make sure things are Made Right helps. (and people cared about this! Not everyone of course, but many people clearly did, the concern for ones immortal soul was real, but could also be a source of comfort)
You had friends, you talked to people, you told stories and sang songs and you slept. Peasants made art, they decorated their homes in what small ways they could, they tried to make their lives as beautiful and pleasant as they could. There were moments of joy that made life worth living.
And people loved thier children, they mourned them when they died and cared for them when they lived. They watched them grew up and were concerned about their lives.
Funny song. I would make two additional points. The first, implicit in the song, is that the routines, be they daily, weekly (drunk on Saturday, church or sleep on Sunday), or seasonal (plow, harrow, and sow), are themselves a source of comfort. Also, the song somewhat slights the comforts of wife and children, which probably do the most to reconcile most men to their lot.
Thanks! It goes into my music library. And some related ones seem promising.
Also, I was not expecting “Text: Astrid Lindgren”
It’s from the Emil i Lönneberga movies/TV shows. (I can’t recall if they were movies cut into TV episodes or TV episodes stapled together into movies…)
There are literally billions of subsistence farmers even today and they generally consider their lives worth living! Its worth remembering human happiness is in large part determined by comparison to expectations, quality of social life, plus emotional homeostasis (in the long run most people will average a rough happiness level). Expectations are lower (they don’t expect to be sitting around and reading lots of books!), lot of day-to-day interaction with people you know all your life. Heck there were quite a few feasts and parties.
In general, happiness does tend to correlate to things you would expect, but much weaker than you might think.
To give another example, while quadriplegics have depression rates a few times higher than the general population, most of them are not depressed, and studies have found self-reported happiness on average only slightly lower than the general population.
Not only did lots of people think life was worth living, but if you were somehow teleported to such a society, you would probably think life was worth living (albeit might take a little while to reach that point), unless you had some predisposition toward depression.
Also, while there was less ability to leave an unpleasant marriage, plenty of people would have had happy marriages. We have better documentation for the elite, and the majority seem to have had successful or even loving marriages (and they often suffered from culture shock issues less relevant for peasants). In a certain sense if you think about it spouses are really odd as immediate family members in that you get to chose them. You have no choice over parents and siblings and only limited over kids. Yet for both spouses and biological family you get much the same spectrum from great to nightmarish…
“Also, while there was less ability to leave an unpleasant marriage, plenty of people would have had happy marriages.”
Plenty of people?
About a third of all marriages get divorced nowadays, and those people had a lot of time to carefully consider whether they even wanted to marry, and whom they wanted to marry.
I mean, sure, one third happy marriages (I am sure a lot of unhappy marriages do not get divorced, and also, nowadays a lot of unhappy marriages don’t even happen) is still “plenty”, but … I wouldn’t like my chances as a married woman in the Middle Ages or before.
(And yes, I would probably kill myself, seeing as I am of the opinion that being raped is a fate worse than death. Unwanted marriage + sex is rape, however you want to call it, and marriage without sex wouldn’t have been an option for a peasant woman.)
The low suicide rate is more to do with the low expectations people had than with superior quality of life.
(I mean, we all know that investment bankers might jump out of windows due to having lost most of their money, while homeless people on the street, who have it objectively a lot worse, just continue to live. It’s the abrupt change from good to bad living conditions that causes suicide. Well, that and a genetic disposition towards depression.)
So while medieval peasants by and large did consider their lives worth living, that doesn’t mean that a modern person forced to live under the same conditions would want to continue living like this.
Though I will admit that I would not even consider suicide if I suddenly woke up as male medieaval peasant. Hard work is unpleasant, and I hate getting up early in the mornings as is, but it isn’t traumatizing. It is the sort of thing you get used to, with time.
(And no, being expected to have sex often enough to cause the pregnancies required for replacement rate number of children isn’t anywhere the same if you’re a man. I am sure any intelligent person can imagine why. Heck, a man could just decide to not have sex with his wife at all, and there isn’t much she could do about it.)
“Heck, a man could just decide to not have sex with his wife at all, and there isn’t much she could do about it.)”
Also something that varies a lot; many cultures give women at least some right to divorce. “Lack of intercourse” is one reason Jewish women can use in suing for divorce.
You have gotten a great set of responses detailing how these lives were worth living, and I have nothing to add on that score.
What I will say, is that many people did not “go to the trouble of surviving.” They fled to forests or other unfarmed land to take up banditry, and died. They fled to towns and cities to work for pay, and died. They found professional military and campfollower work, and often kept with it until they too died.
And there was also the violence to consider. Not only were the more ambitiously extractive societies subject to regular peasant revolts (where unarmored peasants went to pitched battle against fully equipped soldiers with predictable results), down to the personal level everyone was subject to an unfathomable-to-moderns amount of coercive direct violence. Children who didn’t learn their gender-and-culture-appropriate work ethics were simply beaten until they did learn, and the sorts of acts we would associate with schoolground bullying were lifelong phenomena. Like, when ‘child abuse’ as a concept was first identified last century, the deviance noted in the abuser was not ‘a desire to hurt’ but ‘a lack of care to avoid permanent harm’ when hurting, because until the 20th century ‘how to hit without causing permanent injury’ was just a universal human skill learned as part of growing up.
People were taught the hard way that they had to survive and put up with the circumstances, so they did, and tried to pass the lesson along.
I do note that both child and spousal abuse wasn’t just recognized in the 20th century: There are (sometimes laws, someitmes just policies, sometimes government instructions and propaganda) against that kind of thing. Their limits were often very different than ours, but they *did* have limits.
(my professor at uni showed us what amounted to an anti-domestic abuse pamphlet from the 17th century, it was in pictures and not text, and it involved the wifebeater being ganged up on by the women of the village (for unclear reasons dressed like nuns) and getting the shit beaten out of him, the message seems to be pretty clear)
IIRC from Sparta series, even acceptable treatment of slaves tended to have some limits. And Sparta was unusually cruel also on that metric, to the point that even other ancient slaveowners were noting cruelty.
My suspicion is that a varied work life for physically capable people isn’t as resented as you’re suggesting. My uncle was a farmer in season and worked in a mirror factory in the off season. Every year, one of the workers would throw mirror across the factory floor and go away crying, but rehired sometime later. Factories even modern times had target workers, often who shared digs (and sometimes drugs) and worked until they had enough money for some time off. One mill department in Martinsville, VA., had 100% employee turnover per year.
Just wait until you realize how much the lives of wild animals sucked. Yet they still live.
Suicide is painful, pain is scary. Instinct probably explains a huge part of it. The next biggest factor is the hedonic treadmill. Things suck less if you don’t get a taste of how much better they could be. Many modern humans who become blind or paralyzed get used to their new life, despite many people imagining that they’d off themselves if they every became blind or paralyzed.
And you get used to things sucking quite fast. If you don’t dwell too much with how much better things could be, surprisingly large hardships are balanced by the most minor conveniences. For example, after doing some combat training in a wet and dark forest, getting into a warm tent, having some of your clothes dried and being allowed to sleep even a few hours is a heavenly luxury. (Personally, one reason I am an actively drilling reservist is the fact that the associated inconveniences make the rest of my life seem positively luxurious.)
That is true. I am not worried about the happiness of male medieval peasants at all.
I can personally attest to how great it feels to just have dry feet, after a day of working in the rain in wet shoes.
You very quickly recalibrate your expectations to: “Hey, dry socks would be really nice!”
Just think about how much you would enjoy Christmas as medieval pesant! Especially if you are a man and don’t have to do the extra work connected to the holiday …
Now, the domestic violence women had to endure with no hope of escape, that’s a different thing. That is traumatizing on an emotional level. You don’t get used to emotional trauma the way you do to physical hardship. Yeah, some people live with it all their lives, but it has all sorts of negative effects on health, etc.
That, and tragedies like stillbirths, and the fact that people died of infection very often, were probably the things most medieval peasants thought sucked the most. Emotional hurt sticks. You think back to it.
Hard work? You get used to it, and the memory only makes any free time you have feel better in comparison.
My hot take is that emotional pain is also subject to hedonic treadmill effects, but I don’t have personal experience with that, only anecdotal observations, so I won’t die on that bill.
“the domestic violence women had to endure with no hope of escape”
Not always true, if you had relatives nearby to call on, or a sympathetic community. “Rough music” or “charivari” (basically a form of mob violence) sometimes punished wife-beaters. (Though at other times it punished men who were “henpecked”.)
In some peasant societies, wives could return to their parents if they didn’t like their husbands.
These men and women have family and friends to live for and “the lie of heaven” is functionally real to them as it would have been to most people anywhere anytime before the 20th century. Their life sucks to us because, to paraphrase our esteemed host, we live like elites by the marvels of modern technology.
Don’t even need the lie of heaven. Brett is also talking about Roman and Greek women after all.
I take it you must have never read before this about how that slaves had been treated on the plantations of the Antebellum US South or latifundia of Ancient Rome that this surprised you?
As premodern subsistence farmers look like they have it lucky compared with such slaves; as free peasants, and (sometimes?) also serfs at least were not put to work in chain gangs and did not live in constant fear of being whipped, their wives raped, and their families broken up by sale.
Curiously enough, AFAIK even slaves in the Antebellum US South were not known for committing mass suicides. I did encounter stories of mass suicides to avoid slavery in the Ancient Mediterranean but that was of free people who wanted to avoid being enslaved by capture in war.
—
Note, others had already came up with arguments one could consider better; however, I find it a bit odd that had not been brought up.
Slaves in the Antebellum US South did not commit mass suicide. In fact, they had a pretty high birth rate (much higher than Caribbean slaves). This seems to indicate that not only did they find their lives worth living, but worth bringing children into.
IIRC, high enough for the US slave population to keep on growing with (at least?) 2% a year even after the US abolished its (external) slave trade.
Hmm, I’m not completely sure of that. I have doubts most slave-owners would have allowed their slaves to engage in family planning; that would have slowed down the growth of their capital.
The things slave owners did to increase birth rates among slaves are positively stomach-churning. Suffice to say, the slaves often didn’t have a choice in it.
That’s fair. And the point that slave owners were willing to engage in horrific practices to encourage child-bearing is also important to note.
However, I am addressing the “why would you want to live if you had to work so hard” argument.
If there is a point where life is no longer worth it, it is a condition much worse than subsistence peasantry for most humans, I would just like to make the point that slavery in many Caribbean islands during the same time period (and colonized by the same-ish type of slave owners and growing many of the same crops) was so horrific that the slave population consistently decreased. Presumably all the same “fertility-encouraging” practices were used. Yet the work conditions on those islands was so horrific that people died in droves. I assume it wasn’t suicide per se, but it seems like it was bad enough to either make people decide it wasn’t work fighting to survive, or that it was just impossible to survive.
Whereas for the slave in the US, and most peasants throughout history, the survival rates were high enough for population growth.
“or that it was just impossible to survive.”
AIUI a combination of factors: very hard work and poor food on the sugar plantations (in part because the food was _imported_; the owners weren’t going to “waste” valuable sugar land on growing food); high disease rates in the islands; and maybe the imported slaves being mostly men (for their greater physical labor; I’ve read that the European purchasers of slaves valued men more highly, while African owners preferred women.)
@Matilda:
Do I even want to know?
J.K. Rowling on the birth rates of house elves in Harry Potter (they’re inspired by brownies, but behave more like human slaves than like powerful spirits, in case you managed to not even watch the films ;)): “They breed infrequently and only at the behest of their masters.” Veeery ugly implications there, but I never quite dared imagine what stomach-churning historical details she might have researched to answer the fan’s question that way …
High birth rates do not necessarily indicate happiness, indeed, I would say they more often hint at rape.
Only in societies where each woman individually wields enough power to abort any unwanted pregnancy (we do not have societies where women are safe from rape, but legal abortions are/were a thing in some places) can you confidently claim that the woman with children had them because she assessed her living conditions as sufficiently good to bring children into them.
Your modern work time excludes all of the *essential* maintenance tasks you emphasize should be valued in women’s labor. Obviously they’ll be less today, but sticking with 2000 for today instead of factoring in the modern equivalents is surprisingly lackluster
I attempt that exact apples-to-apples leisure time comparison right around footnote 12.
My pet theory is that the reason that christianity and cultures derrived form it have such a strong cultural and theological stigma against suicide is that without it, they simply wouldn’t have a society for very long.
I think there’s *some* truth to it, but I also think it’s not really about peasant life or pre-industrial life being terrible (plenty of people in extremely poor societies today feel that life is worth living, so i’d imagine the same has always been true). It’s partly about innate psychology- some people are just more depressive than others- and also about periodic, unusual disruptions (war, conquest, epidemics etc.) that might make people much more miserable than usual.
St. Augustine’s long and categorical discourse against suicide in The City of God, for example, seems to have been inspired by the fact that some Roman women during the Visigothic sack of the city committed suicide to avoid being raped. (I’m sure it had precursors in Christian thought, but it’s been particularly influential as a proof-text, and it had a clear historical context- the context, though, isn’t just that “premodern life is terrible”, it’s something much worse).
Incidentally there is very little evidence that disasters increase suicide rates. If anything they may *reduce* them short-term, what is known as the honeymoon phase (a very strange way to describe the immediate aftermath of a disaster!). Why is disputed by sociologists, but perhaps one reason is that essentially it gives people prone to mood disorders a legitimate ‘reason’ for their internal experience both in regards to others and themselves as well as a shared challenge with others.
I think people seriously overindex how dependent their happiness is on their circumstances versus their baseline. Depression rates tend to correlate with things you would expect, but not as strongly as you would naively assume. Even more so suicide is very weakly correlated with your life objectively sucking and suicidality rates very *widely* by culture. Heck in the US, blacks have about half the suicide rate of whites, despite higher depression rates. Which means a white with depression is nearly *3* times as likely to kill themselves as a black with depression!
Which is not to say I don’t believe suicide rates might well spike in St. Augustine’s scenario where there is a strong cultural streak of death is better than dishonor for female purity.
Suicide rates (along with reports of things like depression) fell to almost nothing during the Blitz. Probably for this exact reason.
Which is not to say I don’t believe suicide rates might well spike in St. Augustine’s scenario where there is a strong cultural streak of death is better than dishonor for female purity
Sure, and of course St. Augustine also wasn’t a statistician- he may have been doing the common thing of assuming sensational and much-talked-about news stories are reflective of broader social trends.
Eh, I am one of those people who are prone to depression, and I do think I would have committed suicide to avoid being raped. Not out of any cultural notion of purity, but because the trauma would tilt my mood towards suicidal in the long run anyway, and it’d be better to spare myself the pain. (Though of course, if there was the option of killing the rapist, I would choose that. Not really a survivable option with marital rape, but should be doable with invaders.)
Now, a nice little survival scenario, like having survived a plane crash and having to survive the trek through the woods back to civilisation, with injury, infected wounds and starvation, perhaps some bears thrown in the mix … that?
I have no trouble believing that it would make me feel less suicidal. Though not sure about the “external reason for internal feelings” – if your goal is “survive”, then you can actually *accomplish* it. Accomplishing things makes people feel good.
Whereas in everyday life, you may have many dreams that feel out of reach (the stereotypical spouse, two kids and a house, for example) and be stuck in a dead-end job that earns you too little to achieve even the house – and escaping that dead-end job would mean you have to risk being worse off, so you don’t.
After a disaster, well, your life is shit, but you can also try everything to improve your situation, because you have nothing to lose.
Plus, everyone around you is also coping with the disaster.
The all your friends being in the same situation thing might also explain why black people in the US are less prone to suicide. If you are poor and your friends are also poor, you don’t feel as isolated as the investment banker who lost all his money through bad investments and now cannot keep up with the neighbours anymore.
(Another explanation would be evolution – those numbers are for the US. Black people in the US are mostly the descendants of slaves. Slavery drastically altered the gene pool, only those with really, really good disease resistance survived the journey to the US on the slave ships in the first place. It may well be that all those enslaved people who were prone to suicide, committed suicide, seeing as the conditions were certainly bad enough to justify it. Do you have suicide rate numbers for black USians who immigrated to the US of their own free will? )
@Rose,
You make a really good point about evolution and selection- our psychology is definitely strongly affected by genetics, and I’d be surprised if propensity to suicide wasn’t part of that.
I also agree with you that the suicide and rape thing isn’t really about cultural purity- plenty of people today feel the same way.
Also, note that lots of peasant cultures have neither Christianity nor strong strictures against suicide, but they manage to continue.
@ey81,
I do think that Abrahamic religion probably does make a difference at the margin, but only at the margin.
Durkheim’s research on suicide found that rural, poor communities had lower suicide rates than wealthy, educated ones. He also found that different groups had different suicide rates, regardless of the fact that they all had the same religious prohibitions against suicide. Also, minorities experiencing significant discrimination had lower rates of suicide than the majority – and this holds mostly true today.
The social* factors that contribute to a high suicide rate are not poverty and hard work. They are isolation and lack of community and relationships.
*Sociologists like me don’t address psychological factors. But we assume that people all over the world have the same level of depression across populations. If that’s true, then the fact that countries or communities with similar ethic make-up can have very different suicide rates means that there is social factors that contribute to the suicide rate. And research indicates that premodern peasant communities, because they were close-knit, had the right variables for low suicide rates.
This also helps to explain a bit of the entire victorian Cult of Domesticity, etc: Women having worked in factories often stopped as soon as they could afford, not only because household labour at this point had higher status, but because it was important job that needed doing that would be neglected if you spent all your day wroking at a factory. So the moment your wage was no longer neccessary you’d stop… and probably higher a servant to help out the moment you could afford it too.
There is of course a great irony is that being a stay-at-home wife becomes affordable for a significant chunk of the population just as technological advancements mean it no longer has to be a full time job. (though increasing standards of course means it often still is)
I don’t understaffed how this aligns with your earlier claims that the average peasant household has too much available labor for the land they have, hence why the Roman system was sustainable.
The women’s work described here is all required to raise, feed, and clothe the workers. It should scale pretty linearly with the amount of labour, and not be strongly affected by the land-to-worker ratio.
If you want evidence for our host’s claims about how peasants needed more land, head back to part IVc.
Yeah, that was bugging me too. I’m sure theres an explanation, but It’s not coming to me.
Remember that much of the male peasant labor is on other people’s farms.
right, but we can’t simultaneously have the peasants both over and under worked. Women’s work, fine, that’s not getting used by the military. But either there’s more labor hours than work, or less. It can’t be both at once
As I understand it:
The peasants would be underworked, and starving, if they only worked their own land. Not having enough land for their labour forces them to work on other people’s land, which in turn means working under worse terms.
Imagine a peasant can do 100 units of work comfortably. 1 unit of work produces 1 unit of food from 1 unit of land. Imagine, also, that the peasant needs 80 units of food.
A peasant with 100 units of land is doing just fine; he has enough land for his labour and he eats well. He has 20 extra units of work or food to spare.
A peasant with 50 units of land is not doing fine. He needs to farm someone else’s land and take a cut of the results. If he gets 50% of the crop on other people’s land, then his 100 units of work leaves him with 75 units of food. (50 from farming his own land and 25 from the same amount of work farming 50 units of someone else’s.) This leaves him 5 units of food short, so he needs to work 110 units to stay afloat. Because he has too much labour for his land, he actually ends up overworked.
Look at the subsistence economics (the “business processes”) as fixed and the legal aspects as a transparent abstraction layered onto them.
When you taboo land ownership, you see a society where the peasants work all land (up to some threshold of quality), eat most of the food grown on said land (with a little going to the cities and even less eaten by the aristocrats), plus the peasants doing a lot of labor for the aristocrats. This is related to the agricultural labor peaks (harvest and planting) keeping 80-90% of the population in farming villages, and yes they do other subsistence work in the “downtime” between peaks, but they also have spare capacity which can be (and is) extracted. (Clearly, the labor demands of intensive farming cannot be higher than the population density, but they can be lower, leaving extractable surplus. The supply of labor-hours is an elastic balloon, work expands to fill it, stretching it with some pressure.)
Turn the land ownership lens back on. A whole bunch of the land — worked by the peasants — is, according to the society’s legal system, owned by the aristocrats. Hence sharecropping (and slavery, peonage, corvée, &c). This leaves the aristocrat with plenty of extra food, which they can use, among other things, to hire numerous household servants. (All societies that have written to us have included leisured people who could choose to spend their time on writing to us.)
Treating the legalisms as primary and causing the practices is when you see that, wow, landless peasants don’t have enough land to feed themselves, they need to sharecrop, and to sign up for other labor-for-food deals as well, working through the agricultural downtime to earn enough food to subsist, and consequently look at how many hours they work. Well, sort of. Since the peasants do all the work to grow food, and they do eat 80-90% of it, they would still have to work ridiculously hard even if the aristocrats went poof and their lands were parceled out. The only thing that would be freed up would be downtime labor, and since these peasants aren’t in cities or close to natural resources (other than arable land), they can’t use it very productively to manufacture material goods anyway.
Did you read IVb? That explains how many people can work lots of land.
I had the same question, especially around the harvest. With more land, the labour demand aggregated over a whole year works out, but since even these too-small farms are sending literally everyone in to the fields for a month to bring the harvest in, wouldn’t peak labour demand be the bottleneck on production rather than land availability?
They want to do all the harvesting fast to prevent loss, but that loss could be made up by having more to start with : if you need 30 units to live, your field produces 45, and the wildlife will remove 5 per day¹, then you need to get your thirty out ASAP. But if you have enough field to start with 60, you still want to rush to maximize what you get from the yield (because you only get one chance to harvest a year’s work that will LITERALLY keep you alive) but a delay won’t *kill* you.
¹ with accelerating growth as more animals learn there’s food to be had; 5, 6, 7… up to a limit. Because there’s only so many local animals, and as they are drawn toward your field so are their predators after them.
Thinking more, there are other options for trading away yield (food energy, market price, raw fabric materials, etc) for less peak labour: your example is bringing in the harvest a bit less efficiently, but there’s also using other crops than the spherical-cow maximally-efficient ones, or sowing at not quite the maximally efficient time, and I’m sure there must be others. But all of these still strike at the original calculations about how much yield a peasant household could achieve given arbitrarily much land that showed that typical households are massively under-landed: ten times as much land might only yield, say, three or four times as much due to the accumulated trade-offs having to be made to blunt peak labour demand, and totting up labour demand on an aggregate basis will give overly-optimistic numbers for yield.
That’s not how (least some of it) works. While animals eating stuff certainly matter there is a time constraint: The seeds will scatter if left on too long, rain or frost might ruin it, etc. It’s not something that can be really “paced out” by simply allocating more land. (unless you got an extreme and have plots of land at wildly different places on the planet, which runs into its own problems)
Since the last couple of posts have been specifically about women, I’d be currious to hear your thoughts on Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici. It’s a pretty popular pop-history book, and parts of it seem interesting and plausible, but a lot of the big-picture claims set off my BS detectors for reasons I can’t pick apart. Googling it doesn’t reveal many criticisms of it, and not many actual historians seriously commenting on it one way or the other.
I asked a similar question on Tumblr a while back, and received a link to the sort of harsh criticism you seem to be looking for.
https://bisphenol-a.tumblr.com/post/779485087404343296/more-or-less-all-of-the-data-supporting-a-link
Some comparisons between China and the West:
Unlike in the West, Chinese peasant women were always *taxed*: they *had* to produce more textiles than the household needed because some were paid to the state.
OTOH, as far as I know water-hauling was “man’s work” in China. You don’t see pictures of women with water-jugs nor are such jugs part of the Chinese ceramic tradition. What you do see pictured are men hauling water in buckets hanging from a yoke over their necks. It’s possible that Chinese women had the extra time for textile tax work because they didn’t have to haul water.
Chinese worked in bast fibers, cotton (?), hemp, linen line and tow, and silk. Silk fiber handling was partially mechanized early, and the treadle and harness loom was also early. Charkas (Hindu name but from China originally) spun finer thread faster than supported spindles. Peasants also invented horse collars which allowed them to plow with horses which were faster than oxen. A lot of this technology didn’t reach Europe until the 1000s and later. Wild silk from other species of moths was also harvested but spun from floss, not reeled. Camel wool and some coarser sheep wool for either spinning or felting was also available.
One thought occurs to me about Dr. Devereaux’s observation here…
our female labor model assumes these women are entirely focused on labor, non-stop, from sunrise to sunset, every day, which is simply not how humans work. There’s no real way to account systematically for idle chat, daydreaming, moments of rest or distraction (or moments where work needs to be redone because of an error) and such in our model because that varies so much person to person and task to task, but the value obviously isn’t zero. I considered adding something like a flat ‘productivity’ reduction in the model of hours by 20% or so to account for this, but decided to leave the model more or less as is instead.
Most of the data for how long activities take, both for men and for women, is coming from broad-level overviews that would themselves tend to “bake in” a certain amount of wasted time for, as noted, chitchat, daydreaming, brief rests, errors that need to be fixed, and so on. For instance, if you gather data indicating that the median Irish farmwife spent X hours getting water from the well/stream/etc in 1880, it is fairly likely that this Irish farmwife was herself pausing occasionally to rest her arms, stopping for a few minutes to have a chat, and so on. If Columella is commenting on how many tenant farm laborers it takes to harvest a field of wheat, he’s basing that on observed experience of real tenant farmers… who are, necessarily, occasionally stopping to sharpen a tool, take a drink of water, have a lunch break, and so on.
So to an extent, I think this is a self-solving problem. No real group of human beings can labor every moment from dawn till dusk, but the data in our model was gathered from numbers based on real human beings, who were already not doing that.
Yeah, I would second this. Dr. Bret’s figures already inherently have the 20% inefficiency he is talking about baked in. People definitely stopped and chatted, got distracted, felt rundown, all of that.
Heck on the chit-chat thing, in some areas in Africa there has been issues with women sabotaging water wells, because walking to get water was a great way to socialize with other women. Sure a lot of that talking was probably while walking, but I suspect they were not always refilling their water jug in the maximally prompt manner…
My Gran, born 1890, was never without her knitting. She regarded it as an enjoyable and relaxing occupation to be done when her work (housework) was finished. It was an interest, not work, though it was important for producing clothes economically for the whole family until roughly 1970. I wonder if peasant women felt the same thing about their spinning and textile production. It makes the life of the women less onerous if at least some of them enjoy the process. And, like my Gran, giving someone a hat or a scarf or a jumper (or whatever the ancients and medievals produced in house) means they might think kindly of you and maybe give you something useful, not as a barter, but more as a friendship gift when a need is seen.
As I mentioned in an earlier thread, many women of my mother’s generation (she was born in 1930) were the same, although she was not one of them. When I was a boy, several of the playground moms–there were very few playground nursemaids–would be knitting. When my daughter was born, my great-aunt Fran (actually a little older, born say 1920) knitted her a cap and gloves, the last of the hand-knitted items we own. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.
Why not just kill yourself at that point?
Why our ancestors bothered with survival at all is baffling.
Are you baffled by the fact that predatory animals bother to hunt, despite the effort and the risk of it? Evolutionary psychology is mostly bunk, but there is a point past which the basic answer to why a person continues working to survive is just “because continuing to live is the default”.
And like, these aren’t people who necessarily lament their lot in life. Nobody here is born into circumstances that will tell them anything other than constant work is literally the only way to ensure that they have food and clothes and a place to live. If it’s the norm, then people will normalise it. Hell, sometimes they’ll even look down on the prospect of things that could make it easier (although I suspect that’s a far more modern phenomenon for people who were far more privileged).
But still, there were things worth living for. Community, family, spirituality, artistry. And even when labour is hard and thankless, people can take pride in doing it well.
The more you try to sugar-coat it, the more soul-crushingly dreary you make it sound.
As someone with a degree in (mostly) evolutionary psychology, ‘evolutionary psychology is mostly bunk’ is at best a massive overgeneralisation.
I’d agree with something like ‘the understanding of evolutionary psychology that percolates out into the public consciousness as pop psychology is mostly bunk’, but then I’d argue that’s the case for most (if not all) sub-fields of psychology.
The idea that selection processes act on our neural circuitry as well is hardly a controversial assertion.
There are literally billions of subsistence farmers even today and they generally consider their lives worth living. Its worth remembering human happiness is in large part determined by comparison to expectations, quality of social life, plus emotional homeostasis (in the long run most people will average a rough happiness level). None of these things are inherently worse in these peasant societies. Expectations are lower, lot of day-to-day interaction with people you know all your life. Heck there were quite a few feasts and parties.
In general, happiness does tend to correlate to things you would expect, but much weaker than you might think.
To give another example, while quadriplegics have depression rates a few times higher than the general population, most of them are not depressed, and studies have found self-reported happiness on average only slightly lower than the general population.
Not only did lots of people think life was worth living, but if you were somehow teleported to such a society, you would probably think life was worth living (albeit might take a little while to reach that point), unless you had some predisposition toward depression.
I’d have slit my throat within a week of this kind of labor-regime.
Material comfort, wealth and leisure are what makes life good. Work and poverty are what make it bad. It’s not that complicated.
you have modern expectations of material comfort and leisure. i dont want to make assumptions about your situation but becoming a premodern peasant would almost certainly be a tremendous downgrade in your standard of living. it wasn’t a downgrade for them though, it was normal, and that matters a lot.
having had periods in my life where ive had a lot of work to do and periods where ive had a lot of leisure im not convinced that its as simple as leisure makes life good and work makes it bad. unlimited leisure time grinds away at you slowly and steadily until you find something productive to do with it.
i observe also that your measure of what makes life worth living seems entirely individualistic. many people would include friends, family, religion, reproduction, or social status as important factors in quality of life, all of which were at least as available to premodern peasants as to us
unlimited leisure time grinds away at you slowly and steadily until you find something productive to do with it.
I had a friend live with me for six weeks a few years ago, after he became unable to work because of a medical disability. He’s dead now (because of the same condition), but watching how unemployment destroyed him was really tragic and sobering.
You can see the same kind of phenomenon at the social level, all over the world, in communities with high unemployment (even where they get government assistance so that their basic material needs, at least, are met). There are very few things that are as bad for a person, in my opinion, as being unable to work.
@Hector I’d agree with that, but for a broader definition of ‘work’ than is typically discussed in these conversations.
I’d probably phrase it as something like ‘There are very few things that are as bad for a person, in my opinion, as being unable to feel valued’.
We just happen to value paid work far higher as a society, so it’s a more obvious route to the end product: to feel valuable.
Of course, it strikes me as very much a ‘privileged 90s white male complaining about ennui as the world about them is unprecedentedly good’ position to take, but I don’t necessarily think that criticism sways me from my belief of its importance.
You need time, energy and comfort to be physically capable of socializing.
How do you play soccer with the boys or gossip with the girls if you are mentally and physically destroyed by the burden of labor?
Leisure isn’t about lying in bed doing nothing, it’s about having your physical needs met without effort, so you can instead spend that effort on having fun.
You people really don’t understand what “leisure” means.
It’s not sitting on your arse doing nothing, it’s about having the time and energy to spend on doing enjoyable activities you share with people you care about.
Imagine a time traveler from 2225 being scandalized at how, in 2025, people have nowhere near as much wealth and material comfort as the people in 2225 do. And the people in 2025 have to work longer for it, too.
Whatever your reaction to that is, is what preindustrial peasant you would say to actual you.
This is not to deny the improvement! Yes, it very clearly is better to have material comforts, ample food, etc.! It is also better that nowadays, half of newborns don’t die in early childhood, and that people stay healthy longer (not just the easier-to-get-data-on question of “not literally dead”), and that for that matter, our “healthy” people are in fact much healthier than what passed for “healthy” back then! Presumably people from 2225 would be utterly shocked at how today’s US as a society just tolerates car crashes sorta-randomly killing massive numbers of people every year despite solutions having been discovered and implemented in other countries.
But if, on being prompted with the idea to compare the life conditions in 2025 to those you expect to obtain in 2225, your reaction is not to despair and commit suicide, then if you had been born in preindustrial times (and survived to adulthood), you would also not have done so, not even if you tried to imagine what 2025 might look like.
“people stay healthy longer (not just the easier-to-get-data-on question of “not literally dead”)”
Back before the NHS was effectively wrecked by a decade and a half of austerity-driven underinvestment, there was a lot of talk about measuring ‘QALYs’, which stands for ‘Quality Adjusted Life Years’.
If you wanted to find some data on the increases in *quality* of life rather than just length, that’s probably the buzzword to be searching for in databases and research papers.
“Presumably people from 2225 would be utterly shocked at how today’s US as a society just tolerates car crashes sorta-randomly killing massive numbers of people every year despite solutions having been discovered and implemented in other countries.”
Car crashes aren’t even the main one that comes to the top of my head (cough active-shooter-drills-in-schools cough).
Though I do get the point of picking an example that flies under the radar more than that to drive the point home that it’s something that’s *completely* normalised, rather than just tolerated by enough people to keep it being a problem despite significant pressure.
I know about QALYs (EA is good), but I didn’t want to lead with that. Unfortunately, this is not something “observer-independent” that can be just measured and then optimized based on that. Any implementation would be intractably political (as in, some people — for whatever reason (claiming to) speaking on behalf of people with this-or-that — asking for a higher/lower number due to how that would affect treatment decisions), would almost certainly inherently suffer from bucketing (pretending all cases under a label are equivalent), the boundaries of various buckets would drift over time, etc. Appealing to this artifact was not suitable for the argument; appealing to the intuitive sense of “we suffer vastly less from lice (laundry and other housekeeping), hookworm (shoes and latrines/sewers), bacteria (antibiotics), waterborne diseases and other mass poisonings (clean drinking water piped to the flat), infectious diseases in general (vaccines), etc.” was exactly what was required.
Likewise, yes, active shooter drills unnecessarily immiserate people and should be done away with. I wanted an example that actually kills and physically maims, though. Though I’d also mention that contemporary US society generally makes childhood and teen age inconvenient to an almost comical degree. First off, it doesn’t even consistently recognize adolescence as a thing, and routinely refers to e.g. 15 year olds as “children”. Concrete mistakes that rhyme with this theme crop up all over the place. Second, similar to active shooter paranoia, is “stranger danger”. Third, to make a larger jump, the way most American cities are laid out makes it annoying to move around without a car, thus to a large extent kids’ and adolescents’ mobility — and consequently, their ability to take actions that rely on being in some location — depends on the availability/willingness of some adult to transport them. Particularly as it affects social life (to meet with the friends of their own choosing, without parental presence or supervision) this “life subject to the arbitrary will of another” is …extremely suboptimal for humans.
Related tangent, because it has come up previously on this blog, and the counterpart was mentioned in this post. It is “natural” for kids, starting from an extremely early age (to modern ears, that is) to help out their parents or adults with economically productive work (read this as “meaningful work”). And for a fair chunk of their self-worth to be based on this — that they have (acquired) the skill to perform the task, and that what they just did was genuinely useful to the household. So obviously children and younger teens default to looking at school through this lens (this is the sense that the reason teacher praises work done well is obviously because the student was doing a favor to the teacher); call it the null hypothesis, if you will. Relatively early on they discover that this cannot possibly be the case. Some (including the professor) lay out the alternative that it’s coaching, i.e. guidance and motivation for deliberate practice. I just want to say, come on, who are you kidding, you remember what school was like, this hypothesis is somewhere between “not findable based on the experience of a student” or actively disproved by it. The problems start with admitting that by necessity (more in primary and secondary, maybe slightly less so in tertiary education?), the curriculum has to aim for a remarkably low-percentile member of the class, since later modules will build on it and so having anything like half the student body just fail to properly acquire any particular thing is unconscionable. So even the median member of any one class will, on most modules, waste quite a lot of time rehearsing that which they have adequately learned already. And then the problems get worse, including the famous “that will be next week’s material, it is bad that you have initiative/interest in the material and read ahead in the textbook independently of the curriculum”. Overall, this is why adolescents (and adults) in massive numbers become either atheoretic “school has no identifiable purpose/meaning, but — for that is the will of the gods — we have to endure it anyway (and making that easier, by using anything from chatGPT to a more diligent student, is an unalloyed benefit, just as long as one doesn’t get caught)” or its cynical version “the value of school is in the certificate of completion it grants, not the material purportedly taught, no-really-see-all-these-studies, as well as common experience (including the Professor’s own complaints about how tenure-track positions hire based on the prestige of the university the applicant attended)”.
Maybe this isn’t very good for subjective wellbeing and feeling-valued-by-others?
Call the above tangent the fourth. Fifth, and to tie all five items into a Gordian knot, the standards for childcare respectability (as opposed to subsistence) have become nonsensically high, and in our society they are enforced by an institution (CPS or its equivalents). This progressed to the point where great numbers of adults report either that they would want (additional) kid(s) but don’t feel able to match the (unreasonable) respectability standards for their care, or that they altogether demoted the idea from “want” to “sure, it would be very nice to have, but it’s {statistically unlikely to happen / psychologically not expected to happen in the baseline scenario / not being pursued}”. Meanwhile the kids and teens themselves, while not necessarily able to put it into words, wish for less adult supervision, less “programmed activity”, more independence of mobility, of scheduling, and more opportunity to be directly useful to someone. As has been brought up in the NLRG subthread above. But if a ten-year-old tried to do a grocery run for their family on a whim, then (quite apart from how long it would take on foot or on a bike, and the real-for-some-circumstances risk of being run over by a car driver) there’s a decent chance that they would be taken home in the back of a police cruiser, and their parents would be subjected to various legal proceedings on transparently nonsensical reasons (either stranger-danger or literal “something could have happened” i.e. “I can’t even think of any reason why what you did is wrong, but I want to punish you for it anyway”).
“Material comfort, wealth, and leisure are what make live good. Work and poverty are what make it bad.” But maybe you believe that because modern work is soul-sucking and miserable?
There is research in the sociology of work that argues that work in modern, industrialized societies is much draining and unfulfilling than premodern labor. It’s not just Marx’s theories of alienation, although I do find it plausible that working for yourself is more fulfilling than working for a (potentially idiotic) boss as a cog in a bureaucracy. Modern workers also experience much higher levels of surveillance, discipline, and time control than premodern farmers. We work as tiny cogs in huge bureaucratic machines, and it’s hard to see what contribution we are making.
Work can suck, but it can also be satisfying. The seeds you plant grow and grow, and one day there are beans or apples or whatever, and you get to rejoice in the harvest. You make plants into food, and your family gets to eat. You spin and weave, and your child gets new clothes. You chat with your fellow worker as you sew and knead and weed and plant, cracking jokes, singing songs, and sharing dreams.
I know I have internalized too much Protestant Ethic for my own good, but I personally find too much leisure time rather enervating. After several days, I usually fill it with someo kind of work – gardening, elaborate recipes, home improvement projects, volunteering….
“There is research in the sociology of work that argues that work in modern, industrialized societies is much draining and unfulfilling than premodern labor.”
Another example from my NHS experience that might be helpful.
I work in the back-office commissioning function of the NHS (and before that I worked for the assurance arm that mainly collected information and presented it to government for performance monitoring).
We get a fairly steady trickle of frontline staff coming through to these sorts of backoffice jobs as career development. A fairly common issue they come across is the transition from work that is immediately and visibly rewarding (i.e. treating a person’s injuries right in front of you) to work that is either nebulously rewarding (you cannot see the impact that you have personally made because you are distant from it and your individual contribution is small), or at best massively delayed (it can take years of work to get something off the ground that actually starts helping people).
This is still a common issue despite working conditions being quite famously worse for frontline staff than us backoffice folks.
The issues are more common and more pronounced the further you get away from doing something with a visible impact (i.e. it was a much bigger problem in terms of staff morale, productivity and turnover in the assurance branch than it is in commissioning).
I’ve done office work. I do chores around the house. I’ve done academic research/written a paper. I’ve done a BIT of manual labor.
While office-work is by far the least pleasant among them, especially since most of it is idiotic and useless, but the idea of doing long hours of manual work for survival terrifies me to my core in ways I struggle to put into words.
Manual labor back then was infinitely more stressful than anything us moderns can conceive of, because instead of an overweening boss, you were working under the threat of starving to death.
I can’t imagine anything more hideous than toiling in the fields at tasks that are so exhausting that they break the body, yet so monotonous and repetitive that they also stultify the mind, all the while being hounded by the terror of hunger, not knowing whether the gods will just shit on your harvest with some natural disaster and let you die.
So while I will grant you that idiotic office work has a unique kind of stupidity and poison, it’s still infinitely better than manual labor.
“I’d have slit my throat within a week of this kind of labor-regime”
Well you get points for having the weirdest self-aggrandizing assertion of how you would conduct yourself in the past that I’ve ever seen, I’ll give you that.
“Material comfort, wealth and leisure are what makes life good. Work and poverty are what make it bad. It’s not that complicated.”
Material comfort and leisure are attainable for subsistence farmers, and work is a thing that people can take satisfaction and pride in (in addition to the insignificant reward of BEING ALIVE THE NEXT DAY).
Like, there are two ways to be baffled by something. One is to find that it robs credibility from a position, and the other is to be motivated to understand how something can be the reality in spite of it being baffling.
You, I, and everybody else in this conversation is the result of thousands of generations of people surviving, and even occasionally thriving, within these material conditions. This fact cannot be disputed, you did not conveniently pop up out of the ether at the only time in history worth being alive during.
Figure it out.
Like, there are two ways to be baffled by something. One is to find that it robs credibility from a position, and the other is to be motivated to understand how something can be the reality in spite of it being baffling.
that reminds me of a nice quotation from a novel I like, “Wisdom consists in being able to differentiate ‘this makes no sense’ from ‘I don’t understand’.”
When someone says “work…is what makes life bad” i think it says more about the person saying it than about work, life, or human nature in general.
How is my claim in any way “self-aggrandizing”?
“How do you play soccer with the boys or gossip with the girls if you are mentally and physically destroyed by the burden of labor?”
Your perspective on the extent to which this labour drains all energy is at fault.
“I can’t imagine anything more hideous than toiling in the fields at tasks that are so exhausting that they break the body, yet so monotonous and repetitive that they also stultify the mind, all the while being hounded by the terror of hunger, not knowing whether the gods will just shit on your harvest with some natural disaster and let you die.”
Can you imagine people who aren’t yourself?
Or even the prospect that the yourself that you experience would not be the version that would grow up under these circumstances (after having been toned down to something less bleak and more realistic)?
I grant the point that the necessity of subsistence farming for the majority of people selects against a lot of lifestyle and personality types that can only thrive in a more liberated, prosperous, and technologically advanced society. Yet I feel as though history bears out a far higher frequency of people adapting to necessity rather than being so incompatible that life becomes impossible.
“How is my claim in any way “self-aggrandizing”?”
I perceived a subtext of regarding this kind of lifestyle as beneath you in it.
I suppose I see now that there’s some kind of misplaced existential dread, but… why? Like, this is about trying to understand people in the past, not place ourselves impossibly into these scenarios.
How is my claim in any way “self-aggrandizing”?
Because you’re presuming that your values, preferences and worldview are normative for other people.
Note that it is entirely that this prediction is accurate, but this would be fairly unusual.
Many people have not chosen suicide even in literal death camps. See how people behaved in German death camps, in gulag labor camps and other similar cases. With more extreme treatment suicide is appearing more often, but even with completely absurd mistreatment it is rather NOT a typical or universal response.
See also
“Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.”
and
“When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to?”
.
@Hector Though it is worth noting that while some kind of productive effort is needed, it does not necessarily needs to be a paid job – and especially it does not need to be a paid job of a bad variety.
Though it seems that some people at least fail at finding it on their own, if they need no paid job for one reason or another.
It does not imply that everyone(or anyone) needs to have a soul-crushing terrible job as alternative is worse.
Effectively many did, but not to just die for nothing. They ran away to get murdered, or become murderers and get killed in self-defense. They organized revolts against the landowners, which is basically just mass suicide-by-cop. In many eras leaving a rural farm was choosing death more often than not, and yet in every era people have left farming communities in search of anything else.
Yep. I definitely would have been one of those who went to join the brigands.
I’d live to horribly regret it, of course, but fuck life if the only way to survive is to toil.
Ah, see, now this is where you’re more unambiguously aggrandizing yourself.
“Why if I was in the past, I’d definitely have been one of the cool and awesome rebels. Toiling for daily needs is for losers.”
A lot of subsistence cultures have fought against what they could tell were impossible odds. Having a range of tasks over the days and years is rather satisfying. Working for one’s family was different than sewing in Nike logo patches to raise the price of a $12 sweat shirt to $40 (one of my students worked in a sweat shirt factory).
Working for one’s family was different than sewing in Nike logo patches to raise the price of a $12 sweat shirt to $40 (one of my students worked in a sweat shirt factory).
Different, for sure, but not uniformly better. Over the last month there were a lot of comments arguing that early industrial life (or for that matter modern post-industrial life) was unquestionably and self evidently better than agricultural life, and it’s good you’re pushing back on that, but I don’t think that the direct opposite is necessarily true either. I think it’s fairer to say that both had costs and benefits, and tradeoffs, and that some people preferred (or prefer) one, others prefer the other.
I wonder whether it might also have depended on the exact situation.
For example, I vaguely recall once encountering the claim that one of the reasons for France’s trouble industrialising had been the land reforms of the French Revolution creating a class of land-owning peasants which had it good enough that they were less inclined to move into the cities to work in factories than the landless agricultural labourers in, for example, Britain had been.
However, I don’t know how accurate that was, it might have been one of those internet urban legends.
@Tus3,
Well, one thing to bear in mind is that we’re talking mostly about an age prior to highly effective contraception, where (agricultural) populations, unless they were like stuck on Polynesian islands or other closed systems, were eventually going to experience population pressure. Even if you had the most fair and just system of land distribution imaginable, you would still face an influx of people to the cities in the long run.
It’s been very interesting to read that series of posts, but I’d caution a little against 1:1 comparisons of “hours of work” between men and women, and moreso of the conclusion in this post that the women worked more, or one in the previous ones outright stating wage discrimination due to disparity between spinners and male unsiklled physical labourers.
First, the fairly easy one of this post – it’s quite a good method to rename domestic labour to ‘maintenance labour’, but it falls right into a small pitfall – assuming there was none of the ‘maintenance labour’ done by men in that final comparison of time worked – which, well, given how even nowadays most tinkering, home repair and such remain male-dominated endeavours seems like it’s missing a bit of the work that would be performed.
Second, in regards to spinning – some of the wage disparity could be plainly attributed to simple fairness, not discrimination – pre-modern physical labour was bound to be, on many days, absolutely awful – cold, rain, snow, heat, etc. – would it not be fair to reward people (men) working in such conditions more than a woman doing some yarn spinning on the porch in the shade or even inside, in far more favourable conditions? Even as noted by the posts, here and in the ones about cloth production, spinning is not exactly a very engaging activity (once one has enough skill in it), possible to perform alongside many other tasks, even walking – or more importantly to our peasants – sitting in a comfortable place with others, talking and singing and doing basically what amounted to leisure in the period.
Part of which could also be tied to labour calculations regarding cloth manufacture here – at least when it comes to watching over kids or cooking, one could quite handily combine that with some spin work.
And a minor question that i just want to poke at – food preparation estimates are quite high in the comparison, which, well… 40 hours a week amounts to almost 6 hours a day, which is VERY high amount of time. Of course it’s possible to get to those numbers if one is fancy enough with their cooking, and without taking a look at what the actual fare of your average peasant would be it’s difficult to estimate – but seems high still – especially considering that the staple – bread – was oft made in bakeries, and a lot of what would be peasant food amounts to “Throw stuff in a pot, boil until tender” – stews, soups and so on, if needs be, which consumes far less time. On the other hand we’re missing stuff like chickens or dairy which would be handled by women if the family had access to it, so it’s definitely a non-negligible amount – but then again yet, if the fare is aforementioned Eintopfs, increases in time required for food preparation for higher number of household members would be more negligible.
My impression at least in the early modern period is that women probably *did* actually work more hours on average. Of course male labor was more likely to be heavy manual, so whether that is ‘fair’ might be somewhat subjective. Though some female tasks, like getting water and doing laundry could be pretty physically demanding.
One thing worth noting is that while women are a decent bit weaker on average, especially in upper-body strength, there does not appear to be any gender gap in terms of endurance. So while women might not be able to do certain jobs with the same efficiency, they could do them just as long. Longer probably since so much of women’s work pre-modern is going to be making yarn, very tedious, but not systemically demanding.
In terms of the cooking, I suspect the cooking numbers are a bit high. A medieval peasants diet is going to be simpler on balance and skewed much more toward porridges than a 1900 family. It is worth noting however that food preparation is going to take far, far, far more time in the time before you can just buy a pound of butter at the store. Wheat kernels to baked bread is *enormous* work if you have to do all those steps. Which is why even peasant societies often outsourced much of that, but the work still needs done by *someone* and means the household in return has to have a surplus of grain or other product to sacrifice.
Yeah, food preparation part is going to be heavily influenced by period and available outsourcing – access to a mill and/or bakery improves things significantly over having to mill grain by hand, which could actually drive up food-related labour demands quite strongly.
In general, food preparation, unlike many other kinds of work, would be, most likely, quite flexible – if you’re really strapped for time, you can just boil the grains into porridge and be done with it, whereas there’s no cheap or easy workarounds for spinning, weaving, laundry, cleaning, childcare etc. – so our peasant with access to good infrastructure and ‘spare’ time is going to eat fancier stuff – pasta, dumplings, pies and whatnot, whereas one with little of time or infrastructure will have to content themselves with porridge and stew or any other time-insensitive fare
Though water-fetching in particular is something that varies widely between cultures if it is male or female work. Probably because on one hand it is need of the household itself, but on the other hand is highly-demanding work sometimes a considerable distance from the house. Which is a reminder that who is doing what is semi-arbitrary, a combination of actual incentives pushing toward gender labor division and cultural gender norms.
Heck, moving past the farming population, working-class women would have had much the same problem as modern working women. Having a job and still being expected to do most of the household work. Except worse because workdays were generally longer and household work much more demanding.
‘Working class’ in pre-industrial period could vary wildly AFAIK – considering just women, you could have those engaged in mostly work like spinning, which paid shit (previous posts), making their lives very, very difficult, or, say, be employed as servant, which depending on circumstances could be far less of a labour demanding job, if one severly impacting personal prospects – in a sufficiently large and rich household you’d most likely have an overabundance of servants (to show off), which, while having heavy demands on their time, would have relatively low demands on actual labour.
Yeah, on a per hour basis, women would be likely to work more – even if they were *just* spinning yarn, if only because it’s something that can be done basically anytime, anywhere, year round, but that circles back to a part of what i’ve mentioned – sure, it is labour, but is not exactly demanding – an hour of spinning yarn and chatting with your neighbour is far less intensive experience than an hour of field work – hence, they might have been working longer, but have they been working harder than men?
Fairness bit is more to do with some mentions in previous posts of wages for various tasks – with spinning commanding some of the lowest payments, but in contrast for work that’d be far, far more chill than many things a man could employ himself for
Yes, and also a fair bit of male-coded maintenance was done in tandem with watching children, chatting, minding the fire …sharpening tools, replacing wooden parts, whittling, plaiting a straw hat or a basket …
Have you read any of Christopher Dyer’s work eg Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain, 850-1520 (New Economic History of Britain) (The New Economic History of Britain Series) by Christopher Dyer and other such titles? Another interesting work is W.G. Hoskins The Midland peasant: The economic and social history of a Leicestershire village ( I will admit to bias about the last one as a Born and Bred resident of Leicester).
Pedantic note: you repeatedly state rhis series is about the experience of “the majority of all the humans who ever lived”. Is it really true? How many people lived BEFORE the neolitic revolution, so before the age of agriculture? Because their experience has to be profoundly different, and I suspect there could be more of them in the prehistory than people living after the neolitic revolution…
Per footnote one https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ii-starting-at-the-end/. The human population before neolitic revolution was much lower then after it. There is a reason we call it a revolution. The invention of agriculture had massive consequences particularly by making large populations possible.
Thank you and sorry! It is so unbelievable for me I forgot about this footnote from the first part of the series.
Funnily since we’ve had industrial revolution, in the few hundred of years, most human who ever lived would not be farmer again?
Probably, but in view of the population implosion, perhaps not.
I did the maths once based on widely available data (Maddison mostly, IIRC) using Wolfram Alpha, and I saw that:
~90% of humanity after before 1 AD
~50% lived after 1650 AD
~25% lived after 1950 AD
This took 10,000 BC as the bench mark, but if you assume a slow, steady exponential population growth before that then the cut off barely matters because the population was so low. Also, I wasn’t doing this based on births but human-years (essentially births weighed by life expectancy). All the data is rather iffy and has huge error bars, but just how recent those cut off dates are is astounding.
To answer the question about peasants we’d have to know what fraction of the population was peasants at different points in. But even assuming that it was 75% between 1000 BC and 1900 AD (very likely an underestimate in both fraction and date range), we already arrive at over half of humanity.
“while older infants space our feedings more”
->space out feedings (although I like the implication that our host is an infant)
“but also a pale of what is presumably water”
“pail” I assume, unless the water is from Ireland or something.
Feel like there’s a slight bit of a disconnect here where you go to great lengths to note, correctly, that “men’s work” was also done by women when at all necessary, but then assume that any and all domestic labor was done entirely by women. Was there a reason you did this?
You noted that there is basically no in-depth sourcing available for most of these, since for whatever reason the authors we have available to us didn’t write about it, but that seem to me to imply that it’s perfectly reasonable to guess that fetching water, cleaning/repair work, some amount of childcare, and food preparation/storage would’ve been something the men in the house would participate in.
I mean, it seems on the face of it absurd to propose that in a household which is always teetering on the brink of subsidence, half the house works up to 50% more than the other half.
In a lot of these cultures there are often pretty strong cultural taboos against men doing ‘women’s work’ in civilian contexts.
I’m sure that is true, but there seems to be something mutually contradictory about saying that:
a) peasants were canny survivors
b) womens work was essential
c) if a household had too few women to do it all the men would let it go undone
I feel one of those statements has to be relaxed occasionally. There are people on this thread claiming that fetching water in China was done by men, despite the fact that we called it women’s work.
And if we relax it slightly, then we can take a couple with 2500 hours of mens work and 3700 hours of womens work, and have him do about 600 hours of womens work. They would now work the same hours, but he would still be spending <20% of his time on "womens work", mostly in the household where other people can't see him.
I feel it dangerous to take the minimum estimate for group A, the maximum estimate for group B, and then try to compare A and B.
(I find it easy to believe the head of the household would not work longer hours than his subordinates, but I can't deduce a figure for hours worked from that assumption.)
The best example of men doing women’s work that I know of is naval life. You have several hundred men crammed into a wooden ship, and maybe a couple of women on board (officers’ wives). Sailors became known for their skills with needles and cleaning and other “women’s work” because there wasn’t anyone else to do it. Pretty much any male-dominated group is going to have to deal with the same issue. There were tasks on the farm that required overnight work, for example (foaling, lambing, cooking charcoal, baking ceramics, and some tasks that you couldn’t stop until they were done), and men get hungry doing those. So someone has to cook. And if you have some downtime, maybe you take out a needle and thread and fix that hole in your tunic, or in your friend’s tunic because you’re sick of looking at it. I always got saddled with the cooking. Got good at it, but it was never my favorite.
I think there’s also a danger here of assuming modern sensibilities carried over into the past. Every culture is going to have different ideas on what work each gender should do–there will be some common themes (fathers can’t lactate, and being relatively immobile during pregnancy makes women default to certain tasks, for example), but within that framework there’s tremendous variability. We risk losing that if we discuss this in terms of the species as a whole. And that carries down into the household–every household will need to strike its own balance, so chores done by a woman in one household may be done by a man in another.
Finally, again, it’s simply not possible that men are going to be sitting around doing nothing while their wives worked, not for hours at a time and routinely, not in a household that wants to continue existing. The men may do “men’s work” that’s more mobile–carving tools, small repairs, projects that you can do during quite family moments–but it’s hardly unlikely that men would help with the “women’s work” as well. There are certainly many tasks on the boarder line, and “It gave me an excuse to chat with the cute girl” has pretty much always been considered a valid excuse. For example, carding wool or helping a woman put the spun yarn into skeins, washing dishes after a meal, acting as a frame to help women sew clothing, helping fetch water, and the like–all technically women’s work, but stuff that men have helped out with since the beginning of time (and, in the case of helping with the sewing, have complained about since the beginning of time). Every old farmer I knew would grumble and gripe about this stuff–but they’d do it, and helping one’s spouse never made you look bad in the eyes of the community.
I think the important thing to remember is that the taboos we know about are, like most things in the past, taboos among the upper classes. We simply don’t know how the peasants viewed things because no one cared enough to write about them. The upper classes considered peasants to be just slightly above the level of cattle, and who cares how cows divide up their tasks? And the two cultures could be wildly different–in England they literally spoke different languages. It’s very risky to extrapolate the prejudices of the rich and powerful, who could afford to waste time, onto the poor and powerless, who couldn’t.
Lordessa, where I grew up, an agricultural culture and economy, men did sit around for hours all day, particularly in the winter, while the women worked from 6 AM, making kids’ breakfast, making the older kids’s school lunches, even driving the kids to school, getting the laundry going, sewing, cleaning, etc. until after cleaning up the dinner dishes, the kitchen, overseeing kids’ homework, getting them ready for bed, taking them to bed, reading to them.
Their husbands were so bored they’d go ‘to town’ and drink. So many reasons by age of 5 I’d decided I’d never get married and I’d NEVER EVER LIVE ON A FARM.
” Sailors became known for their skills with needles and cleaning and other “women’s work” because there wasn’t anyone else to do it.”
“Sailors make excellent husbands,” one Patrick O’Brien character remarks. “Often away, and handy about the house when at home.”
If you’ve enjoyed this series, you’ll probably enjoy the BBC’s “historic farm series” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_historic_farm_series), in which a trio of plucky historians and archeologists spend a year living the life of moderately prosperous farmers during various periods of history—using only the tools available to the people of those times. It’s more “immersion journalism” than hard-core history, and there are gaps (e.g., nothing about child-rearing or eldercare), but entertaining and educational. If you can track down the docents who performed the work, you can probably get some hard data to refine your model for non-Roman (here, British) families.
I kinda still miss the point were the peasant household got all those fibers to make fabric from.
I mean I know in concept how sheeps are raised, were linnen comes from etc. But were in this modell is the work people have to put into raising sheep, or growing flax? Were is the work to have the means to purchase fibers, if the average family did not produce fibers themself?
Fiber is relatively non-perishable, so if a household is going to have to decide between using their own land to grow food or grow fiber, they can more safely choose food, and hope to find a way to trade for fiber. This can develop into a system where big landowners dominate local fiber production. Sheep, in subsistence-dominated economies, can sometimes pay for their grazing rights with just their manure; sheep will be moved through various fallow fields and into areas that are inconvenient for village farming, and in many cases the people with the sheep will end up being ethnically distinct from the farmers to the extent that they not only have their own languages but have whole sets of different rights and obligations governing them.
Yes, but how much do those fibers cost. In actual hours/days worked. Is it 2/3 of the respectability bucket? But what that if the family barley hit’s their respectablility bucket.
Or are fibers (unspun and unwoven) really so cheap, that they barley show up in a peasant families budget?
Have you counted the time when the women can’t work because they’re (late-term) pregnant? Does it matter?
Women who are 39 weeks pregnant can still spin, sew and mend, process vegetables for cooking, instruct their older daughters, etc. Perhaps they’re not doing the most physically demanding tasks (though it likely depends on the society), but they can still do quite a lot of their work.
Yeah, women in late pregnancy can do a decent bit of work still though fatigue easier. Really if anything its right after childbirth that ability to work is most reduced between recovering and the demands of newborns.
Thanks for the great article Prof Devereaux. I do have a question since I started reading this series through. If most peasants seem to live at this level of “subsistence + a little more”, what enables say, the Roman Republic to get that many soldiers in its period of expansion? Is the “little more” part enough to account for the extra weapons, shield and armor needed to arm the few adult men (ie candidate for the dialectus) as proper soldiers? Seeing as from the previous series on iron production, it takes quite a lot of resources to make full body armor + weapons for a soldier.
I think it may be that “having a deployed or deployable soldier in the family” got rolled into the respectability standard.
Yes, but also
a) Extraction (i.e. taxes) can come in the form of corvee labour, or being drafted. For the Roman Republic, the extraction part of the model, is rolled into having to send part of your workforce to the army.
b) As our host mentions regularly, peasent farmers are always long on labour and short on land. And leased land brings the lowest yield per workhour. Sending one eater away, to forage on enemy land, might just shift the rest of the family further into the respectability bucket.
c) As long as they kept winning, the roman citizen soldier returned home with loot. A few stolen bales of cloth might push a family further into respectability, than a worker, eating 3/4 of what he yields, after the rent for the land he works is paid.
Or a slave set to grinding the grain and fetching water. One chronicler noted the English women taken off to Scotland as domestic serfs in the wars (not doubt the same was true for Scottish women)
The property requirements will account for this, most likely, in addition to what others have said. Citizens who are expected to buy armor are also ones with a somewhat better situation/more land, so a bit more extra resources to buy the needed equipment in addition to day to day requirements.
Blog author has an academic book coming out that involves calculating all this out in detail, there was an in progress section released on patreon that did a basic calculation for land and labor requirements of the type used in these posts. I don’t remember if he directly said this, but if not it seems likely that having to cauculate all this out for the book was an inspiration/motivation for this series of posts. Possibly when the book comes out it will include exact calculations of Roman peasants vs. Greek, Egyptian, Greek settlers in the middle east, etc., because it effects tax collection and the amount and types of soldiers that could be raised.
Some thoughts:
On cultural taboos re: “women’s work and men’s work”, I’ve long had this sort of inkling that adhering to cultural norms is a bit of a leisure. IE, the more desperate your situation, the more that stuff falls away. So women stay out of the fields, except when they have to. And men don’t clean up around the house or cook, except when they have to. And the razor thin margins here would indicate to me that “have to” probably happened a lot. But of course the “norm” is what happens in prosperous houses and thus is what gets written down as the “norm” even if it is rarer than the exceptions. Now, it’s possible there were plenty of ogrish husbands who sat around at the end of the day watching their wives work, even after asking their wife to come help them finish up in the fields. Goodness knows many couples work that way even today. But obviously the ones with husbands willing to pitch in where needed are going to be the ones that have a better chance of actually surviving.
On time, it occurs to me that many of the tasks on both sides require a lot of “waiting”. Which is not to say they generate free time, but they do reward being able to spin a lot of plates. It’s not as if you just plant crops and then sit on your hands for several months, nor can you put the stew on and it will just make itself. But there is mandatory downtime from that task, where you can fit in another task. And this is a way to reward particularly smart or diligent planners. A good farmer can’t make the crop grow any faster. But he can make sure all the other tasks are done when the harvest comes in, so that no tools are breaking during the harvest, etc. And a skilled housewife keeps a dizzying number of plates spinning such that the hours needed for each task are able to overlap considerably.
And this leads into my final observation. Our leisure time is very important to us in evaluating our quality of life. In fact, most of us consider our work hours to be either stolen or at best, bought, a price we pay to have the rest of our time to enjoy. By necessity, peasants would have to learn to overlap leisure with work just as they overlapped work tasks with each other.
And what do we do with our leisure time? Listen to music, watch stories on TV, maybe pretend to farm or mine in Stardew Valley and Minecraft? You see where I’m going, but of course my point is not to equate our situations at all or to picture peasantry as this idyllic thing. The “intentionally stressful” leisure activities we enjoy like complex strategy games are enjoyable specifically because of the removal of real world stakes, so it’s not like a savvy housewife planning out her day is enjoying the same leisure as someone playing a management sim. However, she is (by necessity) exercising some of the same skills in labor that we may choose to exercise in leisure (and a whole lot more exercise, to boot).
All that to say, you tell stories while you spin. You make a game out of harvesting. You sing and compete and optimize and play around all those necessary tasks, because you’re not getting a few hours of video games to wind down at the end of your day. This is your life, so you might as well find ways to enjoy it. And I am confident that they did (and do).
There’s ‘work’ – activity someone else makes you do, hopefully for money, and there’s work – the activities that you do both to stay alive or enjoy yourself. A lot of peasant life was in the second category, and all mixed in – as in threshing in a group, singing as you whacked away, competing a bit but not so much as to show off, with an eye to the women bringing in the sheaves …The labour on the lord’s farm was resented, very much in the first category. Harvest was brutal and anxious, but the rest of life not so much.
My great aunt, the wife of a (by then retired) coal miner, still had a pump in her backyard in England in the 1960s. Although that was admittedly very old fashioned and unusual by then
Just dropped in to say how much I love your series on the peasants’ life. Thank you for writing this!
And I’m always surprised by how many aspects of it I can see in the living memory of my own family (I’ve grown up in a small town in Russia). For example, my great-grandmother, born 1917, still had a spinning wheel and a distaff in her house, and she knew how to use them, although of course by the time I was around she hasn’t used them in a long long while. And I remember a story about another great-grandmother who would instruct her daughter how a woman must never have her hands idle – she must be always spinning, sawing, knitting and the like, especially if there are guests in the house. Also I’ve seen and operated a water well, the kind with windlass.
And even though all of my parents and grandparents had “normal” urban jobs, we’ve continued to grow potatoes and other vegetables at our dacha through the 90s, and, the Russian economy being what it was at the time, those provided a non-trivial part of the family’s total calorie intake. Later as a teenager I didn’t understand and was quite annoyed that my parents and grandparents were so adamant that growing potatoes is an absolutely vital skill everyone must have. But now as I’m reading these series many years later – yeah, I understand why they would see it that way. I mean, it’s one thing being told that “at least you can always feed yourself this way, whatever the economics are”, but it’s another thing to realize that I’m on the receiving end of an unbroken tradition going back literally for millennia (not for potatoes specifically ofc, but for growing food in general). So yeah, I feel a lot more connected to my family history now.
(Also, as a kid I totally did drink raw milk which hasn’t been boiled and has come from a cow less than an hour ago lol. It was considered perfectly normal then. Doesn’t mean it’s safe or good idea though, I guess)
Does anyone else find it hilarious that several men here are so serious about refuting the very idea that women work longer and harder than men in these peasant – agricultural societies? Also in herding societies, as the Bedouin women informed women like Gertrude Bell, who copied down what they told her, and made drawings as well.
It’s a belief that patriarchal men are *protecting* women from the harsh realities of the world, that yes these patriarchal societies denied women legal rights, decision making, financial independence, etc but as compensation they didn’t have to work as hard.
If there is in fact this large a gap between male and female work hours, that suggests that some of the listed female work could have been handed off to men until it balances. It’s possible that this doesn’t make sense because the male work requires much more physical exertion and thus needs more recovery time. But if not so, most of those tasks could be done by a man. Obviously breastfeeding cannot, and men may lack both practice in textile tasks and the ability to do them well because their hands are too big and strong for that sort of fiddly job. But men and boys could easily cook, haul water, or clean. Is there some sort of cultural disdain for doing “woman’s work” that prevents that sort of thing?
The physical differences between men and women aren’t incapacitating when it comes to the majority of work types. Most men can use a spindle or loom just fine; most women are capable of hard agricultural work. Chopping wood or steering a plough doesn’t require more “recovery time” than hauling water or hoeing a field.
But the average greater strength of men does convey an advantage when it comes to violence. Seems to me that’s the most compelling hypothesis for why we see patriarchy evolving over and over again in so many different cultures around the world. Patriarchy includes categorizing all kinds of activites by sex and stigmatizing people who don’t “act their gender”. It also virtually everywhere justifies violence against women, including women who try to “hand off” work to their husbands.
So the imbalance in work hours between men and women can ultimately be explained the same way as the imblance between lord and peasant: it’s an injustice underpinned by socially sanctioned violence.
> aren’t incapacitating (…) most women are capable of hard agricultural work.
note that differences may be noticeable and serious without being incapacitating
> So the imbalance in work hours between men and women can ultimately be explained the same way as the imblance between lord and peasant
this element is definitely present, denying it is silly
but I am not convinced that it is sole reason and explains 100% of it