[Type R]

Originally Posted by Ester

Reason being that you cannot go against what nature has perfected for thousands of years: men are supposed to be the providers while women were made to nurture and ensure that everyone in the family is happy and healthy.

Originally Posted by grip_daddy

I view it this way:
For thousand of years men have been the material providers for the family, whereas women have played the crucial and most important role of managing the materials, the home affairs, kids, and family relation to the larger community.

Strangely enough, in traditional Africa, women: -

* carried out barter trade
* built the huts (construction industry)
* herded cattle/goats
* dug, planted, weeded, harvested
* pounded grain and legumes into flour (millet, sorghum, beans, etc)

Industrialization took away very many industries from women. Society is overall richer, but she has been relatively disadvantaged. Grain milling is now an major industrial process, run almost entirely by men. I have never seen a woman ploughing with a tractor, but all the way from Malindi to Busia, I see peasant women tilling the land with jembes and pangas. I have never seen a (modern) woman mason, but I have seen Maasai women slapping dung onto a stick frame at manyattas. Even modern farm management leaves women out.



Overall, traditional women's roles are becoming more deprived by industrialization, in a very subtle manner -- most people don't notice. When a modern man says, "a woman's place is in the home", he means something very different from his great-grandfather.