Chatting about the history of women at work on the @Ready or Not podcast. Throughout all of history, women have always worked. The myth that women entering the workforce is a modern phenomenon and a product of feminism, of necessity, of women abandoning their “natural roles” is one of the most worst and most easily disproved lies we tell. Women have always worked. They worked in the fields alongside men for most of human history. They brewed the beer that sustained medieval communities. They ran market stalls, managed estates, operated looms, delivered babies, taught children, nursed the sick. In ancient Rome they owned ships and managed farms. In medieval Europe they ran guilds. In colonial Australia they worked in factories, on farms, and in domestic service from the moment they arrived. The idea of the woman at home, not working, supported entirely by her husband… that is not the historical norm. That is a brief, specific, class-dependent anomaly that existed for a sliver of middle-class Western women in the mid-twentieth century. And even then, they were working. They were just not being paid for it. - @ashbg.motherhood