Females ALWAYS worked. ALWAYS. They were just unpaid and exploited labor, locked into a specific job role with no choice in the matter.
Of course females always worked. It's just that feminism is a materialist, individualistic philosophy that is rooted, since at least the 2nd wave, in marxist economics. You use that lense to analyse the world and everything comes out as either the exploiter or the exploited and the only way value and reward are represented is in money. If you want to analyse the world in that kind of money focused way, then I'm sure you will get the result out that women were exploited. is that the right way to look at things though?
"Women didn't work".
FFS, have you ever had to clean the house, do the dishes, the shopping, the cooking, the laundry, the planning for the day, AND care for a child? And not merely for a third of your day, but from when you get up to when you go to bed.
If you are going to read this in to what I said there is no point in us talking. Either you are dishonest, or I don't know. You just persist in responding to this cartoon 2nd wave feminist caricature of the enemy and absorb nothing I say. I like you, but I feel like I am wasting my time.
{less annoyed response ----->}
I was talking about wage labour.... "going to work". When I unblock the toilet, I don't expect to be paid money for that and it wasn't the kind of work I am talking about. This reducing of the concept of value and reward to whether some employer is handing you money that the government taxes is part of the issue that I am talking about. Feminism values at zero many aspects of the traditional female experience. I can see why it makes sense from an activism perspective to do that, but is it a sane world view if we aren't doing activism? Soft power is counted as zero.... hard power and official power are the only things that count. Having and looking after children is seen as unrecompensed work, since no money is handed over for it.... there are surely rewards that come from having children that aren't about money? My wife seemed to derive some happiness from it - that is counted as zero though because it isn't pay. In the old world, and even a little in the new, children were a long term investment in a financially stable future.... they were kind of like the pension for the parents. We count that as zero though. Women also control most of household spending, but we are focused on who earns the money not who gets to spend it for.... reasons.
How would we even pay for "women's work".... do we just say that every woman is equally terrific at it and they should be paid equally? How much.... I mean, it's a bit like being a kindergarten teacher where people are drawn to the work, so maybe they should be paid really badly? But then there will be the complaint that we aren't valuing the work, even though there are obviously these other rewards but we want to pretend that the whole of the value is in the pay, so we should pay women as if they had some kind of high powered office job? Do we just compensate them at the rate of the job that they would otherwise be doing? But what about people women who just want to be homemakers.... do we not pay them, so we value their work at zero?
Where this kind of thinking leads is to people increasingly handing over their children to be raised by others while they work. If you insist on viewing motherhood and everything else that goes along with it in capitalistic terms and demanding the state fix it, capitalism and the state will come and take it over. It's like inviting a vampire into your house.
ETA: You seem to have missed the roll of Protestantism in the development of both mercantilism and enlightenment.
No I haven't. Weber's The Protestant Work Ethic is an excellent book which I recommend. None of this stuff came from nowhere, but the soil has to be ripe for a particular idea to flourish. Aspects of liberalism go back to early Christianity and the equality of souls, but liberalism was hardly an idea that was going to do well at the time of Charlemagne. Giving an explanation at one level does not mean that one denies explanations at all other levels.
If we are talking about Protestantism, as far a I'm aware, the big thing that saved Martin Luther from the fate of Jan Hus was having a bunch of northern European nobility who were jealous of the power of Rome and were ripe for an ideology that justified them.
We agree.