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Comment by ASNRAlpha | Hacker News Reader

These power structures have existed for millennia, so this abstracted idea that women wanting to step out of their traditional gender roles ONLY in the last century is a bit arbitrary.

It makes much more sense that because the ruling class wanted a bigger work force they sanctioned for (or at the very least turn a blind eye) women’s role in the work force.

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Exactly two millennia. The role of housewife didn’t really exist until the 1820s, and even then it was more of an upper-middle class thing and a distinctly American concept. It didn’t even really take off until the industrial revolution when factory jobs became more mainstream.

It was also created by corporations, largely to sell magazines, cookbooks, and home appliances.

Everywhere else in the world, especially outside of cities, the labor of the home was evenly divided because everyone in the family had jobs.

That’s two centuries, not millennia.

More obvious explanation is that the movement really took off after the World Wars, as there was a huge labor shortage on the market to be covered, in the form of a whole generation of young men who never came back from the meat grinder.

And many women spent WWII in factory jobs or even more directly combat-related roles especially in Europe. (Just finished reading a book that mentioned how Mary Churchill--daughter of that Churchill--ended up commanding an AA battery.)

While, of course, the period after is probably widely seen as classic white picket fence suburbia, the WWII experience couldn't have helped but set some changes, however slow, in motion.

Do we have examples of the 1970s women's lib movement (for one example) receiving broad financial, social, and political support from large corporations across multiple industries?

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