"Women only started working very recently so a woman's place is the house-" shut up and feast your eyes at old photos of women from around the world doing physical labor only for them to return home and solely care for 5-10 children and the elderly parents of their husband.
Greek women represent:
These photos show Greek women doing the type of physical labor they would perform more often than not. At the luckiest working conditions for rural women (aka most of the country) they would start working the fields as children and when they got older they would work the same fields with their own babies on their backs.
On the way home from the fields, sometimes the women would carry the wood and the mule would carry the man so he could rest.
Of course, we can talk about the manual labor that is rubbing cloth and metal for hours on end, chopping and carrying wood to light a fire for a large cauldron your size, and stirring it for hours.
But we can also talk about how it wasn't for them to break and carry rocks in baskets for the making of new roads. They would gather salt, olives, and grapes and carry them on large baskets filled to the brim. For salt they carried thirty kilos each trip, doing fifty trips each, stepping shoeless on the grains of salt.
Carrying water was also their job, often moving large barrels with all the water a house of 10 needed upon hills that horses and mules had trouble ascending.
(more photos for salt mining and carrying here)
It's no hyperbole to say these women carried their incomes and households on their backs. "The good she-housekeeper is a slave and a lady" the old Greek saying goes. A "good woman" was a woman who could be strong and work at home and in the field, often described with the qualities of a mule. Men took their wives out in the fields so much that some who were a bit more educated had to make their husbands sign that they wouldn't ask them to work alongside them in the fields! (source in Greek)
Some of these photos are also from 1970. I'm missing a photo from Leukada showing women carrying baskets of the stones they broke, and I'll add it here when I find it.
Basically, women were out of the house forever. A woman who got to stay home and never perform any labor had some type of privilege (wealth, status etc). Same as the many privileged men around the world who didn't perform any labor at all.
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God bless this post. My grandma did not start working in the mines at the sweet age of 12 (on top of household chores + agricultural work) for you people do go around with that tradwife bullshit.
I know it’s hard for those people to imagine a woman can be anything else but a white wealthy American straight out of a 1950s advertisement, but the truth is the only thing that’s recent is women’s (labor) rights…
Precisely! There's nothing traditional about being a Trad-wife! A modern "Trad-wife" in the US has significantly less children and responsibilities than women around the world the previous centuries. (Which is good, btw, I don't want any more women worked to death. But I'm saying that this restriction is a modern invention)
Also one income was NEVER enough to sustain a family. This was possible only in some cases and for a few decades, like... in the 1% of cases in Human history. Normally the whole family had to work!
Have these people forgotten that every state around the world at some point had to beg and threaten families to let children go to school instead of taking them to the fields, the sea, the mines? Have we forgotten the child workers at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution? Children with families, most of the time. Why do you think the parents sent their 7-year-old kids to the factory? So they could buy another yacht or another villa?
Adding the washing of clothes; how the women beat the clothes by the river with a big, thick log which they raised with their muscular arms. The whole area echoed as if a war had just started. Oftentimes women were saying they couldn't feel their arms/hands from the ongoing beating.
After they were done, they bathed themselves and their kids, gossiped, laughed, and told stories, as well as taught their children things about the surrounding nature.
In the Odyssey we also get the scene of women washing their clothes this way. In the recent Greek tradition there are many songs written about women washing clothes this way, even romantic ones. In the song below a man sings to his mother about a young woman (kore) he saw washing clothes in the river. She was beautiful, her log was silver and the plate upon which she washed was marble. He's ready to give her his horse, his weapons and 500 coins for a kiss.
source: arcadiaportal
