Home making

Feminism maintains that it recently freed women from the oppressive confines of the home. This is a cornerstone of many feminist arguments.

In hunter-gather cultures women were active in obtaining food for the community, participating in hunting and gathering alongside men and children in many cases.

Following the development of agriculture women were often in the fields alongside the men and children. Few families were wealthy enough that they could afford to maintain people who did not contribute at least part of their time to agriculture.

Women in Renaissance Europe earned trade qualifications, worked alongside men in those trades, and sometimes ran their own businesses.

They also had take-out food in medieval and renaissance Europe - a lot of women worked in the service industry providing take-out food then as now.

When industrialisation occurred women could often be found in factories alongside men and children.

The idea of the stay-at-home mother is quite a recent one and came about largely as a result of increasing material wealth. It was in fact a conspicuous demonstration of wealth to be able to show that some members of your family need only keep house and raise children. As wealth grew this phenomenon spread from the wealthy classes to the middle classes.

But then feminists engaged in historical revisionism and convinced the bulk of the population that women had been oppressively confined to the home throughout history.

The feminist historical narrative is so pervasive that even many anti-feminists don't question it.