The Changing Role Of Women In Hunter Gatherer Societies

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While movies and television may frequently show women as being seen as weak and unimportant in hunter gatherer societies, they were actually seen as equals during that time by a majority of these societies. Until such time as when the Neolithic era began, women were seen as equals, and suffered from almost no form of systematic subjugation. When the Neolithic era began and people started to develop permanent societies, women began to lose importance. Agriculture meant that work required more heavy lifting, and settlement also meant that humans could reproduce more, causing women to be less helpful with work, and making it more necessary for them to take care of the child. Men became economically valuable, making men and sons seem more …show more content…

Because of this, they were given equal influence in society. When agriculture developed women no longer needed to harvest plants from the forest and no longer seemed as beneficial to society as the men were. With the development of permanent societies there also came the ability to have larger numbers of children and the ability to support them. Women were now having more children than they had during the Paleolithic era, when people were still hunter-gatherers. The baby boom caused by the development of a more permanent type of society forced women to stay at home more so that they could take care of their children. Because women were stuck at home taking care of children, they were seen as less valuable to society then men were, despite the fact that they had to do work taking care of the house and raising children, which didn’t make women more economically valuable. The fact that men could do a lot of heavy lifting and complete large amounts of farm work meant that they were economically valuable. This caused men and sons to be seen as more valuable than women, because they were the ones mainly working and making

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