Gender in History. Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

it was first developed, and slowly larger and larger parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas became home to farming villages. Domesticated foods often included cereals or other crops that could be ground and cooked into a mush soft enough for babies to eat. This mush – for which there is widespread archaeological evidence – allowed women to stop nursing their children at a younger age. By doing this, women lost the contraceptive effects of breastfeeding, and children were born at more frequent intervals, which contributed to population growth.

      A field of planted and weeded crops yields 10 to 100 times as much food – measured in calories – as the same area of naturally occurring plants, a benefit that would have been evident to early crop-planters. It also requires more labor, however, which was provided both by the greater number of people in the community and by those people working longer hours. In contrast to the 20 hours a week foragers spent on obtaining food, farming peoples were often in the fields from dawn to dusk, particularly during planting and harvest time, but also during the rest of the growing year because weeding was a constant task. Farming increased the division of labor within communities, as families and households became increasingly interdependent, trading food products for other commodities or services.

      At roughly the same time as plant domestication, certain animals were domesticated in parts of the world where they occurred naturally, and then, like crops, taken elsewhere. Dogs were the first, then sheep and goats, and somewhat after this cattle, water buffalo, horses, llamas, and poultry. People learned from observation and experimentation that traits are passed down from generation to generation, and they began to breed animals for qualities they wanted, including larger size, greater strength, better coats, increased milk or egg production, and more even temperaments. Animal domestication shaped human evolution; groups that relied on animal milk and milk products for a significant part of their diet tended to develop the ability to digest milk as adults, while those who did not remained lactose intolerant as adults, the normal condition for mammals.

      Where terrain or climate made crop-planting difficult, animal domestication became the primary means of obtaining food; people raised flocks of domesticated sheep, goats, cattle, reindeer, or other grazing animals, a system termed pastoralism. In some areas pastoralism can be relatively sedentary, and so easily combined with crop-raising, while in others flocks need to travel long distances from season to season to obtain enough food, so pastoralists became nomadic, sometimes using horses to travel further. In Eastern and Southern Africa, many groups were pastoralists, with the men typically caring for cattle (the higher-status animals), and the women caring for smaller animals such as goats. In later periods, cattle often formed the bridewealth that husbands presented to their wives’ families on marriage, with fathers and male elders retaining control over young men’s marriages through their control of the cattle. (The introduction of wage labor with colonialism would later upset this control as then the young men could buy cattle for bridewealth or present this in some other form.)

      Nowhere do archaeological remains alone answer the question of who within any group first began to cultivate crops, but the fact that, among many foragers, women have been primarily responsible for gathering and processing plant products suggests that they may also have been the first to plant seeds in the ground. In many parts of the world, crops continued to be planted with hoes and digging sticks for millennia, and crop-raising remained primarily women’s work, while men hunted or later raised animals. In these places, which include large parts of North America and Africa, women appear to have retained some control of the crops they planted, sharing them with group members or giving them as gifts. They developed means of storing and transporting the harvested seeds, including skin bags, carved wooden vessels, baskets, and pottery. Women in these areas occasionally inherited land or the rights to farm certain pieces of land directly, or boys inherited land through their mother’s brothers, both of which are termed matrilineal systems of inheritance. This division of labor and these systems of inheritance were often misunderstood by colonial conquerors, who then tried to enforce their own division of labor. In North America and Africa, for example, Europeans assumed men were the primary agricultural producers, and developed various plans to make indigenous men better farmers; they often introduced patrilineal inheritance laws at the same time, through which land passed from father to son. Such schemes generally failed to convince men that they should farm, though male elites generally welcomed patrilineal inheritance systems.