Martin van Crevald dedicates a chapter of his The Privileged *** to the historical division of labour between the sexes.
An amazon reviewer summarizes it with striking quotes:
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Workshy Women?
Men function, Van Creveld explains, as “humanity’s beasts of burden” (p41); while “women represent the leisure class” (p105).
Whereas “most women settle into a life in which they are provided for and protected… most men step into one in which they provide and protect” (p64). “In the whole of nature,” he declares, “there is no arrangement that is more demanding and more altruistic” (p43).
As a result, “men’s lot in life is endless hard work whose fruits will be enjoyed largely by others” (p46). Should they fail in this endeavour, “only too often the first to desert them are their wives” (p64), such that they “lose both what they made and those to whom they gave it” (p46).
Throughout history and across the world, the hardest and most dangerous work remains the exclusive preserve of men (p96).
Thus, women were “all but absent from miners’ and loggers’ camps, construction sites and garbage dumps” as well as “offshore oil rigs [and] arctic weather stations” today (p208). Similarly, “the tradition… that women at sea [even slaves] should be given the most secluded and comfortable quarters available has continued for thousands of years” (p212).
Indeed, “throughout history, wherever immigrants are numerous or conditions are hard and life difficult [e.g. the American frontier], women tend to be few and far between” (p211).
Moreover, “the smaller the relative number of women, the more precious and exalted they became in the eyes of the men” (p209). Thus, “in California mining camps during the middle of the 19th century men would pay large sums just to watch a (fully dressed) woman walk around” (p208).
Men also do more work. A 1995 “United Nations survey in 13 different countries found that men spent almost twice as much of their total time working than women, 66 percent to 34 percent” (p98).
In the West, whereas “men normally stay in the labour force throughout their adult lives… two-thirds of [women] are constantly drifting in and out of employment” such that “over a lifetime career women… work 40 percent fewer hours” (p102-3).
Double-standards apply – “a man who does not work for a living will probably be called a playboy or a parasite, while such a woman will be called a socialite or a housewife” (p66).
Thus, “the biblical term eved, ‘slave’ has only a male form” (p70) and “when God drove the first human couple out of Eden, it was Adam and not Eve whom he punished by decreeing that 'by the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread’” (p69).
Is Work Wonderful?
“During most of history,” Van Creveld reports, “work tended to be seen as something unpleasant, hard and even dangerous” (p66) - as indeed it often was. Work was “a burden imposed on man as a punishment–one which, monks and protestants apart, most people tried to avoid” (p88-9).
The privileged were those exempt from work – the 'idle rich’ and 'leisure class’. The oppressed those who worked – slaves, serfs and the 'working-classes’. Yet women’s increased labour-force participation over the last half-century is strangely celebrated as 'liberation’.
Work is, almost by definition, something one does, not because one enjoys the activity of itself, but rather because of the recompense offered in compensation.
Most people work because they are forced to do so – whether literally (slaves) or by circumstance ('wage-slaves'). Mark Twain famously concluded: “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and… Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do”.
Only with the rise of Protestantism did the curious notion emerge that work was somehow liberating. Yet, Van Creveld explains, what is forgotten is that originally “Protestantism glorified work precisely because it was unpleasant and therefore well suited to doing penance” (p69).
The 'Protestant Work Ethic’ is therefore analogous to religious practices such as fasting and self-flagellation.
Van Creveld deals with the notion that work is liberating with caustic cynicism – “The same claims were made by the 'Arbeit macht frei’ ['Work Sets You Free’] signs that stand at the entrance to Auschwitz” (p69).
'Too Weak to Work’?
Yet, Van Creveld insists, expecting women to work is hopelessly utopian. Women are unsuited to work as a matter of basic biology.
Thus, “in China during the Great Leap Forward, the attempt to make women do agricultural work… led to mass starvation” (p77); in the USSR, making women work “led literally to the country’s collapse” (p104); and “over the seventy years communism lasted, its attempt to emancipate women by making them work on equal terms with men caused their very will to live and give life to be extinguished” (p93).
The link between increased female labour-force participation and declining fertility is plausible. However, Van Creveld exaggerates.
The claim that women are unsuited to work may have been tenable when work usually involved hard physical labour. However, in the post-industrial West, where most men work in offices not coal-mines, it is obsolete.
Van Creveld’s claims do, however, prove that feminists got one thing right: Men like Van Creveld do use an ideology of 'Biological Determinism’ and 'Male Supremacy’ to justify the Status Quo. However, Male Supremacism is used to justify, not women’s oppression, but rather imposing greater burdens on men, who, being superior, are perceived as able to bear them, while women, being weak, are, like children, protected and provided for.
On this view, being biologically inferior seems like quite a good deal!
The Redistribution of Wealth
If women cannot work, how do they survive? The answer, Van Creveld explains, “is because they were fed, clothed, housed and looked after by men” and “a society in which this was not the case has yet to be discovered” (p106).
He identifies three institutions that facilitate this:
1) Marriage;
2) Charity;
3) Welfare.
Marriage
“The family is,” for Van Creveld, “an economic institution” whose primary “purpose is to guarantee that… women will be provided for” (p107).
Thus, “the duty of husbands to provide for their wives according to their means is universal” (p110), and evidenced as far back as ancient Egypt (p109) and Greece (p111).
Thus, “a French royal decree of 1214 gave a wife the rights to half her husbands’ property” (p108); while “the husband’s duty to support his wife was… written into… Roman wedding charters” (p110). Accordingly, “before a man can marry he must work and pay and after joining hands in matrimony he must continue to work and pay” (p107).
Even if the marriage dissolves, the husband’s burden continues – “in ancient Egypt, divorce entailed heavy financial penalties for the husband, but none for the wife”; while “both Hindu and Muslim law oblige husbands to support their divorced wives” (p118).
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Van Creveld rationalizes these arrangements thus: “Compensating women for their lesser earning capacity has always been among the most important purposes of marriage” (p121).
However, in the post-industrial West, where heavy labour is rare, women can earn as much as men. Indeed, once potential earnings in the *** industry are considered, women’s 'earning capacity’ probably exceeds men’s.
Van Creveld has his causation backwards. Instead of divorce law compensating women for their lesser earnings, it is probable that women’s reduced earnings are themselves a rational response to current divorce law.
In short, why bother earning money when you have the easier option of marrying it?
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As a result, although men earn more than women, women spend more. Van Creveld reports that, as early as the Victorian era, advertisers had already begun to target “Consuming Angels” (p116).
Traditionally in France and Britain, “most of the earnings of working-class married men ended up in the hands of their wives [and] many surrendered their pay packet without even opening it, receiving back only what they needed to buy their daily ration of wine and tobacco” (p116).
Likewise, “Today… women buy 80 percent of everything” (p116-7: see Marketing to Women: How to Increase Your Share of the World's Largest Market

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