Men and women have different strengths, it is true. But men need women to feed them, and heal them when they are sick, and women know how to gather, and also how to hunt small animals, and how to preserve food, and how to make clothing, and how to make basic housing. They make babies, they raise babies, they feed the family, they take care of the old people.
I hypothesize that 90% of the things that primitive people need to know in order to survive is known by women.
Not everything. While women do the every day hard physical labor, there is special labor like hunting that men do. I think probably only men make big tools, like knives and axes, although perhaps women make needles, and they also make nets, because women make fiber, while men build weirs, and men make boats.
I recommend a movie set in Canada, The Snow Walker, about a bush pilot and an Inuit woman with tuberculosis, who crash in the Canadian tundra and have to walk out. She teaches him how to survive in that environment. I enjoyed it because of what appeared to me to be verisimilitude and also because my female ancestry is Ojibwe/Inuit/ people who walked across the land bridge from Siberia to North America, although I would have no clue what to do to survive in the Arctic. But I think if I had been born where she lived I would know what she knew. Because that's what you do. In this movie she does teach him how to hunt, but he does the hunting. amazon.com |