This is a long one...
I was listening to NPR tonight and caught a rerun of the second 2004 Massey lecture given by Ronald Wright. The lecture was entitled A Short History of Progress and dealt with human cultural history. It was extremely interesting of course and it left me with a new gnawing wonder(as if I need more of those
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The speaker(Wright) was discussing hunter-gatherer groups of peoples not long after the last ice-age and he mentioned how because large game were depleting at this time(whether by climate change or human over-hunting) the communities came to rely much more greatly on the gathering aspect of the hunter-gathering lifestyle. He mentioned in an offhand way that it was women who were primarily the gatherers and then mentioned that it was this new reliance on gathering that led humans to begin to develop farming practices. He did not however make the connection between women's roles as gatherers and this new leap in human cultural evolution. This was not his main point and so he just moved on. I got kind of stuck on this concept and could not help but deduce that woman and children must have played a huge role in this advancement. I mean yes it is obvious that communities work together, men and women, and women’s roles are always as important and vital as men’s, but here is a new twist. Here are women not just in a position of daily chores as so often depicted, but women with a chance for true and lastly innovation. It only makes sense to me that the ones who spent the time with the plants, and the seeds, would have been the ones to first realize we could harness(if I dare use that word) nature in this new way. It must(it seems) have been the women who layed the first purposeful gardens, with their babies on their backs.
This may seem like a short feminist manifesto but I wanted to know what all your thoughts are on this. Does anyone know anything about this? I will be doing some research but have had little luck so far. I wanted to see what you all thought. In a culture like ours where woman, and certainly mothers, are so often left of of history's tales of advancement, this makes me smile, thinking of my great grandmothers so apparently saving humanity from its own folly and weakness with new and better(?)ways of living.
I was listening to NPR tonight and caught a rerun of the second 2004 Massey lecture given by Ronald Wright. The lecture was entitled A Short History of Progress and dealt with human cultural history. It was extremely interesting of course and it left me with a new gnawing wonder(as if I need more of those
.The speaker(Wright) was discussing hunter-gatherer groups of peoples not long after the last ice-age and he mentioned how because large game were depleting at this time(whether by climate change or human over-hunting) the communities came to rely much more greatly on the gathering aspect of the hunter-gathering lifestyle. He mentioned in an offhand way that it was women who were primarily the gatherers and then mentioned that it was this new reliance on gathering that led humans to begin to develop farming practices. He did not however make the connection between women's roles as gatherers and this new leap in human cultural evolution. This was not his main point and so he just moved on. I got kind of stuck on this concept and could not help but deduce that woman and children must have played a huge role in this advancement. I mean yes it is obvious that communities work together, men and women, and women’s roles are always as important and vital as men’s, but here is a new twist. Here are women not just in a position of daily chores as so often depicted, but women with a chance for true and lastly innovation. It only makes sense to me that the ones who spent the time with the plants, and the seeds, would have been the ones to first realize we could harness(if I dare use that word) nature in this new way. It must(it seems) have been the women who layed the first purposeful gardens, with their babies on their backs.
This may seem like a short feminist manifesto but I wanted to know what all your thoughts are on this. Does anyone know anything about this? I will be doing some research but have had little luck so far. I wanted to see what you all thought. In a culture like ours where woman, and certainly mothers, are so often left of of history's tales of advancement, this makes me smile, thinking of my great grandmothers so apparently saving humanity from its own folly and weakness with new and better(?)ways of living.
