The examples can go on and on and on through history and around the globe- but indeed.
Gender roles have basically ALWAYS been adaptive. That’s… how human beings have survived and thrived. We adapt to live in most climates and situations, we change our diets and dwellings and cultures etc. to suit the needs of a time and place. Do you REALLY think that in times and places with little to no infrastructure or support that people clung so closely to gender roles? If you want to survive you generally need to use the labor you have to do the tasks at hand and you divide them up based on what makes practical sense for your exact situation. Where scarcity begins to be less of an issue and societal systems exist to make survival easier or more specialized we start to see the emergence of stricter gender roles.
Simply put- people trying to survive have little time and energy to waste on frivolous or superficial things. Once you can survive to a point where you are thriving enough to have a member of the family doing little to no work or supporting tasks you’ve reached a place where power begins to be consolidated and social politics and such really begin to evolve.
Having a spouse be “ornamental” is something one can only afford of one has the ability to survive on their own with enough abundance left over to provide for a spouse or family. What often happens in human history is that wealthy or privileged elites begin doing things to essentially show off their abundance and it becomes aspirational.
For example- if people are able to make enough money to keep animals that don’t perform any labor, if you go to someone’s home and they have such animals, that is a sign of their wealth. A more modern example might be like if a person has enough money to buy a home that has spare rooms beyond what they require for basic needs.
So this thing that becomes an excess of those in success, a luxury, people who want to be seen as or feel like they are successful then emulate it as well, and so these practices begin to trickle down from the topmost levels of wealth and those who don’t have these things are seen as inherently unsuccessful or lacking culture etc. making them essentially a “right” or sign all but required if those who want to do business and socialize with a certain class or above.
So it basically becomes a cultural norm over time. This is much the same with gender roles. Of course other elements come into play such as restricting competition and other factors- but in short- gender roles change to suit the society and time based on what works and social negotiations between members of a society.
The idea that gender roles are somehow inflexible or dictated by biology is laughable. In a broad sense we can generalize that the genders tend to have certain advantages in some areas and thusly certain tasks might be better suited to one or the other, but of course if a given woman can lift more weight than a given man the optimal person for a job involving lifting would be whomever was stronger.
Gender roles have basically ALWAYS been adaptive. That’s… how human beings have survived and thrived. We adapt to live in most climates and situations, we change our diets and dwellings and cultures etc. to suit the needs of a time and place. Do you REALLY think that in times and places with little to no infrastructure or support that people clung so closely to gender roles? If you want to survive you generally need to use the labor you have to do the tasks at hand and you divide them up based on what makes practical sense for your exact situation. Where scarcity begins to be less of an issue and societal systems exist to make survival easier or more specialized we start to see the emergence of stricter gender roles.
Having a spouse be “ornamental” is something one can only afford of one has the ability to survive on their own with enough abundance left over to provide for a spouse or family. What often happens in human history is that wealthy or privileged elites begin doing things to essentially show off their abundance and it becomes aspirational.
So this thing that becomes an excess of those in success, a luxury, people who want to be seen as or feel like they are successful then emulate it as well, and so these practices begin to trickle down from the topmost levels of wealth and those who don’t have these things are seen as inherently unsuccessful or lacking culture etc. making them essentially a “right” or sign all but required if those who want to do business and socialize with a certain class or above.
The idea that gender roles are somehow inflexible or dictated by biology is laughable. In a broad sense we can generalize that the genders tend to have certain advantages in some areas and thusly certain tasks might be better suited to one or the other, but of course if a given woman can lift more weight than a given man the optimal person for a job involving lifting would be whomever was stronger.