Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

by Richard L. Currier

In the hunting and gathering societies of the past, women not only gathered the firewood and cooked the food but also brought home most of the vegetable foods that the group as a whole could not live without—and that enabled adult men to spend their days hunting for the equally vital supplies of meat. In agricultural societies, women not only worked in the gardens and did all the cooking, cleaning, and washing, but also bore and raised the children that brought wealth, status, and the promise of future security to the family as a whole. But in modern industrial society, the only job that is truly indispensable is earning money through gainful employment, and because this began as “men’s work” during the first decades of industrialization, men have traditionally dominated this sphere and still enjoy a considerable advantage over women as employees. Meanwhile, the importance of women as the bearers of children has lost much of its former significance. The people of the developed world have increasingly come to rely not on their children but rather on their investments, pensions, social security payments, and health insurance policies to provide them with economic security in their old age. In short, cultural inertia—the tendency for a culture to retain values and attitudes that are traditional but have become obsolete due to other changes in society—has dealt the women of the modern world a cruel hand. On the one hand, women are still expected to perform most of the work inv...