There is a habit abroad today of standing in a warm, well lit room and scolding our ancestors for the way they arranged their lives. It is done with great confidence and very little understanding of what it actually took to keep human beings alive for tens of thousands of years. This habit often gathers itself under the banner of attacking patriarchy, as though the past were a debating society rather than a long, hard exercise in survival.
For most of human history, life was not an abstract moral discussion. It was immediate and physical. Food had to be found or grown by hand. Shelter had to be built from what lay to hand. Cold, hunger, animals, disease and other people were constant threats. A single winter could undo a community. In such conditions, societies organised themselves around what worked, not around what sounded fair to a modern ear.
Men, on average, were larger and stronger. They could carry heavier loads, endure longer periods of physical strain, and were more readily sacrificed when danger arose. Women carried the greater burden of reproduction and early child care, and that made them irreplaceable in a way that any hunter gatherer would have understood instantly. The division of labour that followed was not born of cruelty or ideology. It was born of necessity.
To look back at this arrangement and describe it as a moral failing is to misunderstand its purpose entirely. It was not designed to privilege men. It was designed to ensure that there would be a next generation at all. A group that treated its reproductive capacity casually would not last long enough to develop philosophies about equality. Nature is unsentimental in that regard.
What often goes unacknowledged in modern criticism is the sheer cost paid by men under these systems. Dangerous work was expected of them as a matter of course. Hunting large animals, clearing forests, building roads and ships, mining, fighting and standing guard all carried a high likelihood of injury or death. Shorter lives and harder ends were not anomalies but the norm. To describe this as effortless dominance is to ignore the ledger of broken bodies that made stable societies possible.
This is not to claim that the past was gentle or that abuses did not occur. They did, as they do in every age. But it is a serious mistake to confuse the existence of abuse with the purpose of the system itself. Tools can be misused without being inherently evil. Fire burns, yet without it we would never have survived a single Ice Age.
The real danger of retrospective bashing is that it teaches contempt for the very instincts that carried our species through scarcity and danger. Cooperation between men and women, respect for physical reality, and acceptance of unequal burdens were not moral failures. They were solutions. Remove them without understanding why they existed and you do not get progress. You get fragility.
We live now in a time of extraordinary comfort, enabled by technology, medicine and surplus energy. These have changed what is possible and rightly allow us to renegotiate roles. But wisdom lies in building upon the past, not sneering at it. A society that forgets how close its ancestors lived to hunger and cold is one that mistakes comfort for virtue.
Our forebears were not monsters. They were practical people doing the best they could with what they had, often at great personal cost. To honour that truth is not to oppose equality. It is to ground it in reality, which is the only place it can endure.
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