I have the advantage of being only one generation removed from a culture of rural (Maine) subsistence agriculture before electricity, and I grew up in a culture which still retained its home based businesses and related gender roles.

The feminists make three mistakes. They first ignore the fact that the factory workplace outside the home was a relatively new situation created by the industrial revolution. It would be like us presuming that men being able to type is not a relatively new situation created by the computer revolution.

This is why Unix has such cryptic two letter commands — it was written for men who were “hunt and peck” typists, while the “qwerty” keyboard was designed to slow down typists because the keys were jamming, the initial typewriter being made by Remington, the gun manufacturer.

But for most of human history, the family business revolved around the home, and the wife kept the money and paid the bills because the man would lose the money if it was in his pants, whereas his wife had a safe, dry place to keep it, usually in a cookie jar.

Business was often conducted with a husband saying to someone “ to go tell my wife to pay you” a certain amount of money — or to go pay her a certain amount of money when he sold something to someone. Husband and wife would reconcile the books over supper, and being a small closely knit community, fraud wasn’t an issue because a man’s word was his bond.

The second mistake the feminist made, and still do, is presuming that the lives of upper class women reflected the lives of women in general and this one drives me crazy. It’s like saying, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and the guy who owns Amazon represent American men in the 21st-century — and nothing could be further from the truth.

Evaluating the lives of the rich and famous may be entertaining, may even be of some cultural value, but it is completely irrelevant when one wants to understand the lives of the people of that era. As Jack Kennedy famously said, he didn’t know anything about the Depression (which he had lived through) until he learned about it at Harvard.

And third, this was an era before refrigeration, before microwave ovens, before even thermostatically controlled ovens, and stove tops with on/off heat. Women in the 19th Century had cook stoves that burned wood and coal. Before that they cooked over the open hearth, which is why so many New England dishes involve boiling — boiling water maintains a constant temperature.

People forget that dandelion greens were the first edible green vegetable in the spring, and that’s why they are brought over here from England. But before they grew in the spring, everything the family would have been eating all winter were things that the housewife (her teenage daughters, and sometimes her mother) had “put by“ the prior summer and fall.

Food was dried, salted, or in the 20th century, “ canned” in glass jars. Lacking refrigeration, cooked food was kept warm on the back of the stove because the organisms that harm people can only live at temperatures people can live at. All of this was passed down, mother to daughter, and while society women had the money to purchase food that have been preserved by others and to pay people to cook it for them, the overwhelming majority of families survived on the basis of their wife’s ability to do this.

What happened to the 1950s was that all of the things that society depended on women knowing and doing were eliminated by new technologies. Today, we think nothing of milk coming from 1000 miles away, and a being flown in from South Africa — back then milk either came from the cow in the barn or didn’t, and apples grew on the trees in the backyard and have been dried by the women last October. (I’m told that dried apples could be used to bake cakes and make applesauce with although applesauce could also be canned and usually was.)

Yes, only men could vote, but the most significant votes were cast in town meeting, and even if his wife wasn’t sitting next to him, her friends would tell her how he voted. Even today, couples almost inevitably both vote the same way, sometimes one won’t vote at all, but I’ve never seen husband and wife vote differently.

Prior to about 1855, every time in Massachusetts had a municipal minister who was provided a house, called the parsonage and an annual salary which came for the property taxes. One of the most debated issues at town meetings was the miniature firewood allotment, how many cords of wood he would be given to heat both the parsonage in the church — wood which the men of the community would have to cut, split, and haul for him.

But the other issue was hiring and firing a minister, and that was a simple vote of town meeting. For example, the then town of Northampton, Massachusetts eventually fired Jonathan Edwards for a bunch of reasons. The men usually didn’t much care who the minister was, but the women did, and they met after church and decided how their husbands would vote — and their husband did.

Marriages back then were largely corporate partnerships, and a husband and wife often worked together, e.g., she wouldscoop salt onto the lobster bait that her husband was shoveling into barrels. She didn’t need the physical strength to do this, but she needed to be conscientious to ensure that the fish was equally salted or it would spoil.

As to women being less prone to violence, what planet do you live on?
The one thing that a mandated arrest policy in domestic violence calls did, much to everyone surprise, was result in the arrest of a lot of women.

And talk to someone who has chaperoned a high school dance recently, there are now girls fighting with other girls over boys — and with weight trained athletes, these fights can get kind of scary.