Income in this context means trading labor for cash.
In the past, huge amounts of household work were done without any such exchange.
Today, child raising, cleaning, cooking, provisioning, and more remain unpaid household labor. The people who do that work were not idle 800 years ago, and they are not idle today.
Women and kids would tend to animals and food came directly from the animals. They both would tend the fields when work did not required physical strength - and thre was plenty of such work too. The crafts women did were for sale or trade. They would also sell on the market whatever excess household produced.
If we are talking about "centuries" quite a lot of people including men did not worked as in being employed for salary. But their work was economical - necessarily so.
Being stay at home mom today is mostly battling boredom and demotivation. Or then, making up things to do. It is not the same as milking cows or making cheese.
> Being stay at home mom today is mostly battling boredom and demotivation. Or then, making up things to do. It is not the same as milking cows or making cheese.
I was a stay at home parent for my daughter. It was extremely far from battling boredom (except perhaps for first year and a half, if that, and even then anyone who is actually interested in child development will not find it boring) and it was the opposite of demotivating.
Rather than speak in such broad generalizations, I think it would be better to restrict your claims to specific, real stories.
In foraging societies - ie, most people for the vast majority of human history - people worked ~15–20 hours/week on subsistence tasks. The rest was leisure or social time (ie, time for being a human later rebranded as 'idleness').
Industrialization has pushed inequality to extremes while raising hours worked - even as productivity keeps shooting up. There's no good reason for people to tolerate this; it's just exploitation.
Those hours worked are carefully defining a lot of work away. Most things people eat need hours of preparation that isn't counted in you 15-20 hours for example. When you relook at what people did most of the time you realize they had to work really hard for a lot more hours to survive.
How many hours a day would you estimate that primates in the wild "work"? Without commenting on quality of life it seems readily apparent to me that many foraging animals have large amounts of leisure time.
> Most things people eat need hours of preparation that isn't counted in you 15-20 hours for example.
Yeah, and we now expect women to work 40+ hour work weeks and house work on top of that. That is the thing causing societal reproduction rates to plummet.
Let's just do the math: a day has 24 hours. The recommendation for healthy sleep is 8 hours. Then, you work for 8 hours, with 1 hour added for the unpaid lunch break. That's the two largest blocks, leaving 7 hours to distribute... dedicate 3 hours for the "staying alive" stuff (preparing for going to work in the morning, aka breakfast, shave, getting dressed, preparing dinner, eating dinner, have a shower and at least some unwind time to fall asleep).
And that in turn leaves only 4 hours for everything else: running errands (aka shopping, dealing with bureaucracy, disposing of trash, cleaning), just doing nothing to wind down your mind from a hard day at work, hobbies, social activities (talking with your friends and family or occasionally going out) and, guess what, actually having sex.
Easy to see how that's already a fully packed day. Society just took the productivity gains from women no longer having to deal with a lot of menial work (washing dishes and clothing, as that got replaced by machines, and repairing clothes) and redistributed these hours to capitalism.
And now, imagine a child on top of that. Add at least half an hour in the morning to help get the kid ready for school, an hour to drive the kid to errands (because public transit is more like "transhit"), and another two hours to help the kid with homework because that workload is ridiculous and you don't want the kid to fall behind kids of parents rich enough to afford private tutors. But... whoops, isn't that just about the entire "everything else" time block? And younger children need even more work, constantly changing nappies, going to the doctor's all the time because it's one new bug every new week and sometimes the bug also catches you cold...
You're inventing sexism where there isn't any. The men who expect their wives to work 40+ hour weeks are not (at least as a group) the ones dumping all housework and childcare on them.
The time constraints that come with a dual income certainly make the logistics of having children more difficult though.
> The men who expect their wives to work 40+ hour weeks are not (at least as a group) the ones dumping all housework and childcare on them.
I'm not talking about men, I'm talking about society itself. Try renting a family home on a single income in any moderate popular area. Owning a home is outright out of reach for even more people.
Look man if you want to write a refutation of Marshall Sahlins' work, go ahead. I might even read it. But I'm not going to just take the word of a random commentator - are you even in anthropology?
Like, this is a broad consensus thing. There's not really much debate; ethnographic studies have backed it up. Where are you getting your info from?
There seem to be two main points of critique there:
1. That there was war and war sucked; disease; and also infant mortality was high - therefore life sucked back then. None of that really factors in to the debate of how much free time people had; and those thing are all still very much with us (especially in America).
2. That food prep and gathering firewood takes time. Well, gathering firewood is also known as 'going for a walk in nature', and it's actually good for you. You can chat with your friends while you do it. It's not like your average job. It might not be technically 'idle', but it's a lot closer to 'idle' than flipping burgers in a sweatbox.
Same with food prep - picking through some dried beans, or stirring a pot every 30 mins and making sure it doesn't boil over, while you tell stories around the table just isn't comparable to working in an Amazon warehouse pissing into plastic bottles.
It's critique, and you can buy it if you want; but there's nothing there I would call substantial.
A, being homeless and being in a gatherer society are very different things.
And B, even if you wanted to live that way you can't any more; because the commons has been relentlessly exploited past its breaking point for centuries.
I shouldn't really have to explain any of this, but people generally seem to have some weird ideas and blind spots surrounding our history as a species.
In many countries the only obstacle is the legality of living on government lands. In Canada there are people living a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle on crown land. The option is totally available for many people who chose not to do it.
> the only obstacle is the legality of living on government lands
Yes, the obstacle of living illegally on land that has been systematically over-exploited for centuries (or too harsh to bother), without any community or experience. Not sure I'm seeing your point.
Children helped support their families, I don’t see the face value problem with that. The fact remains that humans have been having kids in their teens and 20s for millennia, until very recently in western liberal societies.