It should be noted that sexism (and consequently feminism) as it taken form in our modern Western cultures only really go back to the industrial revolution and its effects on the upper burghers class, so we shouldn't be surprised medieval gender roles/sexism were different. Sure, modern sexism has roots further back and other parts of it are constants, but many if the parts feminism rose against were directly caused by societal changes during the late renaissance/early modern age.
For example, the idea that women should stay at home is a clear modern concept -- to begin with, in medieval times, everybody stayed at home. Home was your workshop, whether you were a farmer or an artisan burgher, that's literally where you worked. The only people who didn't would be the percentage of paupers and laborers who went to labour every day, but in these families it was still common that the women also worked because they were very poor – you'd commonly find fields laboured solely by women which preneccessates a large group of female paupers to work them.
And for farmer families, well, these people were self-sufficiency farmers. Sure, tasks might have been heavily gendered, but you can't say women stayed at home not working because their duties involved spinning cloth when said cloth was literally how they paid their rent to their landlord just as much as the grains from the field (serf contracts most commonly stipulated rent be paid as X amount of cloth and grain per year).
(Side-note: the cloth production was actually what constituted something like 70% of a year's work on a farm. Mostly not "women's work", though, at least in Sweden the majority of it was considered "men's work" and only the spinning, the final part, was done by women)
And among the burghers, at least in the artisan families, we have women "assisting" their husbands in the workshop, and by "assisting" I mean literally being trained artisans in their own right working with their husbands, at least if the number of artisan widows we know of that continued their husband's businesses after their passing is to be taken into account. Sure, artisan wives are not as fullsure undeniable to have been working as farmwives, but again, they spent their whole life in that workshop. They grew up in it and watched their parents labour in it every day – again, this wasn't the case as it is in our society where the grownups leave every day for a workplace on the other side of town, these people literally had their workshops in their houses so it wasn't the case luke for us when a veterinarians child can grow up without even seeing their parent stuff their arms up the butt of a single cow, these children watched their parents work from the day they opened their eyes and it would be impossible for them to not learn the craft.
I am slowly approaching my point here, so please bear with me, because then lastly we have the merchant burghers, which is the first group of people for whom women not working was an option. And in the late renaissance/early modern time, the influence of this subclass explodes (as the artisan subclass dies due to industrialisation) we end up with it on the very top of society class hill in the 18th and 19th century. And that means they were the ones setting the standard for what is seen as "decent living" during those times, which included their wives not having to work (ironically, at least in England unless I'm remembering the location wrong, it was still considered prestigious to educate your daughters, they just wasn't supposed to actually do anything with their educations as adults). We still haven't reached a time where staying at home was even an attainable option for the vast majority of people, though: in the rurals the farmers kept sharing their work as they always had, and in the cities the impoverished masses needed everybody who could working as much as they could, both men, women, and children even. But idea of the burgher wives staying at home not working is constructed during these times, and this is where we get this idea from, and it keeps dominating society into the 20th century, where the short period of time for which it is attainable for the new, broader middle class during the middle of it results in the cementing of the idea of it "always having been that way", which is a blatantly untrue notion.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14913926 times)