I've noticed a lot of people that talk about gender roles say men are supposed to be providers and women stay home to take care of children. Its made me question how many people actually understand how humans evolved.
Many arguments are based around "male dominance" and how that is expressed in some of our close ancestors such as chimpanzees have dominance hierarchies with dominant males controlling many females. This is a strange argument considering our closer relative is actually the bonobo, who is something more in between us and a chimp and far more relaxed of a species.
Anyway, the reason that humans actually were so successful is because we were EQUAL in terms of gender when we first evolved. We were nomadic and moved from area to area, stayed for short periods of time, and then moved again. For this to work, men would hunt in the area, and women would generally collect things. In these societies in the past (and present in some places that they still exist), women and men would/do accumulate relatively similar amounts of calories, and women were usually the ones who would collect water (which is pretty important). They shared many jobs, women would help with hunting sometimes and vice versa. Child rearing was generally something that was done as a group and included both genders. Girls and guys were both very promiscuous. Women would often be down for more than one round of sex since they could have multiple orgasms and would have sex with the men in their groups. For the most part, men being stronger and women being more emotional are just things to encourage men to protect women during pregnancy so that women don't try to protect themselves and potentially cause harm to a baby. This way of living is what fostered innovation and development. The moving around and intermingling of groups allowed for more diversity which is good for genetic health of babies, and for us to create new technologies and grow as a species. We care about our kin and wanted them to stay near us, and to protect them, but we also understood that it made sense for them to go off on their own and be in new areas. These people were/are generally monogamous as well (love still existed so that we would stay with one person and make sure children are reared well!).
All other inequalities came about after the advent of agriculture. Once people didn't have to move around any more men noticed that they could have way more kids than women and started having more than one wife and inbreeding in areas began. The rest is (literally) history.
But now that we're starting to move around everywhere again and realizing the mistakes we've made its strange to me that so many still subscribe to any kind of "women should stay at home and men should be providers thing". Both genders NEED to provide for the group, its just that for some reason the work that women have been allowed to do up until recently has been menial in comparison. Nowadays its easy for either gender to do any job (with some slight exceptions), so there really isn't much reason to keep anyone from doing something.
TL;DR: Men and women both need to work to be happy fulfilled humans and one job is not more important than another
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Umm. It's a very... Utopian idea, unfortunately it doesn't seem at all evidenced. Chimps are slightly closer to us than bonobos, bonobos are just a slightly different chimp. They're both "pan". I wrote a little about both here, Conflict Resolution in Non-Human Apes ↗ unfortunately there's no evidence that we picked up bonobo traits, or if we did they died out really quickly. Violence, war, and rampant death were the markers of humanity as far back as we can see. Hunter-gatherer societies are a good place to look at today in reference.
PS I have to somewhat redact part of what I said. I started looking a lot into it to ensure that I was right, but I've been partly corrected. Some hunter/gatherer societies appear to treat women quite similarly to men in that they'll fight each other for the same reasons. I couldn't discover any discussion about rape in that culture though. The Turkana women are an example of pastoralists and gender inequality.
Yeah I almost put some sources-- in fact the book that lilaqua recommended in her response looks like it may be a good source and have some good ones listed itself. I skimmed a bit of it and may read it. And of course these societies I've described weren't utopian in any way. There were undoubtedly conflict and inequalities. Its more that this affinity for conflict within our species isn't as ingrained in human evolution as many think. We're more of a passive species as a whole and its the loud outliers that cause the majority of conflict and inequality.
Oh yeah no. That's completely false. We're violent fucks and have only gotten better over time. The noble savage motif has almost no merit. I very highly recommend reading The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker if you ever have the time.
You're totally right. There was gender roles sure, but it was based on capacity and there wasn't this whole "doing so and so is better than something else". The sex part is also super correct. Effectively we evolved to kind of have massive gang bangs, the biological parents were completely irrelevant since the whole tribe did the child rearing not one or two people. If you're interested in this stuff read "Sex at Dawn"
Intriguing