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Not exactly. You seem to imply that at some point in the past there was a decision by an overwhelming number of men to force women into specific gender roles. There's no evidence for this, altho there's plenty of evidence of men resisting changes to those roles. The fit between cultural norms and practicality is loose, but never so loose that behaviors that threaten survival manage to endure. The reason one heard few complaints about gender roles from women or reactions to same from men until (in historical terms) very recent times (and that one still doesn't hear them in some places) is that the division of labor between genders was functional. After the once functional social norms became obsolete (at different times in different places and classes) there was, and continues to varying degrees to be, what's called social lag--the old ways remain for a while more comfortable for many men, and also for many women, than the prospect of a rewriting of the norms, with all of the unknowns that that implies. It should be noted that the very few preindustrial female voices of protest were those of extremely privileged women. The lives of all but a few in even the most prosperous societies were, as they still are in most places, focused instead on very tenuous survival. Few farm wives protested having to milk the cows instead of guiding the plough. Mark At 07:23 PM 1/8/2003 +0000, you wrote: > > > > What do folk think about why did women allow themselves to be > > suppressed? > >This reminds me of a student of mine a while back. I'd been giving a brief >history of America, explaining how the Europeans arrived, and gradually took >over from the native Americans. > >"I get that about the white people," she said, "but why did the black people >want to go there." >______________________________________________ >George Simmers >Snakeskin Poetry Webzine is at >http://www.snakeskin.org.uk