| From The Newspaper (32) Gender (8) |
April 27, 2023
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| He got an idea and started to think about how the Gender Issue has been proceeding to the present situation. Maybe in a word, new technologies have been changing women's roles. In the primitive ages, men went hunting with their fellows, and women raised children, and cooked food, washed dishes, made clothes, washed clothes, cleaned the room, and did other households. Besides raising children, cooking was probably the biggest trouble because at that time there were no water supply systems and no gas. They had to go and get water from far places. As water is heavy to carry and goes bad after a certain period of time, they needed to carry water often and it was tough work. Cooking must have also been a hard job. They had to make a fire from scratch, using fire stones and dry grass. Even just boiling water took time. And they normally had to cook every meal from materials because there were no refrigerators. Maybe that type of life for women had lasted until electricity and gas supply were invented. After agriculture started, people started to live in one place and families needed more children to help. Different from hunting, farming needed a lot of manpower. For making the land, they had to cut trees, flatten the land, take out stones, irrigate the land, and every year they had  to plough, plant something, water, weed, and harvest. If they wanted to get a bigger harvest in order to get money or exchange for other products, like fish, cotton, oil for light, tools and utensils, etc., they needed more land. And, because of this, they needed a lot of workers, meaning more children. And at that time, farmers were the majority. Until the end of the 20th century, about 80% of citizens were farmers. Women had to raise a lot of children. Then, gas and electricity started to spread to each household. Soon, companies started to produce various types of electric appliances and other machines to help their households, in other words, the wives. Especially after the World War Ⅱ gas stoves, rice cookers, refrigerators, washing machines, vacuums spread to each household, which would help wives' households. As for farmers, they got new tractors, combine harvesters, so they didn't need children for work. As the birth rate started to decline, wives' time for taking care of children declined. A gas stove and a rice cooker reduced a wife's cooking time dramatically. Thanks to the refrigerator, they didn't need to cook three meals anymore, keeping some leftovers for a couple of days there. (Later microwave ovens enabled storing foods frozen, meaning making cooking times less.) He didn't intend to offend modern wives, just saying that they are blessed with the modern environment. But a washing machine, vacuum, or even a dishwasher takes a lot of time from wives' households, after their children start to go to elementary school. They are envied being told that they can watch soap operas on TV eating rice crackers every day. As for female workers, new types of jobs appeared because of the Industrial Revolution and Economic Development. Most people from farming families became factory workers and office workers. They were salaried workers. Women were employed as accountants for their salaries. Workers got to their job places on buses and trains. Women were employed as conductors. Office working means paperwork. Women were employed as typists, as secretaries, they sent letters, made photocopies, etc. Other typical jobs for women were telephone operators and elevator girls which appeared in the famous American movie 'The Apartment'. But, those types of jobs were temporary. Actually, when he began to work, more than 40 years ago, there were two typists at his job place, which had about 200 workers. At that time, he wrote various documents by hand. If they were contract papers or something important, he asked one of these female typists to type it. After several years, the first word processor was installed at his job place. It wasn't a long time afterwards when word processors spread to each section and the two typists were asked to work as regular office workers, one of them quit soon. （To be continued） |
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No. 519
*primitive :原始の
*fellow :仲間
*Besides :以外に
*from scratch :一から
*irrigate :灌漑する
*plough :耕す
*offend :気分を害させる、傷つける
*be blessed :恩恵にあずかる
*soap opera :メロドラマ
*accountant :会計係
*temporary :一時的