Reddit reviews Women in Ancient Greece

A lot of what you're describing are things people do for friends, are you sure you're not just observing behavior men make towards their female friends and assuming there's a gender component? This sort of altruistic behavior isn't uncommon among either men or women.

As for the "ray of sunshine" vs "threatening creep" comment, I honestly can't say I've ever seen that happen when the man making the comparison wasn't actually a crypto-misogynist. One of those "nice guy" types who only have female friends because they're threatened by male competition and believe being nice to their friends entitles them to sexual favors.

> Yeah, women historically aren't at the top. They also historically aren't at the bottom doing harsh labor jobs that kill you. Theres a lot more equalizing to be done

That's also not true, the MRM kinda has this view of gendered labor divisions where men performed backbreaking labor in the fields while the women picked flowers and sold them to others. And if you're a Terper, one of those others is a knight she was fucking.

In agrarian societies women worked alongside men, often doing the same jobs. Here's an article about the division of labor on farms in Uganda, the main dividing factor between the two is the type of crop and not the labor itself, with traditional cash crops seen as the privilege of men. You see similar things in Nigeria with the production of yams, where yam is a cash-crop that was the privilege of men to produce and profit from. There's not a significant division in labor performed, or the intensity of that labor, but you still end up with a system that privileges men over women because of cultural norms.

In the west we can look at the industrial revolution and, well, I'm just going to direct you to this /r/badhistory thread.

Another source to check out would be Women in Ancient Greece by Susan Blendell, which notes that women in most of the ancient Greek polis had a life expectancy ten years shorter than that of their male counterparts, one notable exception being Sparta.