I recently realized you never hear of old-timey/classical women composers. Surely they were around?

  • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    Women‽ Making music‽ How absurd, everyone knows that it’s 1679 and women aren’t allowed to touch things that aren’t kitchen utensils and babies, they can’t even read! Oh sirrah, how deliciously you delight me with notions of “famous women!”

    • bluGill@fedia.io
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      12 hours ago

      Small correction, in those days, women’s work is making thread. Not to say women didn’t cook, but that seems to have been a shared responsibility for all civilizations throughout history.

      Note that I said thread, not cloth or clothes. Weaving and tailoring was often a man’s job, but making thread took a large part of the woman’s time. Though in 1679 the Spitting Wheel existed and that made making thread take a significantly less amount of time versus say a thousand years before when the Spitting Wheel didn’t exist and the drop l thimble was 12 hours a day every day for all women just to keep the family in enough warm clothes to survive. Depending on climate, of course.

      Acoup.blog has a lot more on what history is normal women’s work in the day although realistically it isn’t much because those types of things weren’t written about in history. Still, we know enough to reconstruct and it had to have been that. It turns out women’s work is easy to figure out just because we know feeding babies had to be done by women (nursing) for the first couple of years and making thread is one of the few jobs that are compatible with having a baby around that needs to nurse at throughout the day. Once the baby was two you could say okay go with dad but by then women was used to doing it then there’s a good chance she was pregnant and couldn’t do a lot of the “men’s work” jobs that had to be done so she is left doing this women’s work things that needed to be done.

    • Tanis Nikana@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      But seriously, that was prolly similar to answers you would have gotten from people of that day, sadly. :/

        • bluGill@fedia.io
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          12 hours ago

          Same for men, but men’s work and women’s work was different for good reasons and the people who write history rarely wrote about either (unless the subject is a noble.). If they did write about peasant work, it would have been men’s work, not women’s work. There’s a good chance you should read slave above, but free men who weren’t nobles, also had to work hard

    • homes@piefed.world
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      12 hours ago

      Well, of course, there are famous women, but only because of their status through birth and/or marriage