What is wrong with girls being lady like? Women with children being "mothers" "carers" and men being "fathers" or "protectors/providers"
Protectors; providers. There are one or two fundamental problems with that concept
From what or whom does the modern Australian woman need protecting by her menfolk: man eating wombats, rampaging kangaroos, or could it be other men?
And if protection is the man’s role, then whose role is it to protect the family while he away doing the ‘providing’
Now let’s consider the ‘man as provider’ scenario. This is not traditional – it is simply a status symbol that came in with the rise of the middle class. It was in great part the ill paid labour of female mill workers, factory workers, domestic servants, dressmakers etc. that allowed the nouveau riche to flaunt their non-working wives as a symbol of their affluence; with the result that being able to ‘keep’ a wife and family on a single wage became a goal for those aspiring to upward mobility.
In rural areas women have always worked alongside their men (shepherdesses and milk maids are not figments of the imagination of costume shop owners). The men may have owned the farms and managed the livestock but it was usually their wives who kept the chooks, made the butter and cheese and took the produce to market – on top of running the home and caring for the children.
When we think about the provision of food in the very earliest societies we tend to picture a group of young men armed with spears tracking and killing an animal which they then carry home in triumph to their waiting womenfolk. There is a reason, though, why these people are described as ‘hunter/gatherers?
We have no way of knowing what the division of labour was, and is probable that the men did most of the hunting – they were physically stronger and, biologically, more expendable, but is also probable that the women did most of the gathering, together with the carrying and preparing of whatever they gathered and it is almost certain that what they provided constituted a larger part of the staple diet than the meat provided by the hunters.
So it would appear that, from as far back as the Stone Age, women, equally with men, have always been both protectors and providers for their families
