Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway0a5e | Hacker News Reader

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This fantasy needs to die.

When pre-industrial farmers were not in the fields all day they were not idle. They were doing tedious low intensity tasks all day instead of doing laborious tasks all day. A large part of the purpose of Sunday being a day of rest in protestant religions is that if you don't convince people there will be literal hell to pay for not taking a day off they won't take a regular day off and they will work to the point of overwork and reduced output.

Even a naive napkin math estimation of the labor required to keep a 1810s farm house and barn maintained and a few work animals fed and watered should make it clear how much labor needed to be put in before you even get to the farming aspect of it. And it's not like your wife gets to share the labor since she has her hands full with feeding and clothing the family. Pre-industrial farmers did not have the luxury of factory made clothes nor grocery store butter nor a galvanized barn roof nor a tractor.

In the US most of these people were literate and we have enough written accounts that we can accurately reconstruct how they spent their time. It suffices to say that they didn't deforest the northeast and carpet bomb it with stone walls by working 40hr weeks.

It’s simply historically accurate as seen by the plethora of medieval holidays not just Sunday. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

“And they worked only as many days as were necessary to earn their customary income -- which in this case amounted to about 120 days a year, for a probable total of only 1,440 hours annually (this estimate assumes a 12-hour day because the days worked were probably during spring, summer and fall).

Which isn’t to say people didn’t get things done outside of work, but we don’t consider food preparation for example as part of the workday.

I think the problem with this debate isn't about how much people have worked in the past, but more about what actually is work.

For example, in today's society we do not think of basic chores like laundry as work, but in the past laundry was far more labor-intensive due to the lack of washing machines. Is repairing your broken furniture or clothes work? Is preparing your own food work? Those things are trivialized in today's advanced capitalist societies, but might have been a substantial part of life for people in the past. Nowadays most people seem to just buy new furniture and clothes, and even food preparing has been substantially trivialized by resteraunts, orders, takeouts, and readymade meals, so we're probably much more prilvileged than they were. But did the medieval people saw all of this extra work as "work" in today's sense? (Graeber's famous book ("Bullshit Jobs") kinda touches on this aspect in the end chapter, but I wish he've delved a bit more on it. There's a whole anthropology of work that's left unexplored...)

I just think that even the conception of work itself might have been too different to compare medieval society's work hours to today's. We in modern societies are too accustomed with wage labor, to even imagine that these people might not have even thought about tracking the hours they were "working".

I don’t disagree, however most people really didn’t have much stuff in preindustrial societies and it generally lasted a very long time. Having say a separate bed for your children was a sign of relative wealth. American plantation owners are the equivalent of local nobility not farmers.

Similarly, food preparation generally involved minimal ingredients and as little effort as possible. Women where often working in fields or tending animals even with very young children, not spending 4+ hours a day in a kitchen.

But what they did have was astronomically expensive. Prior to the invention of a spinning wheel (late medieval), it took somewhere around 100 hours of labor to create a square yard of fabric. At minimum wage, that would make a shirt using 2-3 yards of fabric cost about $1,400-2,100. Imagine if the cheapest clothing available was Gucci and you were making minimum wage, and that would be almost as bad as medieval peasants had it.

Most peasant women probably spent virtually all of their spare time spinning yarn[1]. Most holidays weren't days where they completely stopped working; they were just days where they only did light, low-focus work that wouldn't preclude having a conversation, like spinning yarn.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2021/03/19/collections-clothing-how-did-t...

> And it's not like your wife gets to share the labor since she has her hands full with feeding and clothing the family.

At least in here, a lot of animal care was traditionally done by women. So did quite a lot of field work - a lot of it does not require that much physical strength. And clothing is quite serious time consuming work, really. The amount of time required to make the fabric is quite huge.

Plus laundry. The invention of the washing machine is literally one of the things that allowed women to get jobs outside the house.

Laundry used to be extremely uncommon activity, among other things it damages extremely expensive clothing. It really only started to consume significant time as the production of textiles exploded.

It was done, it had to be done still. Just not that often and it was massive work.

Source: I visited laundry museum once and it was pretty clear they have done it.

It was done yes. Did they all wash their outer clothes every month let alone every week, no.

I don't wash my jackets or jeans that often either. Laundry was not "extremely uncommon" thing. It was thing that needed to be done in every household.

The switch to washday as in once a week washing cloth happened in period we talk about - after 1800. That is when you would spend one whole day in the week doing laundry.

Before that, you still had to do it, less often, but it took even more work due to lack of soap.

1800 was post industrial, the steam engine had been around for 100 years at that point. The spinning wheel invented around 1030 and slowly spread to Europe after that caused a 5x increase in cloth production. Even that was recent, almost 20,000+ years of slowly improving drop spinning where cloth was rare, then a seemingly ever increasing explosion of cloth production.

Really for most of human history washing clothes wasn’t that time consuming for average people. To the point where people today likely spend more time on it.

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