Woman

A woman is an adult female human being, as contrasted with a man, an adult male, and a girl, a female child. The term woman (irregular plural: women) is used to indicate biological sex distinctions, cultural gender role distinctions, or both.

Culture and gender roles

Main article: gender role

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From prehistory, women, like men, have assumed a particular cultural role. In hunter-gatherer societies, women have almost always been the gatherers of plant foods, while men have hunted meat. Because of their intimate knowledge of plant life, most anthropologists argue that it was women who led the Neolithic Revolution and became history's first pioneers of agriculture.

Related Topics:
Prehistory - Hunter-gatherer - Anthropologists - Neolithic Revolution - Agriculture

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In more recent history, the gender roles of women have changed greatly. Traditional gender roles for middle-class women typically involved domestic tasks emphasizing child care, and did not involve entering employment for wages. For poorer women, especially among the working classes, this often remained an ideal, for economic necessity has long compelled them to seek employment outside the home, although the occupations traditionally open to working-class women were lower in prestige and pay than those open to men. Eventually, restricting women from wage labor came to be a mark of wealth and prestige in a family, while the presence of working women came to mark a household as being lower-class.

Related Topics:
Middle-class - Working class

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The women's movement is in part a struggle for the recognition of equality of opportunity with men, and for equal rights irrespective of sex, even if special relations and conditions are willingly incurred under the form of partnership involved in marriage. The difficulties of obtaining this recognition are due to historical factors combined with the habits and customs history has produced. Through a combination of economic changes and the efforts of the feminist movement in recent decades, however, women in most societies now have access to careers beyond the traditional one of "homemaker".

Related Topics:
Equality of opportunity - Equal rights - Sex - Economic - Feminist - Homemaker

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These changes are among the foci of the academic field of women's studies.

Related Topics:
Academic - Women's studies

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