Plus, more women were held as slaves than were men. Some societies, e.g. those in Scandinavia and the Baltics, held all the women as slaves. Women didn't gain any sort of liberties until relatively recently ~ so it shows up in history ~ and in names. Might add that in Scandinavia they actually did something similar to the Iroquois winter walk. That's where the men go away and hunt and fish all winter while the women, children and old people stay at home and live on the surplus saved up in the short summer.
Starting in about the 8th Century the Vikings began just leaving town and making more distant raids. The folks who stayed behind continued to suffer from famine in winter, but in the springtime when the guys came back they had some good stuff to look at. The last famine in Scandinavia occured in the late 1800s, but the last famine in Northern Europe, far to the South, occurred in 1943.
Interestingly enough, women survive famines better than men ~ but in the next generation everybody gets to be a midget proving that nature provides eh!
America in the 1600s and 1700s clearly had a surplus of men over women.
I’d be glad to debate the point, but seem to have trouble finding reliable statistics about historical sex ratios in different societies. Do you have references?
While I’m well aware American frontier societies were extremely lopsided to males, I’m not so sure this was true of the longer-settled areas.
Immigrants were always disproportionately male, and for obvious reasons not too many women were on the ever-moving frontier.
I disagree with your claim about women doing most of the work in the past. While true of most tribal societies, it is most definitely not true of most peasant societies, where everybody had to work all the time to stave off starvation and pay the landlord. The male serfs didn’t get to hang out on the corner. Male slaves through all history were always worked to the max. That’s the whole point of having slaves.
I also suggest your claim that all women were slaves is inaccurate. Sure, by our standards women had no rights and were little better than slaves. But the women of the time were well aware of the difference between honorable wife and mother and a female slave. Note the many, many examples of women killing their children and themselves rather than being taken captive to be enslaved. Jews, Gauls, Britons, Carthagnians, Germans, Rajputs, etc. Very long list.
Found some statistics that in American colonial days 1% to 1.5% of all births resulted in maternal death. Since women had multiple births, as a rule, probably one in eight to one in ten women died in childbirth.
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/childbirth.cfm
I’m not sure this rate was high enough to significantly outweigh the higher male death rate from war and accidents.
I think we get this impression because we have so many records of older widows marrying a succession of young wives. But the primary reason for this was that older, financially established men were prime catches in the marriage market and were quickly snapped up.
To discuss the issue, we first have to decide which type of society we’re going to discuss. American colonists had little in common with Russian peasants or medieval Egyptian peasants.