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“Maybe I’m old-fashioned.”

My friend and colleague offered me these words a few years ago when she announced over lunch that she was going to quit her job before her first baby was born in a few months. She would devote her time exclusively to rearing her children-to-come, she said, at least until the youngest was in school.

It isn’t easy making these decisions or breaking the news to others who have chosen differently, and my friend seemed concerned about my reaction. But she needn’t have worried. I supported her decision, and still do. In fact, my only quibble is with her apparent belief that limiting her work to raising children is in any way “old-fashioned.” In truth, the notion that women’s work ought to be restricted to the family sphere is quite new.

Human history has been carried along by the current of women at work. Women, believe many historians and ethnobotanists, created agriculture, the systematic cultivation and harvest of plants for food. This major turning point in the early history of our species was accomplished only because our foremothers engaged in what we would today see as work outside the family. Women pooled their skills and knowledge and focused their efforts on the good of a social unit larger than their own partners and children. Today, women still produce more than three-quarters of the world’s food—for your family and mine, and everyone else’s.

Similar story lines occur throughout the creation of other major human institutions. With the development of commerce, women were there, producing goods, taking them to market, keeping records, cleaning up. Women fueled the growth of the world’s religions in a variety of ways, in many cases, forgoing family life entirely to follow a religious vocation. As literacy extended beyond the clergy, women became teachers. And long before health care developed into professions, women were on the front lines, caring for the sick, delivering babies, concocting remedies. And as factories began to dot the landscape, women took to millwork.

In fact, the history of women is the history of work, work that has aimed well beyond the family sphere. And while the hand that rocks the cradle may well rule the world, women have not intentionally limited their influence to child-rearing—until recently. The 20th century brought major social changes, including workplaces that became increasingly removed from living quarters and a dramatically different social value on children. In response, women and their families have begun to divide labor differently. Enter the stay-at-home mom as we know her. The woman whose work life focuses exclusively on family is a recent invention, a new-fangled gal, not in the least old-fashioned.

Why the confusion? How did a new way of approaching work and family life come to be seen as traditional and time-honored? I don’t know, but I bet it has something to do with the place where many women did their work over the years: the home. In pre-industrial life, much work was home-based, built around farms and mom-and-pop shops. But just because women worked at home doesn’t mean they limited their work to family caregiving. The farmer’s wife was also a farmer; the miller’s wife, a miller.

And don’t let the fact that, often, women haven’t been paid for their efforts cloud the matter either. When it comes to understanding women and work, the key is not where women work, or how much they are paid. The key is that women have sought to have—and have had—a wide influence with their work. We have chosen to let our labors serve our communities and our world, as well as our families. Many of us still choose this kind of important work. I do, and I hope my daughters do—but maybe I’m old-fashioned.

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Facts about working women