Women can choose to work or not, the same as a man can choose. If the terms of employment, compensation or ownership of property are not agreeable or secure, there is little incentive to work. No father wants his daughter to be faced with either marriage or death, so he will fight to secure her rights over the fruits of her labor.
The problem comes in marriage and the imbalance of power. All partnerships, whether intimate or platonic are fragile. If all legal rights are held equal, the woman has more power in the relationship than the man, not only over her body but over the minds of the children and sympathy of the community. This is how it came to be that men's rights are seen superior to the woman's in a marriage. To maintain order, the woman must yield to the man. It is in his nature to preserve and provide for what is his. It is in his interest to defend his property, and if the woman siezes this through her wry ways, he loses his incentive to provide. Interfere with this 'sacred' institution then the family and subsequently the population will collapse as will women's rights.
if you read even just Genesis, the wives had very crucial roles in many of the adventures of the family of Adam... Sarah, for example, repeatedly involved in some funny gambits with people of a city they were visiting because she was so pretty, so, twice she is pretending to be his sister, and as you observe, under patriarchy the sister is in a different status to the wife
Abraham was probably even the case of the first emergence of a more equal concept of the family roles, and that even predates christianity and influenced the jewish family structure as well
what happens in islam and fundamentalist judaism are both regressions, and idk what their religion is called in korea but in Japan, Shinto is also similarly patriarchal, and has a lot of those characteristics you also see in korean and middle eastern islamic family culture... the polygamy changes a lot of things though, as does the hiding of the women
in asia the women are more respected as producers in gardening and agriculture and art
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