“The Plow.  There is probably no single tool in human history that wreaked such havoc between women and men or stimulated so many changes in human patterns of sex and love as the plow…In cultures where people garden with a hoe, women do the bulk of the cultivation; in many of these societies women are relatively powerful as well.  But with the introduction of the plow – which required much more strength – much of the essential farm labor became men’s work.  Moreover, women lost their ancient honored roles as independent gatherers, providers of the evening meal.  And soon after the plow became crucial to production, a sexual double standard emerged among farming folk.  Women were judged inferior to men.” Pp. 278 & 279.
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>“The first written evidence of women’s subjugation in farming communities comes from law codes of ancient Mesopotamia dating from about 1100 B. C. where women were described as chattels, possessions…Unlike women in nomadic foraging societies who left camp regularly to work and brought home precious goods and valuable information, who traveled freely to visit friends and relatives and ran their own love lives, a marming woman took her relatives and ran their own love lives, a farming woman took her place in the garden or the house – her duty to raise children and serve a man…With plow agriculture came general female subordination, setting in motion the entire panorama of Western sexual and social life.” pp. 279 – 281. 
> 
>from:
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>Anatomy of Love: The Mysteries of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray.
>By Helen Fisher, Ph.D.
>Fawcett Columbine, New York, 1992