I remember being so boggled by the gender roles in the first book. They are LITERALLY freezing to death, but Miranda can't go out and get wood because... she's a girl? And her totally debilitated brother is more likely to survive than the comparatively fit Miranda because... he's a guy?
I recently read some stuff on the Donner Party, in which way more women survived than men. It's hard to say which factors were most important, but the men were doing a lot of very hard work outside in the cold, because women didn't do that sort of thing at that time. (Sort of. They worked very hard too, but not so much the really backbreaking outdoors-in-the-snow labor.) As a result, the men were more worn out and dropped dead. So if the division of labor is that gendered, the probable result would be... most of the men drop dead. (Women may also be more resistant to cold and starvation, but I believe research on that is inconclusive due to the lack of controlled experiments, for obvious reasons.)
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Tue, May. 4th, 2010 12:30 am (UTC)I recently read some stuff on the Donner Party, in which way more women survived than men. It's hard to say which factors were most important, but the men were doing a lot of very hard work outside in the cold, because women didn't do that sort of thing at that time. (Sort of. They worked very hard too, but not so much the really backbreaking outdoors-in-the-snow labor.) As a result, the men were more worn out and dropped dead. So if the division of labor is that gendered, the probable result would be... most of the men drop dead. (Women may also be more resistant to cold and starvation, but I believe research on that is inconclusive due to the lack of controlled experiments, for obvious reasons.)