The reason this kind of nonsense makes me so angry is because it denies women personhood.
Women didn’t get the vote and suddenly develop ambitions and interests and talents.
As long as there have been people there have been women. So much of the history of ordinary people, and especially of women, has been lost.
But we know, because we are people too, that women have always worked and fought and created. Where circumstances didn’t allow for freedom, they dreamed or hoped or caught the dregs of education or hobbies or professions.
Whatever was happening through history, women were there. Cooking dinners and nursing babies and advising men or making their own voices heard, women were always active participants.
Do we imagine that there have never been men who loved their wives for their intelligence and wise counsel? Or who encouraged the education of a clever daughter? Or who bought his dinner from the widow who ran the bakery because she was an excellent cook?
Whatever we modern women have of talent and capacity and ambition, our ancestresses had the same. They had to use loopholes and strategies and stolen moments, but they were doing things.
And if if the majority of Viking women were housewives; think about keeping house when pretty much everything you ate, drank, wore or used, had to be made or gown or gathered by you or your household. Without the labour of women, people would have been cold, naked and hungry.
This version of history which has women sitting by the fire waiting for the men to come back, is such bullshit.
You could as easily say that the women were involved in constant, skilled and vital work, while the men messed around in boats.