Women: The first farmers

Abstract

First paragraph:

Psychologist Carl Jung (1959) used the term ‘feminine’ to describe intuition, representing unconscious and nonrational ways of knowing, thus relegating women to subservient roles. Con­trary to this, Carol P. Christ (2020), a historian and theologian, states that women have always played key roles in society, including being the first farm­ers. This did not happen due to women’s mere intuition. As Christ elaborates, “Women did not wake up one morning [in the Neolithic era approx­imately 12, 000 years ago] with the intuition that if they planted seeds and watered them, crops would grow” (Christ, 2020, p. 9).

Although intuition would have been involved (as is the case with many modern scientific and technological discoveries) in the development of agriculture, scientists and inventors accept that intuition complements and is a precursor to ra­tional thinking and scientific methodology. Being the first farmers would involve women combining their intuition with careful observations of nature, selecting healthy seeds from wild crops and engag­ing in continuous “trial and error” in their efforts to grow better crops. . . .