Page 252 - The Drucker Lectures

The Future of the Corporation I [ 233

cally no women. Now, it is about 50-50 in here. Will we men
accept the fact that the smart thing is to let the women work and
we enjoy it? I’m serious. They are incredibly eager to work. In
fact, throughout history, men and women have always worked.
The idle housewife who sat at home and spun a fine seam is a
nineteenth-century fiction. You could not run a farm unless you
had both a farmer and his wife. And vice versa. The woman
alone couldn’t run the farm, either. The best farmers we have in
the world happen to be the Moravian in Pennsylvania, and they
have a strict rule that if a husband or a wife dies, the survivor has
to marry within six months or you lost the farm. By the way, the
Salvation Army has pretty much the same rule. There is no such
thing as a Salvation Army captain; there is a Salvation Army
captain—a male—and there’s his wife, who is also a Salvation
Army captain. So this is nothing new.
At the same time, men and women have often done differ-
ent work historically. Go back to our ancestors, when the men
hunted and the women picked edible weeds and took care of the
children. The first civilization for which we have good com-
mercial records is the Sumerians. And the traders—the people
who transported goods—were all men. And the scribes were
all men. But the ones who set the prices—the controllers, you
might say—were all women. There is no record of a male con-
troller who said, “Six oxen equal 94 pieces of pottery” or what
have you. That was all women.
In this country, men milk cows. In Europe, women milk
cows. We don’t know why. On the other hand, up until about
1700, there were no women weavers. Spinning was for women;
weaving was for men. In Japan, until World War II, there were
only male potters. So, historically, men and women did different
work. And that is still true of nonknowledge work.
But knowledge work is different. The first modern form of
knowledge work to come on the scene was nursing. It was 1854,