Reading "The Wife of Bath". Stumbled on the first sentence of Chapter 3, where the author Marion Turner claims that "women have also always been economically active.." She's focused on European women and the Middle Ages, but somehow the phrase caused me to think. "Economically active" isn't defined here, but I'd expect it to mean earning and spending money, which would make it more limited than working, although there might be a Venn diagram there.
I think we can assume that almost all women everywhere have worked for much of their lives, if competent, just as almost all men have worked, if competent. I don't know that we'd usually consider spending money as working, at least in common parlance, but we would, I think, consider it as economic activity.
The formal definition of "work" seems to be the expending of effort or thought to accomplish something.
Somehow the subject is fascinating, even if I'm not going anywhere with it today.
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