Agricultural societies assigned women farming because fertility seemed magical, not technical

Evidence

For nomads, procreation seems only an accident, and the riches of the earth are still unknown; but the farmer admires the mystery of fertilization that burgeons in the furrows and in the maternal womb. He knows that he was conceived like the cattle and the harvests, and he wants his clan to conceive other humans who will perpetuate it in perpetuating the fertility of the fields; nature as a whole seems like a mother to him; the earth is woman, and the woman is inhabited by the same obscure forces as the earth. This is part of the reason agricultural work is entrusted to woman: able to call up the ancestral larvae within her, she also has the power to make fruit and wheat spring from the sowed fields. In both cases it is a question of a magic conjuration, not of a creative act. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 162

Categorization

• XREF: The earth-is-woman identification feeds the later chapter on myth (goddess cults, Demeter) and echoes Eliade’s sacred-earth thinking, and connects to the Mycenae/goddess thesis in Gimbutas. — connects to: Pre-agricultural societies attributed to women a mystical power over fertility and crops — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 173