Tell that to the revisionist history books! The women in my family were tough as nails. I could tell you tales that would curl your hair.
My dad's mother was out in the cotton fields while he was still a baby on a blanket under a tree. A story in my family told of the day someone saw my dad with my grandmother's 32 pistol drawing a bead on another worker at the other end of the field.
My maternal Grandmother was over sixty years old when she caught her hand in an old-fashioned table-saw attached to the power takeoff of a tractor. It cut into her palm, she lost two fingers and left the others as useless claws. She had been building a garage by herself for my Grand-pap. She could hang Sheetrock on the ceiling by herself through her seventies with a deadman brace. She was as good a carpenter as any I've seen. In her eighties she tied my grandfather to the chimney so he wouldn't fall or wander off while she repaired damaged roofing shingles.
Mother is also pretty strong willed and got her Masters degree the year my brother graduated from college. My wife has no stories of daring-do but her inner strength continues to impress me. My daughter is already on her way to making a big dent in the business world.
Sounds like my family, my grandmother on my mom's side grew her own chewing tobacco and kept a pistol.
They took her pistol away when she shot the ceiling to break up my uncles, she then started sleeping with a hatchet.
My mother picked cotton, and fruit, and vegetables, as they followed the crops.
As a more mature woman she became a construction inspector.