Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour page 55

Women's production of new life, of new women and men, is inseparably linked to the production of the means of subsistence for this new life. Mothers who give birth to children and suckle them necessarily have to provide food for themselves and for the children. Thus, the appropriation of their bodily nature, the fact that they produce children and milk, makes them also the first providers of the daily food, be it as gatherers, who simply collect what they find in nature, plants, small animals, fish, etc., or as agriculturists. The first division of labour by sex, namely that between the gathering activities of the women and the sporadic hunting of the men, has its origin most probably in the fact that women necessarily were responsible for the production of the daily subsistence. Gathering of plants, roots, fruits, mushrooms, nuts, small animals, etc., was right from the beginning a collective activity of women.

It is assumed that the necessity to provide for the daily food and the long experience with plants and plant life eventually led to the invention of regular cultivation of grain and tubers. According to Gordon Childe, this invention took place in the Neolithic Age, particularly in Eurasia, where wild grains were first cultivated. He and many other scholars attribute this invention to women, who were also the inventors of the first tools necessary for this new mode of production: the digging stick--which was already in use for digging out wild roots and tubers--and the hoe.

The regular cultivation of food plants, mainly tubers and grains, signifies a new stage and an enormous increase in the productivity of female labour which, according to most authors, made the production of a surplus possible for the first time in history. Childe, therefore, calls this transformation the neolithic revolution which he attributes to the regular cultivation of grain. On the basis of recent arhaeological findings in Iran and Turkey, Elisabeth Fraser, however, argues that people had been able to collect a surplus of wild grains and nuts already in the gathering stage. The technological precondition for the collection of a surplus was the invention of containers, baskets of leaves and plant fibres and jars. It seems plausible that the technology of preservation preceded the new agricultural technology, and was equally necessary for the production of a surplus.