Why women did not earn livelihood like men in old times?This is true for almost all old cultures.

You will need to define your terms better "old times" - what the hell is that? The 20th century? The 19th? Medieval times? Ancient Rome?

Here are some general statements to go along with your general questions.

1) Women over the age of 18 (and often over the age of 12 or so) were married and there was no birth control. You do the math - and pregnancy was a fatal condition a lot more frequently than it is now.
2) They were paid **** so it was more practical to send your husband or son out to work (and work was different from now; go back to medieval times and people were often not paid at all and instead were just allowed to live on and work the land in exchange for a lord's dubious protection)
3) Look up dower laws. Go back only to the 19th century in England and America and a married woman's property, inheritance, and earnings all belonged to her husband. So you might not be seeing evidence of women working but they were; they just couldn't keep their earnings.
4) Also related to dower - you want to know why men wanted sons and not daughters? It was not just to work the land; it was also because sons were cheaper. Marry your son off and get a dowry gift from the bride's family. Marry your daughter off and you have to provide an expensive dowry - and girls' chastity had to be protected whereas no one gave a damn when it came to boys.
5) They were denied educational opportunities. Women didn't start being able to go to medical school or law school until the 19th century in at least England and the US.
6) Sexism, pure and simple. They may have wanted to work or at least earn and were unable to do so because no one would hire them.
7) And finally, what you are calling 'household' work was different and more different the further you go back. Today it's cooking and cleaning and child care. In Victorian times, a poor woman would also be sharecropping (called the cottier class in England). They would be caring for animals (having a horse was like owning a car) and helping repair the roof if necessary. Look at women pioneers. They did all of that and often delivered each others' babies, too.

A complex issue like this will have a lot of answers ranging from lack of agency to dispositional factors but I think one common thread is that men tend to be more driven to seek status at higher rates than women nearly universally across culture. That the desirability of a man to his mate is more influenced by his status than the desirability of a woman is to hers.

This is made into simplistic, negative, arguments for self-serving reasons. Like “men only care about a woman’s looks” or “women only care about a man’s wallet” but below those unhelpful extrapolations does lie potentially biological factors to this that influence the balance sought between “work” and “life”.

Women have earned livelihoods in many cultures at many times in history. A great many cultures have had gender parity, up to and including women participating in clan or tribal warfare. Additionally, women have very different notions of what constitutes success in life, and earning a living has not necessarily been at the top of their respective lists. Usually, though, when circumstances have required it, women have stepped up and done what it takes to support themselves, and their families when that applies. In fact, it is likely that their efforts will be greatest when they have dependents to support.

Do you know any single income families? Unless the earner is an exceptional provider, a one income family today is often not nearly as well off as the more common two income family. Competition has something to do with it, surely. But in today's reality, a one income family is likely below the poverty line.

Jespah, I just want to point out that your examples are all focused on Western Culture. I agree with you that the terms need to be better defined.

I think the phrase "earn livelihood" has absolutely no meaning in most cultures throughout the history of humanity.

I think it is a common logical fallacy to judge other cultures through the lens of Western values (whether that be capitalism or feminism). We are just one culture... our belief that our beliefs and values are somehow valid where other cultures were wrong is not unique. Every culture feels this way.

If you insist that our modern values are correct in some universal sense, it makes it very difficult to understand other cultures. I find the view that all ancient and indigenous cultures where all moving toward some ideal that is now realized in our culture to be problematic.

That's why I made it clear what I was talking about and not speaking universally.

When men and women lived as hunters and gatherers, these societies can be considered to be more egalitarian as they were more dependent on cooperation for "earning livelihood".

That is very clearly untrue Walter. You are projecting your modern Western cultural biases onto indigenous cultures. The idea of "egalitarian" hunter gatherer societies is common... but it is a myth. If you look at anthropological studies of hunter gatherer cultures, including current indigenous hunter gatherer cultures such as the Yanomami Tribe and indigenous Australians, the myth breaks down when you start looking at actual cultures. There are interesting texts about polygamy in Native American tribes in what is now the American southwest... the Spaniards used these "barbaric" practices to justify wiping out (i.e. Christianizing) these cultures.

Child brides were a feature of many indigenous cultures, as was polygamy. Both of these practices are now considered quite unacceptable to those of us living in Western Culture.

Western culture has built up a mythology of "egalitarian" indigenous societies because we want to see ourselves and our values as the "logical progression" of every previous indigenous culture that ever existed.

You would be quite uncomfortable with the values of real hunter gatherer societies. They did not share your world view about "egalitarian" society. The noble savage myth is a troubling from our Western Culture with its history of colonialism.

Reading more... it seems like some anthropologists are making a distinction between hunter-gatherer societies and agricultural societies. The claim is that the Western ideal of "egalitarianism" is better met by the hunter-gatherer societies. I am interested in learning more about this; what I have read about modern hunter gatherer societies still suggests that they were nothing even close to modern ideas of equality.

But my point still stands. We as members of modern Western culture now use Western values to judge indigenous cultures. The indigenous cultures that are closer to our values we praise, and we seem to largely ignore the practices of indigenous cultures that trouble us (and if you do any reading of any depth, practices that are troubling based on our values aren't difficult to find).

Every time Western Culture has encountered another culture, we have disapproved of certain cultural practices, and we largely stamped them out.

Exactly NOT.
When I'd studied history, all of our profs told from the beginning, not to draw conclusions from from our and today's perspective but from the circumstances and/in the period we look at.

I don't know how much you know about and where you studied pre- and protohistory.
It might well be that it differs in the USA from here (e.g., we don't have a "Western Culture" in those periods.)

The marriage age was a lot lower even in medieval times "in Western Culture".
And within noble families, the so-called "munt marriage" (actually an older Germanic tradition) was done until early modern times. (In the also common "Friedel marriage", the husband did not become the legal guardian of the woman, in contrast to the Munt marriage.)

In 1880, the age of consent in Alabama was 10, which was also true in Arkansas, Colorado, California and Connecticut. In Delaware in 1880, the age of consent was seven. In fact, overwhelmingly, the age of consent in the states of the United States in 1880 was 10. Most of the other states had an age of consent of 12.

Of course, age of consent laws in western culture are not relevant to women earning a livelihood historically--it's just the obsession of one member posting here. To allege that women did not earn a livelihood is a display of both ignorance and perhaps a prejudice against women. The old saw: "For men may work from sun to sun, but women's work is never done"--has been all too true throughout history. The small but important mercantile communities in Europe and in China relied heavily on the labor of women, who often "held the fort" while the man of the house was out making contacts, sales and purchases. In medieval Europe, women could enter into the rights in property of a husband who was a serf upon his death, and without paying the heriot. Manor court records are filled with agreements recorded whereby a son or son-in-law agreed to meet certain terms in order to have the use of the strip fields which thus fell to the lot of a mother or mother-in-law. In the all important efforts which serfs made to acquire land, so as to become freeholders and end their status as serfs, women contributed not only labor on the strip fields to which their spouse was entitled, but often worked outside the manor farm to earn income with which the land could be purchased. One of the common occupations of women was to work for a fuller. For a penny a day (a silver penny in England in the 11th century was a not inconsiderable sum), a woman would spend all day trampling on newly woven wool cloth in a trough of cold water, or of human urine. One can imagine how this affected their health. Women also worked outside the home in the leather making industry, which also involved soaking and handling the rawhides in human urine. Retting newly woven cotton or flax (linen) involved such labor done with the hands. Those are just a few of the jobs for cash that women did outside the home.

Frankly, alleging that women did not earn a livelihood seems to me the height of stupidity.

I think I agree with most of Setanta's dense wall of text. He agrees with the point I made in his last sentence.

I am questioning whether terms like "egalitarian" have any meaning outside of a western cultural context; particularly when judging the merit of traditional practices of indigenous cultures. This term imply a cultural understanding of what has value in a general sense.

To judge which indigenous cultures were egalitarian, you need some way of assigning value to different cultural roles. This is impossible to do without assuming a cultural context.

You do know that "egalitarian" is the English version of the the French égalitaire, first used in France in 1836, in the meaning you use, only in last centurydon't you? (Source)

19th century France has quite a bit of influence on modern western culture, right? What would this mean to a pre-colonial Native American, African, Asian or Australian culture?

Not only the pre-colonial Native American, African, Asian or Australian culture didn't know this term but - to stay at home - neither did the Bructeri (the people who lived here where my ancestors lived for at least 800 years) nor the Saxons (who invaded here) or the Franks (who killed and Christianised the Saxons).

Gleaning from Jared Diamond:
In the hunter-gathering cultures they did just that. The men went out hunting and the women and children gathered various plant parts, fruits, roots, any useful plant parts, and, of course, any insects and small animals encountered. It's believed that the women and children provided more calories in this method than the hunting men, which is believable considering the difficulty of successful hunting. Men often would return with either a bounty or nothing at all, whereas the women produced a more consistent flow of food.