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This wildly underestimates the amount of labor and stress involved in subsistence agriculture.
Did you know that the a bunch of historical measurement units were traditionally defined in terms of ploughing speed? One furlong for an eight-ox team to plough until they needed a break. Use that time to set up for the next furrow. Repeat for an entire day and you have an acre. Repeat for an entire ploughing season and you have your effective limits on land.
Do this twice a year if you don’t want to starve. Spend the rest planting, weeding, foraging, harvesting, haymaking, shearing, milking, breeding, slaughtering, repairing, digging, building, etc., or you’ll still starve. Have your crops pillaged by a passing army and starve anyway.
And God forbid you’re a woman. You avoid some of those backbreaking tasks, but get your own set instead. Not to mention the joys of giving birth in the era before anesthetics or antibiotics.
Seriously. The past was much harsher than you’re imagining.
Premodern childbirth is less dangerous than is popularly imagined(although still much more dangerous than modern hospital births). Informed people might trot out the 1-2% per birth statistic but this is almost certainly an overestimate because it's calculated based off of recorded births, which were mostly of aristocrats, who started giving birth much younger than peasant girls.
…but had better access to nutrition, sanitation and medicine. I think data is all over the place. Even 1% per birth adds up over a life with 5-8 births!
More to the point, I don’t think a woman has to die in childbirth for it to make her life much more difficult. Assuming that the past was so much easier is hopelessly naive.
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