The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  This is merely the first round of tasks. Afterwards there are the seasonal obligations: ‘March is time for a wife to make her garden . . . March is time to sow flax and hemp’, which then had to be ‘weeded, pulled, watered, washed, dried, beaten, braked, hatchelled, spun, wound, wrapped and woven’. From the woven result, the housewife then had to ‘make sheets, tablecloths, towels, shirts, smocks, and other such necessaries’; if her husband had sheep, she had to repeat the process with their wool. Even then, she was not through with her chores – the author displays the standard patriarchal preoccupation with the danger of women’s ‘idleness’ in the stern injunction, ‘meanwhile, do other works’. It is a wife’s responsibility, he continues:

  to winnow all manner of corns, to make malt, wash and wring, to make hay, to shear corn, and in time of need to help her husband to fill the muck wain or dung cart, drive the plough, to load hay, corn and such other. Also to go to the market, to sell butter, cheese, milk, eggs, chickens, capons, hens, pigs, geese, and all manner of corn. And also to buy all manner of necessary thing belonging to the household, and to make a true reckoning and account to her husband what she hath received and what she hath paid.

  The wife who accomplished all this must have kept many candles burning by night. Realistically, though, for every Tudor super-woman there must have been weaker vessels who quailed at the very sight of the job description, not to mention their cannier sisters who would decide that life was too short to stuff a dung cart. Sir Anthony’s paragon obviously comes from the same region as bachelor’s wives and old maid’s children, and may have been as little seen in real life as any of those.

  But these were the standards, however individual women might fall below them, and training for this demanding role began early. A well-educated girl’ could spin, weave, sew and make garments of all kinds before she was fifteen, and even those manuals which most stridently forbade teaching girls to read often argued that they should learn ‘the four rules of arithmetic’ so that they could keep account of their husband’s money. One Italian father of the Renaissance, while repeating the old idea that reading was wasted unless the daughter was destined to become a nun, left such a long list of prescribed study that she would never have had a moment to pick up a book: ‘teach her to do everything about the house, to make bread, to clean capons, sift, cook, launder, make beds, spin, weave French purses, embroider, cut wool and linen cloths, put new feet on to socks, and so forth, so that when you marry her off, she won’t seem a fool freshly arrived from the wilds.’20 Paolo de Certaldo’s ‘and so forth’ here has an uneasy ring of Sir Anthony’s ‘other works’ – clearly the work to become women was never done, either – and since twelve was the legal age at which a girl could be married throughout Europe until the nineteenth century, these little girls must have had a busy childhood.

  They would however have needed all the training they could obtain to cope with what lay ahead. For every wife and mother in the pre-industrial period had to combine a number of skilled functions that have since become specialisms (and often male mysteries too) in their own right:

  Provision of food and drink

  A housewife had to be able to kill her own pig, butchering the joints neatly for her salting tub. Her family only had bread if she knew every stage of the process from sowing through reaping, gleaning, winnowing, grinding, storing and baking, and performed them all correctly. In every country too, women were the brewers, of ale and cider in the northern world, of wine further south, while in Africa the Quissama women of Angola climbed the palm trees to tap off the highly prized palm beer.

  Making household goods

  Before the birth of shops, with markets often too remote or goods too costly, women had to be capable of making almost everything that they or their home needed: pots, curtains, bed-rolls, hammocks, floor coverings, candles, containers. They made clothes, too, everything from an infant’s belly-binder to a man’s great-coat – that end of the scale was later promoted to men’s work as ‘tailoring’, though men showed no such enthusiasm for taking over the tasks of mending, ‘turning’, ‘rag-rugging’, and putting new feet on socks.

  Doctoring, nursing and midwifery

  When old and young lived together, and women were so often either pregnant, lactating or recovering from stillbirths and miscarriages, there was sure to be someone ill most of the time. And although each of these had its speciahst practitioners from very early on, the expert was often either too expensive, engaged elsewhere, or not in time for the crisis. All women therefore developed some skills in these areas as a matter-of-fact, yet life-and-death, adjustment to their circumstances.

  The way in which women made these tasks part of their everyday lives is evident from the career of Anne Hutchinson. Known to history as a religious radical who challenged the authority of the early American clergy, Anne only began her ministry in seventeenth-century Boston because she was grieved by the numbers of women whose workload prevented them from attending the Sunday services. Summarizing the sermons, she would ‘carry the voice of God’ into homes where she was already known to the women colonists because of her skill in nursing and midwifery. The colony had its own official midwife, a veritable model of the doughty working woman, who came over with the 1630 convoy, where she could never know in advance on which of those eight ships her services would be needed. When a woman went into labour on the Arbella, therefore, a volley of cannon was the signal to the Jewel, far ahead with the midwife, to reef sails and delay. When the Arbella at last caught up, the intrepid midwife tied her skirts up between her legs, climbed down the side of one ship, and after a hair-raising transfer across the face of the Atlantic by long-boat, ascended the other to deliver the baby. This woman’s skill was evidently equal to her courage, since mother and child survived. But in a colony where an unmarried female over eighteen was unknown, and where ‘seldom any married woman but hath a child in her belly and one on her lap’, as one observer reported, it would take more than one midwife to cope with all the ‘birthings’.

  The story of Anne, a woman of outstanding spiritual gifts yet deeply practical and effective, also illustrates the constant jumbling of high and low that characterizes women’s work as home-makers from the very dawning of the notion of hearth and home. Many cultures like India charged women with the guardianship or maintenance of the sacred gods of their respective religious customs or practices; the Jewish mother was honoured at the Sabbath feast, which she had prepared with all devout observance of the religious laws; and no Englishwoman, be she ever so humble, but was ‘Queen of the Feast’ at her own harvest home. Yet those same women had previously presided over and taken part in activities considerably less elevated. The task of washing, for instance, was a grinding burden because of the sheer volume of clothes worn by men, women and children: shirts, caps, neckerchiefs, ‘bands’ for men (still seen on British barristers), collars for women, bodices, kirtles, tuckers, shifts, petticoats, aprons, on top of sheets, towels, and ‘dishclouts’. Nor was this work for the dainty-minded – the foul linen and ‘small clothes’ that landed with the colonists in America had to be immediately plunged into the sea by the women while the men stood around with loaded muskets – though whether this was for defence against hostile attacks of native Americans or to dispose of anything that might crawl out of the months-old dirty linen has not been recorded.

  Home-making women, in any case, could not afford to be squeamish, charged as they were with responsibility for the cleanliness and sanitation of their household. This would have had its pleasant side – women worldwide are known to have made all kinds of perfumed soaps and cleansing powders, and American women pioneered, among other things, a kind of toothbrush made of marshmallow roots, for use with a ‘toothpaste’ of powdered orris root, chalk and bergamot or lavender oil. But overall, the disagreeables must have outweighed the pleasures. Everyone knows of the medieval custom of strewing floors with rushes mixed with fragrant rosemary, rue and sweet marjoram. What we forget is everything th
at was swept under the rush carpet, described by Erasmus as ‘an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, spittle, excrement of dogs and cats and everything nasty’.21

  Worse than this must have been the unremitting task of dealing with the bodily waste of the household, which in the nature of things would be in continuous production. It may have been men who lugged around the wagons collecting the night-soil (in India, the so-called ‘untouchables’), but in every home, from hovel to palace, women emptied the chamber pots and closed stools, sluiced the privies and freshened the houses of easement for the next user. Women naturally dealt, too, with the results of their own physical functions; boiling the menstrual napkins or ‘rags’ went on into the twentieth century, and in a household of women, most of whom would not live past forty, it would have been a recurrent and unavoidable chore.

  All this would have been by way of valuable apprenticeship to a kind of labour not falling within the housework remit, but more properly categorized as pure wife-work. Wife-work comprised all the tasks that women had to do for their husbands, of a physical, sexual and often gorge-rising nature. At its highest, wife-work meant tasks that only fell upon women when they were married, because no matter how poorly off husbands were, they needed to have somebody below them, as in this description of a struggling peasant community in the primitive Auvergne:

  [The wives] go to bed later than the men, and rise before them. If snow has fallen it is up to one of them to clear a path to the fountain. Deep – sometimes up to her waist in snow, she will go back and forth until she has flattened out a passage for the other women. A man would think himself dishonoured if he went for water himself; he would be the butt of the village. These mountain rustics have the deepest contempt for women and the despotic disdain of all wild, half-barbaric tribes. They look on them as slaves born to do all the chores which they consider base and beneath themselves.22

  This wife-work fulfilled a group need – the women needed water for their children and for themselves, not just to keep the noses of their husbands clean. Lower down the scale, wife-work was low indeed. From Canaan to Abbeville, from Japan to Peru, the classic wife-task was the ritual performed, significantly enough, by Mary Magdalene for Jesus Christ and then by Christ in his turn as an act of abasement, washing the feet of the master. The French Book of the Knight of the Tour Landry (1371), widely influential throughout Europe for centuries, insists on foot-washing as a symbol of ‘cherishing a husband’s person’. On the other side of the globe, Japanese pillow-books similarly insist on foot-washing as a wife’s proper greeting to her returning lord. A lady might delegate the job to a maid-servant, but if she really wanted to be sure of her lord, she did it herself.

  From toe to top: a dutiful wife was also expected to massage, comb and cleanse her husband’s scalp. In the course of one such expedition, Elizabeth Pepys unearthed 16 lice, evidence at least that husband Samuel kept something other than wars and lechery under his fashionable hat. Shaving, washing, massaging and masturbating (tr. ‘relief massage’ in modern English, now in the hands of surrogate wives) were also part of the contract – but perhaps least to be envied were the women of the Indian state of Mysore, where:

  Women habitually attended their husbands, male children, relatives and sweethearts at the call of nature, cleansing their privy members when they were through. The individual merely said: ‘Meyn choonah hoon jow!’ (I am going to leak) and one of the females of the house was obliged to attend him.23

  Happily, not all the work of a wife was of this intimate and private nature. For many indeed, wifehood could bring a degree of freedom in the form of a licence to trade in the public world – the woman who found that her hens had laid too many eggs one week was only being a good housewife if she took them to market and sold them to another woman who had lost hers to the crow, fox or thieving passer-by. Some women, either through personal preference or force of circumstances, made trading their way of life, and worldwide, the ancient association of women with buying, selling and every aspect of merchandising is so marked as to make nonsense of another twentieth-century myth: that modern women are the first to work in any numbers outside the home.

  When [women] made most of the articles of trade, they were the best placed to exchange them. In some places like Nicaragua, women did not merely carry on trade, they absolutely controlled it . . . In Tibet, trade was regulated by a council of women . . . The North American fur trade until the nineteenth century was entirely in the hands of women . . . In Melanesia, in New Britain and New Hanover . . . in Assam, in Manipur . . . in the Malay Peninsula . . . in the Luchu islands . . . in Burma, women carried on most of the retail trade and a good deal of the wholesaling even in the 1960s . . .24

  Above all, the country where the market-woman ruled supreme was Africa: ‘In the Congo and Cameroons in Africa, women were in charge of the trading stations and markets. The markets of the Nigerian Ibo were run by a women’s council presided over by a “queen”.’ This verbal hangover from the days of the local matriarchy also indicates the importance of the markets as a reason for women to get together, to exchange news and gossip, and to renew old contacts; messages were passed hundreds of miles from market to market by virtue of the solemn undertaking, ‘I will speak it in the market.’

  In the less hospitable climate of the West, many women devoted their energies to indoor work, becoming proficient in a variety of highly skilled crafts, like the fine glover or the amorous spur-maker ‘Kate’ hymned by the poet François Villon in the sixteenth century. The traditional way for women to gain entry to these generally restricted occupations was via their menfolk, as this list of sixteenth-century German women licensed to ply the following trades clearly indicates:

  Frau Nese Lantmennyn, blacksmith; Katherine, widow of Andreas Kremer, gardener; Katherine Rebestoeckyn, goldsmith; Agnes Broumattin, widow of Hans Hirtingheim, waggoner; Katherine, widow of Helle Hensel, grain dealer; Else von Ortemberg, Oberlin Rulin’s daughter, tailor; Katherine, widow of Heinrich Husenbolz, cooper.25

  Such licences, however, were often not worth the parchment they were written on, for they constituted at best a grudging admission to the fringes of the mystery, and never the all-important full membership of a guild.26 Without this, women could not hold any guild office, nor have any voice in the guild decisions regulating their trade. Given the busy woman’s impatience with honorifics, they may have borne the first deprivation with equanimity, but the second was strongly resented, as a long history of legal actions and petitions by women demonstrates. Female traders suffered under other forms of discrimination, too – then as now, the working woman was frequently accused of taking work away from men, who really needed it. What must have hurt more, they were invariably paid less than their male counterparts for exactly the same work, on the grounds that as women they did not need a job as a man did; and that they worked more slowly, producing less, and also ate less, consequently needing less to live on.

  Yet nothing could actually prevent women from harnessing their natural energies and resource into useful work, and the huge numbers of working women glimpsed everywhere in the historical records demonstrates once again that crucial gap between what a society said and what in practice it did, that women have been able to avail themselves of since time immemorial. For in truth the city fathers and guild legislators who struggled to restrict the activities of ‘wives, daughters, widows and maids’ were straining against a force of which they knew nothing: the importance of women’s work to the economy. Always treated as peripheral, in the lives of the individual women as well as of their society at large (the idea that women work for ‘pin money’ is a long time dying), it is in fact central and indispensable, both in terms of women’s direct production (weaving is a good example) and of their indirect labour of house-work and wife-work which frees men and fettles them up for productive labour.

  Women who as widows were relieved of that second burden of commitment often made a staggering success of their enterprise when they
were able to move for and by themselves. The numbers of shrewd and energetic businesswomen, like their religious sisters of earlier centuries, argue another large body of women who either did not accept the oft-told tale of female inferiority, or by means known only to themselves, succeeded in reconciling it with being superior to most of the men around them. Alice Chester, for instance, an outstanding English entrepreneur at the end of the fifteenth century, trading wool, wine, iron and oil as far afield as Flanders and Spain, deferred to no one but God; and when she built Him a new high altar and rood loft in her favourite church, that too was in the nature of a prudent investment for the future. Not all women traders were as successful as Alice. Margery Russell of Coventry in the heart of the English Midlands was robbed of eight hundred pounds’ worth of goods by the men of Santander in Spain, a ruinous loss. Even worse was the fate that befell Agnes de Hagemon, a Shrewsbury brewer, who, as she was pouring a tub of liquor into the vat of hot mash, slipped and fell in, where she was so severely scalded that she died. Agnes’s fate was recorded in the Coroner’s Rolls of November 1296. As a gruesome footnote, although it must have contained some of Agnes’s skin, flesh and hair, the beer was sold off, raising a profit of 2½d for the Crown.27

  Both these cases illustrate the element of danger that has always deterred a number of women from venturing out of their protected domestic enclaves into the public world. Yet many did, and not only into trade and commerce. These centuries saw, too, the birth of the first professional women. In the wake of the pioneering eleventh-century physician and gynaecologist Trotula, there was a particular interest in medicine. With her colleagues, the ‘Ladies of Salerno’, Trottila had established the first medieval centre of scientific learning not under the control of the Church. Some of her theories were equally radical – she suggested that infertility could be as much due to the male as the female, for instance – but her definitive work, The Diseases of Women, was not superseded for generations. It was, however, generally attributed to a male authorship, either Trotula’s husband, or another male practitioner. Medical women constantly faced such difficulties and impediments. By 1220, for instance, the University of Paris, one of the world’s leading medical schools, had introduced statutes to debar women from admission, and also to disqualify any except their own bachelors from practising. In 1485, Charles VIII of France issued a decree withdrawing the right of women to work as surgeons. Both these measures argue the existence of a number of women, both practising and seeking training, great enough to have become a problem calling for legislation to resolve it.