Wifely Duties
Women who earned their own living usually became seamstresses or kept boardinghouses, work they could do in the home. But some women worked in professions and jobs available mostly to men. There were women doctors, lawyers, preachers, teachers, and writers.
Some women worked at their husbands’ occupations – retailing, printmaking, shipbuilding, innkeeping, operating ferry boats, and managing prisons. Deputy husbands they were called. Some acted as nurses for their communities, and even some as teachers, but those who worked outside the home were the exceptions, not the rule.
In an agricultural society, the home was the center of production for the family’s needs, with both women and men performing labor that sustained the family. Men had primary responsibility for agricultural labor. Among women’s many responsibilities were spinning thread and weaving cloth, taking care of poultry, milking cows, producing butter, and tending the kitchen garden. Excess produce could be bartered or sold for other needed items.
In addition, women prepared and preserved food, made soap, made and washed clothing, bore and raised numerous children, and kept their large households clean and running. Women had to clean, butcher and prepare all game brought home to the family. These varied tasks filled the days of the overwhelming majority of colonial women. During harvest times, women joined men in the fields. The required specialized skills defined a good wife.
In non-farming families, women often worked alongside their spouses in their trades and in their shops, assisting in the production of goods and attending customers, while remaining responsible for child care and other household tasks.
Some women worked at their husbands’ occupations – retailing, printmaking, shipbuilding, innkeeping, operating ferry boats, and managing prisons. They acted as nurses for their communities, and even some as teachers. Women were rarely found in such esteemed professions as law and medicine, and those who worked outside the home were the exceptions, not the rule.
Since the family was the main unit of society, the wife’s position within the family, while subordinate to that of her husband, nevertheless meant that through her husband she could participate in the public life of the colony. When a man cast a vote in any sort of election, the vote was cast on behalf of his family. If the husband were indisposed at the time of the election, wives were generally allowed to cast the family vote in his place.
Since women were in short supply in the colonies, they tended to be more highly valued than in Europe. The wife was an essential component of the nuclear family, and without a strong and productive wife a family would struggle to survive. If a woman became a widow, suitors would appear with almost unseemly haste to bid for the services of the woman through marriage.
The lead in the family practice of religion was often taken by the wife. It was the mother who brought up the children to be good Christians, and the mother who often taught them to read so that they could study the Bible. Since both men and women were required to live according to God’s law, both boys and girls were taught to read the Bible.
