A Housewife’s Duties

Women As Housewives

Para1Almost all women were trained in the many skills necessary to be a housewife in early modern England. Women had to master a range of domestic production skills that encompassed cooking, cleaning, childcare, laundry, gardening, poultry and other animal keeping, dairy management, medicine, cloth-production, sewing, food preservation, candle-making, bee-keeping, and brewing, among others. Wealthier women also supervised servants who assisted with this long list of responsibilities.
Para2John Fitzherbert’s 1525 A Book of Husbandry offers this advice:
When thou art up and ready, then first sweep thy house, dress up thy dish-board, and set all things in good order within thy house; milk thy kine cows, feed thy calves, sile strain up thy milk, take up thy children and array them, and provide for thy husband’s breakfast, dinner, supper, and for thy children and servants, and take thy part with them.
And to ordain organize corn and malt to the mill, to bake and brew withal when need is […] Thou must make butter and cheese when thou may; serve thy swine, both morning and evening, and give thy pullen fowl meat foodin the morning, and when time of the year cometh, thou must take heed how thy hen, ducks and geese do lay, and to gather up their eggs; and when they wax broody to set them thereas no beasts, swine or other vermin hurt them […]
And in the beginning of March, or a little before, is time for a wife to make her garden […] And also in March is time to sow flax and hemp […] and thereof may thou make sheets, board clothes table-cloths, and other such necessaries, and therefore let thy distaff a small staff used in spinning thread to weave into cloth be always ready for a pastime, that thou not be idle […]

Extensive Responsibility

Para3With his list of activities only half over, it is perhaps with some sympathy that Fitzherbert interrupts his account by remarking that it may fortune sometimes that thou shalt have so many things to do that thou shalt not well know where is best to begin. He continues with advice clearly intended for a farmer’s wife rather than a city dweller:
It is a wife’s occupation to winnow sift all manner of corn grain like wheat, not maize, to make malt, wash and wring, to make hay, to shear harvest corn ; and in time of need to help her husband to fill the dung cart, to drive the plough, to load hay, corn and such other.
Fitzherbert concludes that:
[…] our English housewife must be of chaste thought, stout courage, patient, untired, watchful, diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendship, full of good neighborhood, wise in discourse, but not frequent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkative, secret in her affairs household business, comfortable in her counsel, and generally skillfull in all the worthy knowledges which do belong to her vocation.
Para4Other writers such as Thomas Tusser published guides for housewives. Tusser’s 1557 book Five-hundred Points of Good Husbandry was expanded in 1573 to include a long section on housewifery was reprinted frequently throughout the period. Many books of household management techniques, which included content such as recipes, advice and prescriptions for home medical treatments, strategies for childrearing, and instructions ordering servants in their work, began to be published in the early modern period. These books perhaps reflect increasing female literacy in the era, a result of the Protestant Reformation.

Key Print Sources

Eales, Rebecca. Women in Early Modern England, 1500–1700. Routledge, 2005.
Greer, Germaine. Shakespeare’s Wife. Harper, 2008.
McDonald, Russ. Men and Women: Family, Gender, and Society. The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, 2nd ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001, pp. 253–277.
Thirsk, Joan. Daily Life in Town and Country. Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. Ed. Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin. Oxford University Press, Apr. 2003, pp. 103–113.

Key Online Sources

Alchin, L.K. Elizabethan Family Life. Elizabethan Era, https://www.elizabethan-era.org.uk/elizabethan-family-life.htm. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.
Best, Michael. The Housewife’s Duties (a Long List). Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/huswifery/duties.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.
Christensen, Ann C. Words about Women’s Work: The Case of Housewifery in Early Modern England. Early Modern Studies Journal, https://earlymodernstudiesjournal.org/review_articles/words-womens-work-case-housewifery-early-modern-england/. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.
Fitzherbert, John. A Boke of Husbandry. Early English Books Online Text Creation Project, https://name.umdl.umich.edu/A00884.0001.001. Accessed 25 Feb. 2023.
Tusser, Thomas. Fiue hundreth points of good husbandry. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A14064.0001.001?view=toc. Accessed 24 Nov. 2025.

Prosopography

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title A Housewife’s Duties
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
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Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University
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