Women as Household Managers

Para1In tradesmen’s and other working families, women worked alongside their male relatives in the family’s business, and all master craftsmen were required to be married to obtain the rank. But at least twice weekly, most housewives in the middling and laboring classes also took produce to market to sell it. Whether the family was prosperous or poor, published books about household management from the period stress the economic importance of the housewife as a producer and manager of income and labor.

Going to Market

Para2According to John Fitzherbert’s 1525 Book of Husbandry, a housewife is to go or ride to the market to sell butter, cheese, milk, eggs, capons a male chicken fattened for eating, hens, pigs, geese, and all manner of corn grain of any kind, not maize. And also to buy all manner of necessary things belonging to a household.

Household Products

Para3Women were actively involved in the productivity of the early modern English home. Under the housewife’s guidance vegetables were grown in the kitchen garden; woolen cloth and clothing, as well linen and hempen thread were spun and woven; dairy products including fresh milk, cheese, and butter were raised and stored safely; and malt was made from barley and other grains to help produce the beer and ale that were consumed by all household members. In addition, households raised poultry including chicken, ducks, and geese for meat, eggs, and feathers.
Para4All these products were eaten or used by the household, but some were also sold in the markets, bringing in money from outside. This income was supplementary but important to working families.
Para5 During this period, a number of previously domestic activities managed by women began to shift to industries in the cities. Professional tradesmen took over some key tasks such as brewing beer, as well as making and dyeing cloth. This moved these trades out of cottages and small villages and into cities, where they were performed by men.
Para6 Some scholars such as Germaine Greer contend that Anne Shakespeare’s role as a brewer, which is documented in the city tax records in Stratford-upon-Avon, indicates her economic importance, while others trace the role of women in the brewing industry and how women’s earning power was displaced by men. Because households relied on small beer and ale as the primary drink everyone consumed (because it was safer than water, which might be contaminated), it is a metric of the importance of women’s labor.

Managing a Household

Para7A married woman among common people was likely a close economic partner with her husband. This status was more pronounced outside of cities, where women’s labor was more central to the family’s earnings.
Para8A wife’s social status was far above unmarried women in these parts of English society. Unmarried common women often worked as servants, whereas wives gained the responsibility for supervising female servants of the home in the kitchen, the dairy, the garden, the laundry, the buttery, or the nursery.

Economic Status and Social Status

Para9A wife’s status as a household manager, however, did not mean that women had equal social status or equal economic opportunity. Women could own property, but seldom inherited it from their fathers because it was more likely men would leave it to their sons. They could make contracts, but only when supervised by a man. Women’s economic status was related almost solely to the money or property they brought to a marriage (at which point most of it became the sole property of their husband) or to the work they did or products they made in the home.

Key Print Sources

Bennet, Judith M. Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600. Oxford UP, 1996.
Greer, Germaine. Shakespeare’s Wife. Bloomsbury Press, 2007.
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, edited by Stanley Wells, and Lena Cowen Orlin, Oxford UP, 2003, pp. 103–113.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. To Market, To Market…. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/huswifery/market.html. Accessed 19 Mar. 2023.
Best, Michael. The Housewife’s Economic Importance. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/huswifery/economicimportance.html. Accessed 19 Mar. 2023.
Fitzherbert, John. A Boke of Husbandry. Early English Books Online Text Creation Project, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A00884.0001.001. Accessed 21 Mar. 2023.

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 Women as Household Managers
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
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
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Document status published
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University
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Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.