A Housewife’s Duties A Housewife’s Duties Author Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

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Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

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Women As Housewives

Almost 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.

John 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 hempand 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

With 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.

Other 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.