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a woman's
life

births

weddings

divorces

death & dying

manners

cooking

housework

shopping

gardening

livestock &
poultry care

education

employment
opportunities

recreation
& hobbies

holidays &
feast days

board games

music

embroidery
& needlework

pet keeping

reading

dancing

horseriding

hawking

hunting

sex &
sexual health

PLEASE NOTE!
ADULT THEMES!

Housework
STAFF - CLEANING - LAUNDRY

Staff
Scenes of domesticity usually feature women involved with textile arts or engaged in childcare. Working with a drop spindle or weaving or bathing a newborn babe are common themes. Images of women performing daily household chores other than these can be seen in some manuscripts but are often considered not worthy of .

In many homes it was not unusual to have some kind of domestic help. Even townspeople might have domestic staff. It was not just the domain of the wealthy. Household rolls show a wide variety of specialised roles which a woman might take, many for the running of a house itself and not exclusively as labourer.

Seen above is a 15th century manuscript detail which shows a woman performing the mundane task of setting the table and serving the food. She might be a wife, but could also easily be the live-in household help. Many court records indicate that it was not unusual for a man to have live-in help if he was unwedded, and taking advantage of these women is a recurring theme in court records of unwanted physical contact and pregnancy.

Cleaning
Rural woman did their own cleaning, although many peasant women had domestic help. It isn't true that all peasants were extremely poor, and a young, unmarried woman could earn extra money working in another home. In her own house, she had dishes from cooking and eating to tend to, laundry of clothes and bedsheets, bedbugs and household pests to deal with and floors to sweep.

A townswoman or merchant woman would almost certainly have had domestic help, and passed the smaller jobs of cleaning to another woman. Many of these were single women who had come to the town from the country and were employed on a live-in basis. This also gave a young woman the skills she needed to learn in household management before marrying and setting up house of her own.

It goes without saying that the cleaning in a noble woman's house was also not done by a noble woman herself. Many household accounts have listings for their laundry expenses with prices and to whom they are paid.


Laundry
Rural women... Washing clothes may have been done either inside over a fire or at a nearby stream and was often a social occasion as well as a necessary chore. Laundry seems to be an exclusively female activity.
In a town household or the house of an upper class woman, laundry was carried out by female servants who were usually under the charge of a senior laundress who was herself under the charge of the noblewoman. Noble women were expected to oversee these things but not take part in them herself.

More information on laundry techniques specifically for clothes, can be found on clothing care.

 

 

Copyright © Rosalie Gilbert
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