WOMAN’S WORK

RESISTANCE FIGHTERS IN EPIRUS

 “Woman’s work” is a loaded phrase because it has so often been used disparagingly. It also brings to mind a woman caught in the endless daily grind of cooking and cleaning for her unappreciative family. I would like to suggest with a few examples that the reality for many women was somewhat different. Not easier, by any means—in fact, harder, scarier, but also richer, fulfilling and, above all, essential.   

An anecdote whose source I can’t recall describes how Indians ambushed a wagon with two families. The husbands were killed, but armed with cast iron pots and pans, the women protecting their children beat off their attackers.

A girl’s day in colonial New England: “Fixed a gown for Prude,--Mend Mother’s Riding-hood,--Spun short thread,--Fixed two gowns for Welsh’s girls,--Carded tow, --Spun linen,--Worked on Cheese-basket,--Hatchel’d flax with Hannah, we did 51 lbs. apiece,--pleated and ironed,--Read a Sermon of Dodridge’s,--Spooled a piece,--Milked the cows,--Spun linen, did 50 knots,--Made a Broom of Guinea wheat straw,--Spun thread to whiten,--Set a Red dye,--Had two scholars from Mrs. Taylor’s,--I carded two pounds of whole wool and felt Nationly,--Spun harness twine,--Scoured the pewter.” That is aside from washing, cooking, weeding the garden, and visiting friends.

A scene repeated over the course of our history innumerable times was the wife left alone with her children while her husband was away on a necessary errand that could take days or weeks. Wolves and Indians, floods and blizzards, fires, or just slow starvation. Sometimes she and her family did not survive. Sometimes he did not come back. I imagine it took courage just not to go mad.

Speaking of the families who went west, de Tocqueville says, “Many of those who hastened so boldly after wealth were already well off in the places from which they set out. They took their wives with them and made them share their perils and miseries that invariably attend the early stages of such undertakings. At the uttermost edge of the wilderness, I frequently met young women raised amid the many refinements of life in the big cities of New England who had gone virtually without transition from the wealthy homes of their parents to drafty cabins in the woods. Fever, loneliness, and boredom had failed to sap the springs of their courage. Their faces seemed drawn and pale, but their gaze was steady. They seemed both sad and resolute.”

In Pioneer Women, a collection of reminiscences by Joanna Stratton, Katherine Oliver recalls her mother: “My mother loved Kansas from the first. We, her children, have often marveled that she who had been ‘brought up’ to the conventional refinements of life and its ordered ways, prepared by neither training or anticipation for the life of a plainswoman, should have adapted herself so readily to its demands and have conceived a keen zest and pleasure in her new experiences and life.”

They set up in their log cabin a melodeon. Her daughter later explains: "She was especially happy in her gift—music… I have never seen more graceful or instant response than she was wont to give to a request for music, whether from a family guest, a child, or some crude stranger under our roof for the night and hungry for the solacing and almost forgotten pleasure of music… Mother always played from memory… lovely old airs, quaint whimsies… operas… Our Sunday nights were the best of all. Mother used to play as we sat in the twilight and far into the dark. Musingly, her fingers drifted over the keys, weaving from memory a rich medley. Then when the lights were brought someone found the 'gospel hymns,' and crowding the piano we sang."

In Path to Power, the first volume of the epic biography of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro describes movingly the "sad iron," the term Hill Country women called that implement which many households today no longer have. Heated on a blazing stove, the wife would spend the whole day lifting the five pounds of solid iron, her shoulder muscles aching almost beyond endurance, a slip of the hand resulting in a severe burn.

Carrying water, according to some women Caro interviewed, was the most loathsome task, and a lifetime of that chore gradually hunched women's posture.

This comes from Will Rogers' portrait of his sister Maud Lane who had taken on the role of mother and housekeeper when his mother died. She married and became Mrs. Lane. "Maud thought she'd missed the best part of the day if she didn't see the sunrise.  She always said no society woman changed clothes more often than she did.  She got up at dawn, put on her oldest dress and went out to milk the cows.  The dairy cows were one of Cap's farming experiments and Maud milked them and delivered the milk to the local hospital as a charitable donation. She also saw to it that many needy children in the area had milk to drink. After milking, she would change to a clean housedress, get breakfast and then make her deliveries.  In the afternoon, she would dress up to go shopping or to attend a church meeting or similar activity.  She also made calls on the sick or unfortunate and on these occasions she was never empty handed.  She founded the Methodist Missionary Society in Chelsea and served as its treasurer throughout her lifetime.  After spending the afternoon in this manner, she returned home again, donned her milking clothes and attended to this chore.  Then she changed clothes again and cooked and served supper for her family.  After supper, she often dressed up again to go out for the evening or to entertain at home."

And he gave his sister this obituary: "And I want to tell you that as I saw all these people who were there to pay tribute to her memory, it was the proudest moment of my life that I was her brother.  And all the honors that I could ever in my wildest dreams hope to reach would never equal the honor paid on a little western prairie hilltop, among her people, to Maud Lane.  If they will love me like that at the finish, my life will not have been in vain."

This will never happen, of course, but for the sake of truth and fairness, I would like the phrase "woman's work" to become one of high praise.