welcome to my twisted mind

it's mouth season

Women also had vocations and forms of income unrelated to their husband. The nature of these jobs changed over time but many women did things like weaving, embroidery, crafting, beer brewing, chicken tending and laundress work to bring income. Women with skills were seen as better marriage candidates because they’d make money for their husband.

My great-great-great-great grandmother told fortunes and did farm labor, my great-great-great grandmother was a midwife, my great-great grandmother worked in a textile factory for most of her adult life and my great grandmother was a school lunch lady.

What I think needs a little more spelling out as well is the way that historically, what we grammatically speak of as being the man's occupation was often in fact the entire family's occupation, with which parts of the necessary work each person did conventionally divided up along gender lines.

Just some random examples (the gender splits here are pretty typical but I can't say they're true of all cultures; I'm primarily familiar with western European history and especially the British Isles):

men fishing, women preparing the fish for sale and selling them at a market ("fishwives")

wives as salespeople and managers of the financial side of the business was also common for many male-coded artisan crafts; the man who is the 'silversmith' is actually smithing the silver (possibly with the aid of sons, apprentices and/or hired labourers), while his wife is taking care of everything else that is necessary for this to translate into a money-making business

husbands underground mining coal with a focus on speed over purity of product, children transporting it to the surface so he doesn't have to leave, and wives sorting the coal from the worthless rock on the surface. The entire family contributes to the pay check, which is based on the amount of sorted coal delivered.

wives as writers, editors, secretaries and research partners to male academics, scholars and politicians - also frequently doing much of the work associated with the networking that was neccessary for success in these careers. (It was not uncommon in some periods for wives to handle a lot of their husbands' correspondence, and of course a lot more socialising used to involve being hosted at peoples' homes. Wives of the relevant social classes for these careers were unlikely to be handling e.g. the cooking themselves - their job here is more like event manager and line manager of the staff doing the work.)

servants who were married were typically married to servants in the same household (and servant occupations were highly gendered)

"farmer's wife" and "baker's wife" and so on are properly understood as occupations, traditionally taking on parts of the work that a modern baker would need to hire someone for