The-NJNB

If you’re interested in some covid compliant Belcher icons with funky little masks, I made some transparents that are free to steal!

no. tell me what you fixed. i wanna know what the glitch was.

you know those patch notes that are like “fixed an issue where if the player sat in a bush for too long, they’d become the size of a skyscraper” 

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

why? well, you see, up until the 1851 census, women who didn't have work outside the home were listed with their husband's occupation. this means that we have data on the number of farmers' wives and farm servants' wives, and they make up a massive proportion of the agricultural labour force.

but in 1851, as a result of Fun Social Trends (the development of victorian ideas about femininity), the census stops recording any occupation for women who are working in the home

these women were responsible for the bulk of the dairy industry which exploded with industrial urbanisation. they made butter and cheese, not just for their households but as a mainstay of the local economy. they brought in the harvest and played a key role in haymaking. they kept the books. they did most of the gardening, which is also a big part of the industrial economy as corn/cereal crops became less important in the English diet.

women and children were the ones weeding the fields, harvesting potatoes, picking shellfish, milking cows, collecting eggs, processing produce, and making processed foods like bread, jams, chutneys, and pickles. they were also the ones doing the finances, managing the property in a lot of cases, and manning market stalls. as my lecturer put it: there is a reason that (at least in the UK) most dairy produce that has a personal aspect to its brand uses a woman's name or likeness.

and yet from 1851 on, those women disappear. and it's used as an argument that the farmer's wife was gentrified, that she "abandoned the dairy and the butter-churn for the parlour and the pianoforte" to (mis)quote a contemporary comment.

this is miss jpeg.

If you marry a good-time girl

A joyful woman known to her town,

If she is wayward,

and revels in the moment,

do not reject her, but instead let her enjoy;