The Frugal Housewife Summary

We chose the document The Frugal Housewife for our primary source analysis. When looking through online databases, we came across this document and it caught our attention because it correlated well with the topics we studied earlier in the semester about the roles of the housewife and how a woman’s gender was defined during the colonial era. We were drawn to this document because it gives us a more detailed picture of the all-encompassing knowledge women possessed and it spurred many questions in our minds that we were eager to find answers to. To divide the work evenly, we chose three sections of the source that we wanted to focus on: the title pages, the introductory section, and section about education. Each person in our group was responsible for outlining and writing about one section, then as a group, we collaborated to piece our individual writings together into one analysis. The Frugal Housewife was written by Lydia Maria Child in 1829 at the age of
In “The Ways of Her Household” by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, we read about the daily work that three women did to keep their households running. In our class discussions we mentioned how a woman's work in the house was crucial to the household economy because if women did not do housework, men would need to stay home to get the housework done and would not be able to earn wages. In Jeanne Boydston’s article “To Earn Her Daily Bread: Housework and Antebellum Working-Class Subsistence” we again read about unpaid labor as a form of employment for women. Boydston writes, “Within the household, wives’ labor produced as much as half of the family subsistence.” Boydston also writes that a woman’s labor is, “necessary to produce a husband’s labor-power.” Ulrich and Boydston are both arguing that women's labor is important, even if they are not earning wages, which Lydia Maria Child would also