Domestic bliss?

D “omesticity was the major expectation that medieval Europe had for women. They would marry. They would become mothers. They would look after their children and homes.”

As outlined by Dr Eleanor Janega in her book The Once and Future Sex, it wasn’t the only expectation placed upon them. “While women were first and foremost wives and mothers, they were never considered just that. To be a medieval woman was to be a worker, even if that work was not necessarily valued in the same way men’s labour was.” Janega goes further: “The idea that women largely existed in a domestic bubble wholly removed from the realities of labour and work would have seemed laughable to medieval people. In all classes of society, women worked and were expected to do so.”

In a largely agricultural society, women did the same work out in the fields as men, often enjoying a similar status, what the writer Martha Gill has described as “a sort of rough and ready empowerment”. And it empowered both married and single women alike. With up to a third of the female working population yet to find a husband (or yet to even start looking), employment was a way of improving their economic status before submerging into domesticity. Although brides could be as young as 12, the average age for a lower-class medieval woman to get married was double that. Delaying the onset of married life and parenthood had its advantages, as explained by Toni Mount, author of The Medieval Housewife.

“By the 14th and 15th centuries, the daughters of labourers and artisans often left home at the age of 12 or 13 to work for others as servants and apprentices. Away from direct parental control, they were far freer to choose their own marriage partner than a young aristocratic girl whose parents regarded her marriage as a means to consolidate their property or expand their network of allies.”

In finding work in higher-class households – perhaps as nursemaids or kitchen assistants, roles which would provide experience for the later demands of married life – these young women would also see the noblewomen of the house just as defined by their place in the home as wives who occupied rungs further down the social ladder. Others might be doing the grimy domestic tasks, but here were no ladies of leisure. They were too