ABSTRACT
An early account of the duties of a good housewife is provided by Thomas Tusser’s “The Points of Huswiferie United to the Comforts of Husbandrie”. In descriptive contexts, however, “huswife” often seems to focus more narrowly on the housewife’s archetypal occupation as spinner of yam. “Huswife” clearly means both domestic spinner and “hussy,” with some part of the joke probably dependent upon the position of the spinning wheel between the spinster’s legs. Huswifely spinning, whether for wages or for domestic use, seems also to have been connected to anxiety about sexuality and fertility within as well as outside marriage. The small wages available to a seventeenth-century huswife render this improbable, and register the narrowing opportunities available to women in England in the early modern period. Gervase Markham’s “The English Hus-wife, conteyning, The inward and outward vertues which ought to be in a compleat woman”, differs from Tusser’s earlier treatise in its intended audience of gentlewomen.
