9 - ‘Mutual society, help and comfort’: conclusion

Summary

In the late 1660s a clerk scribbled in the front of York Chancery Court's act book, ‘Marriage frees a man from care for when hee's wedd his wife takes all upon her.’ A chance jotting, it powerfully captures the marital relationship described in this book, far more than any of the genteel, polite phrases of male superiority that are common in published advice for wives and husbands in the long eighteenth century. In these few words the material and emotional ties binding husbands and wives are succinctly conveyed. We have seen that married women did indeed take many things upon them and that their labour was not limited to household management, child care and nursing. Though these were mainly wives' work, the division of household labour and duties was not as utterly gendered as is often stated. Contemporary household prescription and some historians recognise this when they describe pre-industrial women as their husbands' helpmeets. Yet the extent to which wives assisted in provisioning the household, as suppliers as well as consumers, is not always fully appreciated. Rosemary O'Day helpfully observes that ‘wives were helpmeets not dependents’ and it is essential to avoid using ‘helpmeet’ as a synonym for a more subsidiary, supplementary role than wives understood it themselves. They knew that the maintenance of the family was a dual activity and described their husbands as contributors to the household economy, not its primary providers.