4 - With Head, Heart, and Hand: Domesticity and Women’s Labor

Summary

IN THIS CHAPTER I look at the economic labor of the lady of the house (Frau or Hausfrau), namely her contribution to the economic success of the family, which was the foundational condition undergirding domesticity. We delineate women's responsibility for organizing the physical labor within the household according to the best practices of the day: the supervision of the various domestic servants and the production of food in the kitchen, the labor in the garden, and shopping for items that were no longer produced in the house. At the time, it was well understood that without a financially prudent wife a household could not prosper. Women's skills—frugality, diligence, discipline, orderliness, and cleanliness—helped to produce wealth by expertly utilizing the family resources—based on the husband's income. As a form of agency, this afforded women significant control but also responsibility. This economic work undergirded all other functions: the emotional work associated with marriage, the socialization and early education of the children, the beautification of the domestic sphere, and the fostering of cultural activities discussed in the previous chapters.

In his Väterlicher Rath an meine Tochter, Campe underscores the economic foundation of women's work in the household. He describes women's role as:

Vorsteherinnen des Hauswesens, welche durch Aufmerksamkeit, Ordnung, Reinlichkeit, Fleiß, Sparsamkeit, wirthschaftliche Kenntnisse und Geschicklichkeiten den Wohlstand, die Ehre, die häusliche Ruhe und Glückseligkeit des erwebenden Gatten sicher stellen, ihm die Sorgen der Nahrung erleichtern, und sein Haus zu einer Wohnung des Friedens, der Freude und der Glückseligkeit machen sollen.

[Managers of the household, who ensure the wealth, honor, domestic peace, and happiness of the breadwinning husband with their care, order, cleanliness, diligence, frugality, economic knowledge, and skill, and who alleviate his worry about feeding the family and turn his house into a peaceful, joyous, and blissful home.]

Thus the financial security of the home is not achieved by the breadwinning husband alone but requires the housewife's expertise and attention to all aspects of leading the household. The various forms of work discussed in the previous chapters are part of the skillful management of the husband's income, with the additional goal of the creation of a surplus, a desirable outcome according to the middle-class ethos.