Domestic Manuals and the Perception of Womanhood

 

For more than four hundred years, domestic manuals have done far more than offer women recipes and guidelines for running a household. They have also served to construct and reinforce gendered expectations of behaviour. A review of selected books of household management shows how they underpinned and lauded a woman’s key function in the domestic economy, whilst circumscribing roles and codes of behaviour that conformed to the norms of a patriarchal society.

 In 1615, the domestic manual The English Housewife, was first published. It outlined the expectations associated with that role.

“Our English housewife must be of chaste thought, stout courage, patient, untired, watchful, diligent, witty, pleasant, constant in friendship. Full of good neighbourhood, wise in discourse, but not frequent therein, sharp and quick of speech, but not bitter or talkative, secret in her affairs, comfortable in her counsel, and generally skilful in all the worthy knowledges which do belong to her vocation.”

This was, not surprisingly, written by a man, Gervase Markham. His instructions and the tone is more instructional than advisory, beginning with the need for the ‘good housewife’ to be ‘upright and severe in religion’. Whilst the man is unequivocally the head of the household, the task of moral custodian is that of the women. Markham then writes of the need for her garments to be, ‘altogether without toyish garnishes, or the gloss of light colours, and as far from the vanity of new and fantastic fashions, as near to  the comely imitations of modest matrons; ’ she is being told how to dress.

The essential ‘worthy knowledges’, that Markham refers to, include the ability to treat the household for a variety of medical conditions. Interestingly, this lengthy section comes before those relating to cookery, distilling and preserving. Markham’s seventeenth century housewife is also clearly expected to be proficient in all aspects of spinning, weaving and the production of clothing for the family, as well as dairying, brewing and baking. What is lacking from Markham’s work, is any coverage of cleaning, child-rearing, or the managing of servants. Is this because, as a man, he is focussed on the aspects of household routine that impinge most closely upon him. He expects to be fed, clothed and physicked by his wife but the servants and children are emphatically not part of his sphere.

For a female perspective, let us consider Hannah Woolley’s Compleat Serving Maid, first published in 1677. Although, Woolley writes as if she is the addressing potential servants themselves, at this time, the adult female literacy rate is thought to have been ten to fifteen percent and the vast majority of those women would not have been of the servant class. It is more likely therefore that her manual would have been read by the employers of servants, rather than those seeking the various roles that she describes. Here the tone is still instructional but somehow gentler than Markham’s diktats. Having outlined the precise duties of various grades of servant, Woolley briefly mentions the finer points of laundering and creating ‘beautify waters’, before turning to physick. She too prioritises this over the many tasks associated with feeding the family.

Her suggested menus, for different times of the year, are very far removed from those that working families might have been likely to afford. In her appendices, she address penmanship and ‘arithmetick’, before giving advice about how to identify the best produce at market. The early modern woman was required to master diverse, key skills like pharmacology, culinary expertise and household management. The housewife’s position as a key player in the domestic economy was legitimised and her specialist domestic knowledge and skills were valued.

Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife or Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion, published in 1727, specifically addresses, as the title suggests, ‘accomplished gentlewomen’. This concentrates on recipes, rather than other aspects of the housewife’s role. In a similar vein, The Experienced English Housekeeper, published by Elizabeth Raffald some four decades later, provides advice on pickling cockles, making a porcupine of the flat ribs of beef and making tansy fritters. Raffald was the former housekeeper to an aristocratic family. By this time, literacy rates were increasing and it would be expected that an upper servant, such as a housekeeper, would be able to read. Although this tome runs to over four hundred pages it is devoted entirely to recipes, conventionally the role of the cook rather than the housekeeper. There is no advice on the traditional responsibilities of the housekeeper, such as managing servants.

In contrast, by the time Isabella Beeton was editing The English Woman’s Domestic Magazine  in the 1850s and publishing her book of household management in 1861, the expectation was that women would be at the centre of domestic administration, commanding servants and tradesmen and overseeing the upbringing of the next generation. Mrs Beeton famously likened the mistress of the house to the ‘commander of an army’. Yet, this elevated status was accompanied by stricter behavioural constraints. The ideal perception of womanhood encompassed  an inflexible etiquette and moral  custodianship in a society that was uncompromisingly demarcated by social class.

Victorian values imposed a rigid strait-jacket for women striving for respectability and Mrs Beeton was there for the aspirational middle-class women, who were keen to reinforce their position in the social hierarchy. By providing women with the tools for successful household management and a blueprint for female agency and expertise, Mrs Beeton’s work might be regarded as elevating domesticity to a highly skilled, respected science. Yet, at the same time, that very agency became a vehicle for oppression, confining women to the restraining depiction of womanhood that was proscribed by the patriarchy.

Jane Ellen Panton published From Kitchen to Garret in 1895. In the aftermath of the industrial revolution, the forerunners of the conspicuous consumerism of the later twentieth century were apparent in embryonic form. Mrs Panton sets herself up as the moral arbiter of good taste as regards interior design and retail choices. Going from room to room, in the middle-class household, she defines what is necessary for good taste and refinement. Her emphasis is on creating and showcasing a home full of carefully curated possessions, chosen as much for their aesthetics as their practicality.

Interestingly, this volume is not specifically addressed to women and as the keeper of the purse strings, one would expect  the man of the house to have had the final veto on which house to rent or buy and how it should be furnished. In fact, Panton addresses both ‘Edwin’ and ‘Angelina’ throughout. Nonetheless, women are clearly expected to have a subservient role, ‘women’s true work’, she says, ‘is that of a helper’. ‘Angelina’  is cautioned not to, ‘plunge head-first among the bread-winners with pen or pencil  ……  the profession of wife and mother being quite as much as any one woman can manage satisfactorily.’

By the nineteenth, century, many of the domestic tasks of the early modern housewife had been outsourced. The home was no longer a hub of productivity, textile work or medical care; instead, it was a stage on which the family’s middle-class status could be displayed. The broader economic responsibilities of the seventeenth century housewife had been eroded; gender roles were no longer different but equally valued, as they had been in the early modern era. Femininity was increasingly characterised by the consumer choices that she made.

These manuals and works like them, served to engineer and delineate women’s role in society. They reinforced patriarchal ideals, upheld a strictly gendered division of work and restricted women to the domestic sphere. As these books of household management illustrate, womanhood is concept that was constructed, not merely physiologically derived. From distilling herbal remedies in the seventeenth century to dithering over wallpaper choices two hundred years later, books of household advice allowed women to claim authority, expertise and an arena of their own, albeit one fashioned by men.

Wellcome Library https://archive.org/details/b20392  

Image used under Creative Commons

Ten Years of Being a History Girl by Sheena Wilkinson

I’m going on holiday very early tomorrow morning, and tonight we have sixteen people coming for supper and some music. In retrospect, this may not have been the wisest scheduling. And in the middle of cleaning the house, packing and making supper for sixteen I have just remembered that my History Girls pots is due while I’m away! I don’t want to take my laptop on holiday, I need to post NOW. And there is NOTHING in my head to write about. At least nothing to which I can do justice in a short space of time. 

But looking back for inspiration through the HG archive, I see that it is, conveniently and unbelievably, ten years since I became a History Girl, and so I am going to reprise that first post, from October 2016, with some brief updating where appropriate. I trust readers will forgive me! 

Me in August 2016

As historical novelists we have the benefit of hindsight. In 2016, I could have had no idea that I would go on to write exclusively historical fiction, or indeed that my personal life would change drastically, from being a confirmed spinster to a wife and stepmother. That I would move to a very different part of the country, and acquire both grey locks and a greyhound. 

Me last week (August 2026)

 

In 2016 I wrote:

 

I have been a History Girl in waiting all my life. I was a swot who loved school, and from the start what I loved most, apart from English (I was a writer in waiting too) was finding out about the past. Like most children at primary school in the seventies, I did a project on the Vikings, which happened to be an interest of my history-loving father too. I don’t suppose my P4 teacher relished being told by me that there was now evidence that the Vikings may have voyaged as far as America, as that wasn’t in her textbook. 

2026 note -- This year I did an eight-week residency in that same old primary school where, fifty years on, they are still doing the Vikings. 

 

The best things weren’t in the books. When I got to secondary school, encouraged by a wonderful teacher (to whom I have paid tribute in another blog post https://authorallsorts.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/a-letter-to-my-o-level-history-teacher-by-sheena-wilkinson/) I continued to love history, but not just in the classroom. That school, Victoria College, a Belfast girls’ grammar founded in 1859, had its own history that enticed me much more than the too-long-ago Vikings.

 

Many break-times found me in a certain little hideaway under the stairs, looking at an exhibition about the school’s evacuation to the north coast during the Second World War. There were photos and letters and old essays on display and for the first time I discovered the joy of the everyday artefact, and the power of old photos to evoke a vanished, but not terribly distant world. I never saw another pupil even glance at the exhibition – I think I’d have been very indignant; it had become my private place.

 

What made it all the more inspiring was that by then I’d also begun on another long-lasting love – that of old school stories, and the world conjured up by those serious bobbed, gym-frocked girls in black-and-white was closer to the world of Malory Towers and the Chalet School than anything else in my Belfast upbringing. Just belonging to a school that had such photos on the walls was a thrill to me. 

 

2026 note – if I had known, in 2016, that I would be asked to write novels in the classic girls’ school story tradition (First Term at Fernside and True Friends at Fernside) I would have been beside myself with joy. 

 

I had the best history teacher in the world, and romped through the Anglo-Saxons, the Tudors and the Plantation of Ulster. I have especially fond memories of the bubonic plague; then as now I adored anything gruesome about disease and pestilence. (As long as it was safely in a book and preferably now extinct.) I was told off for describing (and drawing) my plague victims with too much verisimilitude – but I like to think that a historical novelist was born in that first form exercise book. 

 

In 2016 I had no idea that Name upon Name would be the first in a trilogy 

2026 note – I am, in real life, the most squeamish of people, but that second historical novel, Star by Star, which has just been reissued) centres, along with the end of WW1 and the 1918 General Election, in which women voted for the first time, on the ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic. When I wrote it – and the words above – in 2016, it was with no idea that I would shortly, like the rest of the world, experience a pandemic at first hand.) 

 

But it was modern history, which we studied for O Level, which captivated me most. This was history I could almost touch, history my granny could remember: suffragettes and the Great War and the partition of Ireland, and then another war.  This was a world I knew from those old school stories, and from the war poets I’d fallen in love with in English Lit. This was a world that seeped through the Victorian and Edwardian streets of my home city, and those black and white photos in the school corridors. A world evoked by the neatly-wound balls of nylon string, made from old clothes, in my waste-not-want-not granny’s Utility sideboard, and by the snaps of her and her friends on Sunday School outings in the twenties, looking exactly like Angela Brazil heroines.

 

2026 note – my 2020 novel, Hope against Hope, is set in Belfast 1921, in the very streets where my gran and her sisters lived and played. I always liked to imagine that they could have made friends with my heroines. 

Aunt Annie, Aunt Sadie (who died at 16) and Gran, in about 1917

 

When I started to write historical fiction – short stories at first and then, last year, a novel set in Belfast 1916 – it was this period to which I kept returning. As I write my second historical novel, due next year and set in November 1918, I’m looking forward to sharing some of those enthusiasms here with the History Girls.

 

And I promise not to make my plague victims too gruesome. 

 

2026 – I have indeed shared all sorts of enthusiasms, from houses visited, to old books read or rediscovered, to family history, all with a focus on the early twentieth century, and a leaning towards the experience of women. Since 2016, all my output -- seven novels -- has been historical, including my first two for adults. 

My most recent adult novel, set in 1936

I wonder what I shall write, in and out of the History Girls, in the next ten years? 

Revolution! non-fiction for 8-12 year-olds by Joan Lennon

Like many of us, I grew up in a time of protest. In Canada, we marched against the war in Vietnam (I carried a placard with the catchy slogan END CANADA’S COMPLICITY!), for women’s lib, against racism, and for CND. My parents were part of the underground railway, getting kids out of the States to defy the draft. We lived just across the river from Detroit, and in the long hot summers you could see the smoke rising from the downtown race riots. Meanwhile, in primary school, we were taught Duck and Cover. The people who influenced me the most were busy saying No to different injustices and stupidities.

I think it was inevitable I would want to write a book about revolutions, though it’s taken a while!

Different kinds of revolutions. Different stories about change.

A bit of a blurb:

What does it take to change the world?

Sometimes it’s toppling systems and finding new ways to govern that give people a better chance.

Sometimes it’s challenging long-held beliefs and finding the courage to think differently.

Sometimes it’s coming up with ingenious inventions that transform our everyday lives.

The world we know today has been shaped by exceptional events, ideas and inventions. Revolution! tells the stories of ordinary people who made the extraordinary happen.

The constraints in writing history for this age group are … interesting. (If by interesting you mean frustrating and a right royal pain.) There wasn’t a chapter where I didn’t think, ‘What I really want to do here is write a book.’ A whole book – not just four pages which also had to accommodate a paltry maximum word count, illustrations, and enough space for some of the lengthier languages we hope it’ll be translated into. But always I needed to remember that this was a book to pique the reader’s interest, not to tell all. Teo’s illustrations helped with this so much.

One of the parts I particularly enjoyed writing were the slightly sideways questions at the end of each chapter. Questions like:

What use is music in a revolution?

Why is this revolution not talked about more? [Haiti]

Might India, Pakistan and Bangladesh reunite some day?

What makes something truly green?

I tried to answer in a way that might lead the reader to think again, and to ask MORE questions.

Which was always the take home message.

Revolution! written by Joan Lennon, illustrated by Teo Georgiev, published by Templar Books, due out 27 August 2026.

Other non-fiction books for 8-12 year-olds published by Templar Books:

Great Minds: 2500 Years of Thinkers and Philosophy written by Joan Haig and Joan Lennon, illustrated by Andre Ducci

Talking History: 150 Years of Speakers and Speeches written by Joan Haig and Joan Lennon, illustrated by Andre Ducci

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram