Women Assisting Their Husband’s Work

Women often became invisible when they got married. Much of their work is unrecognized in the documentary record, though undoubtedly much appreciated by their husbands and families.

Women who were pioneers (and new immigrants) often helped their husbands clear land, and cared for cattle and crops when their husbands had to travel to find work. Women assisted husbands with haying, milking, feeding new lambs, bookkeeping, and marketing.

Women also assisted their husbands in lumber camps, and offered important support services to husbands who were at sea, fishing.

“My aunt never had any money. My uncle was the one who got the case for the produce, but he and she were a team when it came to producing it, because they were in that together. But she never had any actual cash until she started working at the bean plant… Then she saved it like a miser… And yet if ever we needed money we could borrow it form her… I would expect that if we put it on an economy scale today, count her house, what she did, and childcare and washings and the cooking, I would think, really, it would be 50%. I think it was a 50/50 deal and they would consider it that. They worked hard, and yet they were always happy and there was always time for a picnic, even if it was just out on the lawn.” [NA1576, p.22-23. The audio was not edited down and interviewer Rita Breton can be heard as well as Dr. Carlene Hillman.]

P00929 Blaine “Tinker” Averill, the cook, and his wife, Goldie, taken between 1945 and 1947, at Little Musquash Lake Woods camp. These two worked together to feed the lumbermen at this camp, three meals a day, all winter, for fifteen years. Goldie remembers that “I used to love to cook. My husband and I did everything together. … He’d do the mixing, and I’d do the frying. We did everything together. And the pies, he’d fill them, and I’d put the meringue on top.”

P05837 An unusual picture of a cook, Lew Cole, and his family, Alice, Tena, and Sadie Cole, in a lumber camp, circa 1920, Palmer area. While the picture might be unusual, the practice it represents was not. Lumber camps cooks were generally male, but Gladys Morrison, the wife of the owner and manager of a lumber operation, remembers that it was common for wives to join their husbands in the woods, and wives whose husbands were cooks would generally help out with the cooking. Whether these women received separate wages for this work or if their work was included in their husband’s wages is not clear.

P05291 Elise Marden driving the team to hay, Gene Marden receiving hay from hay loader to “make” the load, 1930s to early 1940s. Farm women’s work was not limited to feeding the chickens and milking cows, but included “helping out” when they were needed in the fields.

P00445 Leila Horr and Leon Horr, Jr. on Cheabeague Island, Casco Bay, Maine. In any work they did, whether in the home or helping their husbands, women generally had to interrupt  or combine it with child care, as Leila Horr did in the photo above. Childcare was in itself a way to aid in a husband’s work, in that if women were looking after the children, men could concentrate on other things, like lobstering.

P00443 Leila Horr in a rowboat plugging lobsters in Casco Bay, Maine. Leila’s husband Leon Horr was a commercial lobsterman on Casco Bay. Unfortunately, in the interview done with the couple in 1973, there was no discussion of what Leila was doing in this rowboat with a lobster. Is this part of a commercial business? Is this a lobster which will be sold as part of Leon’s catch? Or was it caught to feed the family rather than to help out in her husband’s business.

P02042 In addition to their own work, farm women “helped out” with other farm work, like these unidentified women and children, bringing in the hay with a horse, and hay rake in a field in Lincoln County.

P02014 A group of people standing on some felled logs in the woods, somewhere in the Lincoln Country area. This photograph is probably more typical of women’s work in the woods, caring for children and carrying lunch to the lumbermen.

P08224 Alice and Sydney Oxton and their granddaughter Alice are packing candy into boxes for shipping from Sydney’s candy business in Rockland, ME.

P02064 A man and a woman seated on a pile of logs in the woods, the woman is holding a cant dog and the man is holding a felling ax, somewhere in Lincoln Country. Women did not always work in isolation, or only with other women. This photograph seems expressive of affection and cooperation between a man and a woman.

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Research thought: How can we find out more about this kind of women’s work? Many town directories list each member of the town and their occupation. What other sources could be used?

Additional reading: Groneman, Carol and Mary Beth Norton, “To Toil The Livelong Day”: America’s Women at Work 1780-1980, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).