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Women who worked at home in Shakespeare's day had a hard, hard job. In order to keep the floors relatively clean they had to sweep everything out with a broom and scrub them with a brush and a pail of water. In order to make the food they had to buy the ingredients from the market and cook over an open fire. Many of them kept a kitchen garden, cows and chickens so they could have fresh herbs, milk and eggs, and the garden needed weeding, and the cow and chickens needed to be fed and cleaned up after. Often they would preserve food for the winter by drying, salting or smoking. Clothes and bedding had to be washed by slooshing them about in a tub of water, and then they had to hung up to dry. And if clothes got torn or worn through, they needed to be repaired or patched. Stockings had to be darned. Clothing was extremely expensive (because making cloth was very labour intensive) and people could not afford to throw it out.

If there were children in the household as well, that was an extra pile of laundry, because the diapers were made of cloth and had to be washed the same way as the other clothes. As children got older, they helped around the house. In this way the girl children started training at a very young age the huge number of skills needed to run their own houses in due course.

But there is more. Women sometimes lost their husbands, or ended up married to wastrels or drunkards or other useless men. That meant that on top of doing all of that housework, they had to earn the money they needed to buy the things they couldn't possibly make or grow themselves. Women were known to be brewers quite frequently, as well as engaging in any kind of cottage industry that might pay--especially spinning or other clothes-related trades.

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