A Store Almost in Sight: The Economic Transformation of Missouri from the Lousiana Purchase to the Civil War

6. Cook, Nursemaid, and Housewife

6 Cook, Nursemaid, and Housewife White farmwomen in the antebellum United States operated as economic producers in their households. They often took part in the growing formal market economy and earned income for their work, as well as completing a wide range of traditional household duties. Women provided crucial domestic labor that helped to support their families in both subsistence and market production. Not only did they cook, clean, and provide child care, they also produced, preserved, and gathered foodstuffs, including vegetables, poultry, and milk products. Women processed raw materials from outside the home and produced foods and other items for household or market use. In fact, female labor usually provided from one-third to one-half of a family’s food consumption . Some women also helped to earn money or barter credit through the sale of the goods they produced, which included poultry, eggs, cloth, butter, and cheese. An example of this was Eliza Wallace, who wrote to her sister, “I pay for nearly all mine and Catherines Clothes by marketing[.] I have my butter engaged the year round at ten cents.” Such income helped obtain goods that families could not, or chose not to, produce on their own and allowed them to begin to purchase useful items such as shoes, utensils, or manufactured clothing that improved their families’ standard of living.1 The contribution of women to antebellum farm life has been little explored in the history of Missouri.2 This is mostly due to the lack of available sources. Women in antebellum Missouri played substantial roles in the family economy, completing important tasks through paid and unpaid labor. Some contributed to their households with involvement in the market economy that existed out- 100 chapter six side their homes. Those most likely to be involved in such transactions lived near towns or close to the Missouri or Mississippi River, the areas with the most demand for items that were produced. The opportunity to make money through the sale of female-produced goods increased greatly after the 1820s as steamboats allowed the greater distribution of goods throughout Missouri and as an expanding population supported general stores in growing towns across the state. Many women chose to take part in such activity and took advantage of the opportunity to earn additional income for their families. They also completed a complex variety of work to support their households at home. In the past several decades, historians have detailed greater female involvement in the formal cash economy, finding that women have often helped to support their families through unexpected paid work.3 Farming, according to historian Susan Sessions Rugh, would be unprofitable and unsustainable if families did not have the unpaid work of farmwives and mothers. Households could not have afforded to pay an outsider to complete all the tasks that farmwives did. Families cobbled together their livelihoods by using the domestic labor of women, children, and slaves; the subsistence and commercial farm work of men; as well as neighborhood exchange and barter. Very few antebellum farmwives escaped a life of hard physical labor, wrote historian Jeanne Boydston, for “family life depended on the smooth performance of an extensive array of unpaid occupations in the household.”4 Women suffered from the burden of a “double day” as they supervised and trained children, as well as completing all their expected household tasks (fig. 8). Melinda Napton, wife of a judge and lawyer in Saline County, bore eleven children and managed the family farm while her husband was frequently absent from home for two decades. Her husband, William, complimented her on her everyday labors, including her skilled and tireless sewing, knitting, cooking, and health care for their family. Women often operated as economic partners in their families, and their labor sometimes helped keep the family farm business from failing during tough times. While many sources are unable to demonstrate that women earned income for the family economy, their own labor usually allowed their husbands to earn money from their work.5 The diary of Mary Ann Kitzmillen, a farmwife who lived in Lewis County in northern Missouri, illustrates the laborious tasks of antebellum women. In one week in late May 1855, she worked in her garden planting corn, beans, beets, and cabbage, and spent at least one day making soap, which was a time- Cook, Nursemaid, and Housewife 101 consuming chore. Soap making required collecting grease, fat, and tallow from meat, in...