page_title: Housewife
section_title: Traditional societies
hierarchical_section_title: Housewife / Sociology and economics / Traditional societies
context_page_description: A housewife is a woman whose work is running or managing her family's home—caring for her children; buying, cooking, and storing food for the family; buying goods that the family needs for everyday life; housekeeping, cleaning and maintaining the home; and making, buying and/or mending clothes for the family—and who is not employed outside the home. A housewife who has children may be called a stay-at-home mother or mom.
  Webster's Dictionary defines a housewife as a married woman who is in charge of her household. The British Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary defines a housewife as "the mistress of a household; a female domestic manager; a pocket sewing kit".
context_section_description: In societies of hunters and gatherers, like the traditional society of the Australian aboriginal people, the men often hunted animals for meat while the women gather other foods such as grain, fruit and vegetables. One of the reasons for this division of labor is that it is much easier to look after a baby while gathering food than while hunting a fast-moving animal. Even when homes were very simple, and there were few possessions to maintain, men and women did different jobs.
  In rural societies where the main source of work is farming, women have also taken care of gardens and animals around the house, generally helping men with heavy work when a job needed to be done quickly, usually because of the season.
  Examples of the heavy work involving farming that a traditional housewife in a rural society would do are:
  Picking fruit when it is ripe for market
  Planting rice in a paddy field
  Harvesting and stacking grain
  Cutting hay for animals
  In rural studies, the word housewife is occasionally used as a term for "a woman who does the majority of the chores within a farm's compound", as opposed to field and livestock work.
caption: Southern Paiutes at Moapa, Nevada, wearing traditional Paiute basket hats; note the Paiute cradleboard and rabbit robe
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