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as a receptacle or repository of goods had a profound impact on the gendered division of labor within the home. This shift is reflected in the history of the term housekeeper, originally synonymous with householder (one “who holds or occupies a house as his [sic] own dwelling” [OED]), the term came in the sixteenth century to refer not only to the possession or holding of a house, but to the maintenance and management of household stuff. This shift in emphasis from the possession or ownership of real property to the maintenance or management of moveable property was accompanied by another, specifically gendered shift: the term came to refer specifically to “a woman who manages or superintends the affairs of a household” (OED). Domestic treatises played an important role in defining the precise parameters of this gendered division of labor, in which the husband’s duty or “calling” (in Protestant terminology) became that of getting, and the wife’s that of keeping, household stuff. In its classical form, this division of labor derives from Xenophon’s Oeconomicus and from the later, pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, Oeconomica (itself largely based on Xenophon and on the first book of Aristotle’s Politics). Both treatises seek to naturalize the gendered division of labor by grounding it in analogies both to the natural world, and to the “natural” dispositions of men and women. In Xenophon, Isomachus thus naturalizes the distinction between husband and wife, as “getter” and “keeper” respectively, through the following apiarian analogy:

      Me thynketh also that the maistres [i.e., queen] bee that kepeth the hyve, dothe like wyse that that god hath ordeyned her [the wife] unto … for bicause, sayde he, hit bydeth alwaye in the hyve And what so ever any of them [the bees] bryngeth home she marketh, receyveth, and saveth it And whan the tyme cometh, that it muste be occupied than she distributeth every thing accordyng as equite requireth…. And that that is brought in ye must receive it. And that, whiche muste be spente of it, ye muste parte and devide it. And that that remaineth, ye muste ley it up and kepe it safe tyl tyme of nede.⁴⁰

      The housewife’s role in managing the household economy, her oversight of its stuff and provisions, is clearly not a passive one, as the term keeper might suggest; for her responsibilities include not only saving, storing, and maintaining, but marking, ordering, accounting, dividing, distributing, spending, and disposing of household property, including both durable and perishable goods.

      These varied responsibilities are likewise reflected in the early modern term “oeconomy,” which derives from the Greek oikonomia, from oikos + nomos. The term oikos, usually translated as “house,” itself derives from the verb oikeo, meaning “to inhabit, occupy,” but also “to manage, direct, govern.”⁴¹ The term nomos, usually translated as “law” or “rule,” derives from the verb nemo, which may also mean “to dwell in, inhabit,” and “to hold sway, manage,” but carries the further meanings of “to deal out, distribute, dispense,” and “to have as one’s portion,… to hold, possess.”⁴² The housewife’s oeconomy, her duty as keeper, thus positioned her in an active, managerial role that required her not only to keep or hold goods, but to deal out, distribute and dispense them, and thereby to “govern” the household economy.

      The troublesome issue of authority raised by the wife’s domestic governance or oeconomy, and by the metaphor of the queen bee deployed to describe it, is never directly acknowledged in Xenophon’s treatise—at least not by the husband. Isomachus’s wife, however, responds to the responsibility of governing the household that her husband has delegated to her with incredulity: “I do greatlye marvayle,” she says, “whether suche thynges, as ye saye the maistres bee dothe, do not belonge moche more to you than me.”⁴³ Later, Isomachus invokes a different metaphor to describe the housewife’s duty as “keeper,” and the problem of authority resurfaces:

      I taught her also howe in comon welthes, & in good cites that were wel ruled & ordred, it was not inough for the citezins and dwellers, to have good laws made unto them, except that they beside chose men to have the oversighte of the same lawes…. And so I bad my wife that she shuld thi[n]ke her selfe to be, as if it were the overseer of the lawes within our house: and that she shulde … overse the stuffe, vessell & implementes of our house none other wise than the capitaine of a garison overseeth and proveth the soudiers.⁴⁴

      When the husband worries that this may prove to be too burdensome or masculine a responsibility for his wife, she seeks to quell his concern by providing her own metaphor for her new responsibility, one that both feminizes and naturalizes it: “me thinketh,” she says, that “as it is naturally given to a good woman, rather to be diligent aboute her owne chyldren than not to care for them, Lyke wyse it is more pleasure for an honest woman to take hede to her owne goodes, than to set noughte by them.”⁴⁵ In likening the task of caring for her household stuff to that of caring for her children, she suggests that her precious household objects demand equal attention, if not love, and that her affective attachment to and concern for them is entirely natural. The early modern housewife, it would seem, was expected not merely to watch over the growing litter of objects placed under her care, but quite literally to mother them (and to take “pleasure” in doing so).⁴⁶ A residual trace of gendered anxiety remains, however, in Socrates’s response: he dryly (and ironically) remarks that her analogy suggests that she has a “manlye stomach.”⁴⁷

      The “masculine” responsibilities inherent in the housewife’s oeconomic role as described in Xenophon’s hive-metaphor are likewise tamed in its subsequent appearances in domestic literature, where the housewife is no longer likened to the queen bee presiding over her honeycombe (or compartmentalized store of precious objects), but to a bird presiding over its nest. In Miles Coverdale’s The Christian State of Matrimony (1543), for example, it appears as follows:

      What so ever is to be done without the house that belongeth to the man, & the woman to study for thynges wythein to be done, and to se saved or spent conveniently what so ever he bryngeth in. As the byrde flyeth to and fro to brynge to the nest, so becommeth it the man to applye his outward busynes. And as the dame kepeth the nest, hatcheth the egges, and bryng[eth] forth the frute, so let them bothe learne to do from the unreasonable fowles or beastes created of God naturally to observe theyr sondry properties.⁴⁸

      The housewife’s role as “keeper” of household stuff no longer seems to involve actively ordering, counting, dividing, distributing, spending, and disposing household stuff, but is here likened to that of the hen who sits passively on the eggs in her nest, waiting for them to hatch. The analogy is closer to that offered by Isomachus’s wife, for the implication is once again that the housewife must care for her goods as if they were her offspring. The metaphor appears again in Henry Smith’s A Preparative to Marriage of 1591:

      they must think that they are like two birds, the one is the Cock, and the other is the Dam: the Cocke flieth abroad to bring in, the Dam sitteth upon the nest to keepe al at home. So God hath made the man to travaile abroade, and the woman to keepe home: and so their nature, and their wit, and their strength are fitted accordingly; for the mans pleasure is most abroade, and the womans within.⁴⁹

      The afterlife of Xenophon’s metaphor suggests that the gendered division of labor within the home was gradually coming to be defined as a division between male activity and female inactivity. The husband in Smith’s treatise “travaile[s] abroade” (that is, both travels and travails or works outside the home), while the wife “sitteth” idly “upon the nest.” The phrase “keepe home” no longer suggests the active, managerial role in the household economy described by Xenophon, but conveys simple, passive confinement within the domestic sphere. With the increasing value and proliferation of household stuff within the home, it would seem, the housewife’s role as “keeper” underwent an ideological devaluation; in Smith’s version, the wife’s nest-sitting no longer produces any profit, no longer “hatcheth the eggs” or “bryng[eth] forth the frute” as in Coverdale. Rather, her housekeeping is cast as the passive reception, conservation, and consumption of what the husband “bring[s] in.”

      While the expectation that the housewife should “mother” her goods works to naturalize her role as housekeeper, and thereby to disassociate it from the realm of productive labor,

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