Introduction My mother was a housewife. Born in England before World War I, she worked in an office between the wars. When she married my father early in World War II, she quit her job--as was the custom then--and settled down to being a wife and mother. Like so many others, my parents immigrated to Canada after the war, with their two very young daughters, looking for more opportunity than war-weary, class-conscious Britain could offer. For the rest of her life, she cooked and sewed, cleaned house, and did laundry. She darned socks, canned peaches, and pickled cucumbers. With my father, she bought used furniture at auctions and sacks of potatoes and bushels of apples from the farmer. She kneaded bread, cooked roast chicken and two veg for Sunday dinner, and fancied up the leftovers for Monday.

She baked apple pies and chocolate cakes. She sewed our clothes and her own, often from remnants thriftily bought at the fabric store. She made handkerchiefs from old sheets, already turned sides to middle and worn through. She knitted sweaters and occasionally crocheted doilies. She washed the clothes in a fat, round washing machine and hung them to dry outdoors or in the basement next to the coal furnace. She swept and vacuumed and dusted. She put calamine lotion on our sun-burns and insisted we take our cod liver oil. She made sure we did our homework and chastised us when we misbehaved.

She had dinner on the table when my father came home from work. Two of her fingers turned white in cold weather, a legacy of the time they were dragged into the washing machine wringer. For her time, she was not unusual: all the women in the neighborhood were housewives, some better at the job than others. She was one of that last generation of women for whom full-time domestic work was the norm, full-time paid work outside the home uncommon. I took my mother for granted. All children do. "I'm not your servant, you know!" she snapped at me once -- or maybe more than once -- and I thought, though I had sense enough not to say out loud, "You're not?!" We all took housewives for granted; we always have. Yet colonies died without them and settlements foundered.

From the seventeenth-century New France housewives who staged illegal protests in the streets because they didn't want their families to eat horsemeat to the 1950s housewives who protested at the legislature for lower grocery prices, they have fought for the best for their families. From the nineteenth-century backwoods housewife who boiled pork fat and wood ash to make soap to the 1940s housewife who saved metal and remade clothes to aid the war effort, they have made sacrifices both for their families and for their country. From the Acadian housewife who broke flax and carded wool to the 1950s housewife who adored plastic and -- or so the advertisements told us -- wore high heels to do her vacuuming, they have ensured that the domestic sphere was well looked after. And from the Victorian housewife who closed her eyes and thought of England to the 1930s housewife who smiled and douched with disinfectant, they have been at the center of our lives. Still, somehow, their unpaid labor has seemed to us much less interesting than men's heroic explorations or titanic clashes in politics or economics. By these traditional measures of worth, they just didn't count. As more than one commentator has noted, if a man marries his paid housekeeper and ceases to pay her wages, he has reduced the gross national product. This book looks back with affection at the time from the seventeenth century to 1960 when most women were full-time housewives -- providing food, cleaning house, making clothes, doing laundry, nursing the family, being mothers, being wives.

It would be impossible for one book to describe all the work of housewives in all of those years. Instead, I focus on some significant times and places in that span, following the his.