this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2025
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If I was in his shoes, I'd want a wife, too. Farms are a shitton of work and a partnership would share the burden and improve both our lives.
There's a cool "reality" show from the late 2000s called Victorian Farm where a group of historians move into an old farm and live like the late 1800s for a year. One of the historians is an expert on domestic life and it's fascinating seeing what being a "housewife" was like. They work just as hard all day and if their husband is sick or hurt, they have to pick up the slack in the field.
A couple of years ago I read Salt: A World History which as expected was about salt. A large percent of the book was about how salt was used a preservative and talking about how it was done. This included recipes and examples of "domestics work" throughout the ages. Its easy to forget about how of this "housewife" work included preserving and rationing the food to last all year. This included a lot of different passage about how to butcher and then preserve different animals, not to mention, cheese making, pickling, fermenting etc. A lot of this work is highly specialized and labor intensive. So of course this man needs a wife since he wasn't trained on these skills.
That's a great book. I would recommend his other works as well.