Episode 41 & 42 Housekeeping - The 17th Century Labor Market

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Listen to "041 Housekeeping - Domestic Labor Before 1660" on Spreaker. 
Listen to "042 The Labor Situation 1661 - 1699" on Spreaker.

 Links to the Episodes:

Episode 41 - Domestic Labor Before 1660

Episode 42 - The Labor Situations 1661 - 1669

Sorry!  No pictures...

The word "housekeeping" got used quite a bit during my post-high-school academic career to mean making things clear and cleaning up details.  There are quite a few words I've seen come into academic fashion, like "unpack" and others that have fallen out of favor,  like "mastery".  Each in its own way being shortcuts for larger concepts.  In academia we are often dealing with people who are swimming in the same pool of vocabulary words - or we assume they are.  And since we are all trying to get to the good stuff, there is a tendency to create these short-cut words to cover things we do all the time.  There is an attempt to save long explanations for the new.

And it was with this short-cut academic heritage that I was considering putting up an explainer page or something for people at the end of Season 1.  And that is when it struck me - America has a weird set of ideas about labor, paying for labor, paying for labor in the house and paying for labor when it comes to the growing, processing, preparing and serving food, not to mention cleaning up after all that.

I'm not saying the rest of the world has it figured out or anything, but Americans particularly have this need to pretend that all food appears with very little or no effort at all.  And I realized that is as much a part of the American food ethos as all the other stuff.  

So there will be a housekeeping episode at the end of each season - just a much more literal one than I had ever imagined.

Some Interesting Tomes that connect American Housekeeping through the ages - to most of the rest of the world (South and East Asia will come in the late 19th Century):



French, Howard W. Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World 1471 to the Second World War. NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2021.








Hannah-Jones, Nicole (creator), Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman & Jake Silverstein (eds.). The 1619 Project. NY: One World, 2021. 

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