Sharing the Housework in the Ballad of the Tyrannical Husband and The Wright's Chaste Wife

This paper asks what two understudied Middle English poems—The Ballad of a Tyrannical Husband and The Wright’s Chaste Wife—can tell us about the division of labor in late-medieval bourgeois homes. In both these texts, readers are invited to imagine men doing work around the house that would usually be done by women. The poems imply that, rather than being emasculated by this experience, men who do women’s housework can become better attuned to the realities of household life in late-medieval towns. The essay draws liberally on work on the division of household labor by social historians of late-medieval England. At the same time, it advocates for a sensitivity to tone and the possibilities of audience reception that match the poems’ framing as jokes. The paper’s overarching goal is to show that these admittedly marginal texts constitute a valuable resource for scholars interested not only in who did what in bourgeois homes but also in the ways in which the division of household labor by gender might be perceived by late-medieval householders.