Let us begin by imagining that this particular stew was being prepared in the home of a young childless couple living on a small farm in Connecticut in the middle of the eighteenth century, a farm that was as yet too small to require hired help in the fields or in the house, but was large enough to supply the basic needs of wife and husband. To butcher the animal from which the meat was to come, the husband would have used a set of knives made of wood and iron. This being Connecticut, the water to be used in preparation and cleaning would likely have come from a nearby stream and would have been carried to the house in a bucket made of wood. The housewife would have put the meat and water into a large iron kettle, and this kettle would have been suspended over the fireplace on an iron lugpole inserted into the mortar of the chimney (lacking a lugpole, the housewive could have used a trammel or a crane made of iron, standing on the floor of the hearth). 

Image of Colonial Era Open Hearth with Tools

The fuel for the fire would be hardwood logs, cut, hauled, chopped, and stacked by her husband. The fuel would sit on iron or brass andirons in a fireplace constructed either of bricks or local fieldstones; the likelihood is that her husband had constructed the fireplace himself. If the housewife had been following standard practice on these matters, the herbs and vegetables that were added to the stew would have come from a kitchen garden that she had planted and tended herself (although, when plowing in the spring, her husband might have turned over the soil if it was particularly wet and heavy). The grain that went into the stew for thickening might have been corn or wheat – and, unlike the herbs and vegetables, would have been the product of male, rather than female, labor. The husband would have supervised the growing of it as well as its subsequent processing; had it been corn, he would have husked it and scraped the kernels from the ear; if wheat, he would have supervised the cutting, threshing, and winnowing, although the housewife might have helped. If they had a hand mill (made of stone) for either form of grain, he would have pushed it or managed the draft animals doing the pushing; and if the grain was to be taken to a local water mill to be ground (which would have been the most likely choice in Connecticut in this period), he would have hauled it in a cart drawn by the same draft animals. Skimming and stirring were tasks that the housewife performed with wooden spoons; the spoons themselves had most likely been whittled by the husband during the previous winter when there was little work to be done in the fields. The salt (and other spices, had she had them) would have to have been purchased, as they could not have been made from locally available materials. Once made, the stew would have been served up in wooden trenchers (also whittled by hand), which then would have been wiped clean with a rag (which, at this date, would most likely have come from cloth imported from England, but which could also have been American homespun, although probably not made by this particular housewife, since the couple were too young to be able to afford either a loom or the time required for weaving). The last task remaining to the housewife would have been the cleaning of the kettle, accomplished with some water, perhaps some sand, a rag, and a brush that she had made herself, as its name implies, from branches and twigs. 

This brief scenario illustrates two important points. First, in most American homes prior to industrialization, cooking required the labor of people of both sexes. Cooking itself may have been defined as women's work, but cooking could not be done without prior preparation of tools and food, and a good deal of that prior preparation was, as it happens, defined as men's work. Second, in order for a family to acquire the household technologies needed for cooking (the fireplace, andirons, pots, and accessory implements), there must be some contact between the household and the market economy in which it was embedded. Even as simple a household as this one could not have been entirely self-sufficient. It needed some surplus of cash or goods to trade in order to purchase the tools or raw materials that were essential for subsistence. To put this more clearly, you cannot cook without a pot, and pots have to be purchased because only skilled artisans have the skills and tools for making them. Had I focused on any other meal of the day or on any of the other task included in the standard definitions of housewifery – cleaning, laundering, care of infants, care of the ill, manufacture of clothing – these two points would have remained valid generalizations. Butter making required that someone had cared for the cows (and, at least among several of the ethnic groups that first settled these shores, this was customarily men's work), and that someone had either made or purchased a churn. Breadmaking required that someone had cared for the wheat (men's work) as well as the barley (men's work) that was one of the ingredients of the beer (women's work) that yielded the yeast that caused the bread to rise. Men grew the flax that women eventually spun into linen, and also had to "brake" it (crushing the fibers in a special, exceedingly heavy instrument) before it could be spun. Women nursed and coddled infants; but men made the cradles and mowed the hay that, as straw, filled and refilled the tickings that the infants lay on. Women scrubbed floors, but men made the lye with which they did it. If the tools used in any of these tasks had been purchased, the household would have had to have something, whether cash or extra goods, to exchange for them; if not then the tools would have been made at home by men (with the possible exception of brooms used for sweeping and brushes for scrubbing), since working in wood and leather and metal was defined as men's work. If an eighteenth-century woman had attempted to live alone without a man (or without a good deal of cash to pay a man to do the male housework for her) she would have been likely to experience three things – all of which would seriously endanger her health and wellbeing. First, she would have to lower her standard of living. Second, she would have to do (male) tasks for which she had little training. And, third, she would have to work herself into a state of utter exhaustion. The same would be true of a man under the same circumstances had he tried to farm without the help of a woman. Small wonder that most people married and, once widowed, married again. Under the technological and economic conditions that prevailed before industrialization, survival at even a minimally comfortable standard of living required that each household contain adults (or at least grown children) of both sexes, and that each household have some minimal ability to participate in the market economy, at the very least so as to be able to buy and maintain its tools.