Women's Lives
There is no such thing as a woman's day in the Known World, any more than there is a man's. What there is instead is a household to be run, a trade to be worked, or both, and six cities that read a woman differently while she does it.
What every woman has in common is that she moves freely. Inside a city's walls she goes where she likes — the market, a friend's kitchen, the guild hall, a Therplae, home after dark — and nobody escorts her or expects her to be. A city that suggested otherwise would be saying it could not keep its own streets. The danger is beyond the walls, and the difference between the two sides of a gate is the first thing a girl learns and the last thing she forgets.
The purse
In a household run the ordinary way, what the household can afford is his and what it does with what it has is hers. He sets what it lives on — a sum handed over weekly or monthly, or a purse they both draw on in a shop or farm, where very often she keeps the book for both. Everything inside that is hers: the provisioning, the table, the servants, the slaves, the children's clothes, whether the washing goes out, what is owed at the baker's. How well the house runs on what she has is how her competence is judged. A master's or merchant's wife runs accounts and settles weekly or monthly, and her word is what opens an account. What she earns herself is her own, as is whatever she brought in under the property contract. When he is away she runs all of it — and in a merchant's or a whaling household that means most of the year. Nobody finds this remarkable; it happens in half the houses on the street.
At each station
- A laborer's wife
- Up at the fourth bell, and her day is the household's survival. She works, because a laborer's household needs two wages — washing taken in, a laundry house, scrubbing, minding four children besides her own, a stall, a Therplae kitchen. Bread bought daily because there is nowhere to keep it; the queue at the washing place; mending, because nothing is replaced; watching the price of Gechwyn the way a merchant watches a ship. She is never alone and rarely private, and in one room the two are the same thing.
- A master's or journeyman's wife
- She runs a house with a business attached, and in a good many shops the business too. The kitchen, the day's orders, the apprentices; the household fed at midday; the book, the suppliers, what is owed and to whom, which she knows better than her husband does. She hires the help and directs the slave, and whether the household's slaves are well turned out is read as her management. Her afternoons are callers and guild wives — a guild is a network of households as much as workshops, and she is the part of hers that is in it daily.
- A guildwoman
- She holds a trade in her own right and wears the border that says so. She is at the bench, loom, counter, dispensary, or drawing table from the sixth bell to the twelfth, and at her guild hall for its meetings and judgments, because she is the trade. Her household does not run itself while she works, so she hires help, has a mother or sister living in, keeps a slave, or manages on less sleep. A guildwoman with small children and no help is doing the hardest work in the city. She is rarer than a guildsman, which the world attributes to nature and does not interrogate, and not remarkable once she is there.
- A merchant's or senator's wife
- Her household is large, her day is arranged, and most of what she does is other people. The morning is the household's — provisioning settled with the cook or the senpei, accounts, standing instructions, letters. Then the callers, and being one: reputations are made and dismantled in visits, marriages arranged, business quietly pushed along by wives whose husbands will meet next week having already agreed. In Shining Reach this is a profession in all but name, and a woman good at it is a genuine power in the city without holding any office. Her slaves reflect on her absolutely.
- A farm wife
- Three generations and a day with no edges. She works the farm, runs the house, keeps the poultry and dairy, manages the preserving that carries the household through Endwr, and knows to the Braell what the season has cost. Her nearest neighbors are a field away and her city a morning's walk.
- A woman alone
- A widow, a woman who never married, a freed woman: each holds a Personal Oathbond and runs her own household, and the world has no difficulty with any of them. A widow with a trade goes on working it, and a good many run the business better than their husbands did. A woman who never married is mildly wondered about until she has a trade or a Boedra. A freed woman starts with nothing but herself and the closed circle, and the freed community helps.
Birth, children, and age
See Birth and Growing Older.
Clothes
See Clothes. A wife also dresses her household's slaves, and how they look is read as her management.
By city
Shining Reach watches her constantly and gives her the most room to be a power without holding office; its salons are where a great deal of the republic is actually decided. Forgegate reads her by her work. Stormharbor expects her to be capable, to say what she means, and to speak at the Thing when she has something to say; half the year the fleet is out and the city is being run by the people who stayed, and a good many of them are women. Eldershore runs its lines through mothers, and the elders take an interest in her household a northerner would find intrusive and she finds ordinary. Clearhold assesses her exactly as it assesses everybody, and the standard does not move. The Iron Coves give her no protection and ask nothing of her, and a woman with a crew behind her holds a great deal.