Especially in the villages, the margin of survival for most families was too narrow to dispense with the labor of any household member.
Women in the households working the most acres often brewed ale and sold any excess ale to other members of the village. Earning wages or selling other types of wares was common.
Historians at the University of Khartras have compiled evidence of differential wages (i.e., women being paid less than men for similar tasks), but also equal wages in places facing extreme labor shortages. Basically if women had enough leverage to negotiate better wages, they did so. Undoubtedly the standard practices of society, at least prior to the founding of the Southern Republic, encouraged women to marry or remarry if they wanted a stable and prosperous existence. A common woman could supplement her family’s income, but she was not supposed to earn as much as a male head of household. That kind of social pressure is probably why a lot of the women who appear to be running a business are running inns, bakeries, breweries, and other types of household-work-adjacent establishments. Yet most families needed income and as much of it as they could get. So women show up in the records as active in many other trades, including fish trading, metalworking, and textiles.
Children in peasant or trade households helped in age-appropriate ways. Boys typically learned from the father’s tasks, while girls learned the mother’s skills. Even as young as four or five, they could watch over younger children, and by six to twelve, they could do real chores. Accidental deaths and injuries were fairly frequent.
Children (boys)–in younger years, fishing and gathering (dry wood, wild fruits, nuts, peat, and dung); older children helped with herding, watering animals, bundling harvested grain, weeding, hoeing, goading oxen, and trade work (assistants).
Children (girls)–in younger years, helped with gathering and picking; later, helped mothers in the daily routine (filling water pots or buckets, helping with cooking, watching over young children); gathered wood.
Marriage–Some females entered marriages at ages that, to modern eyes, were far too young. But many women married in their twenties or not at all. Add a simple fact to your understanding: every woman (mothers, sisters, daughters, grandmothers, aunts, midwives) knew that childbearing and childbirth were dangerous for women, and they knew about both maternal and infant mortality with an immediacy that wealthy people with access to good healers struggle to wrap their heads around. A choice to delay marriage or avoid childbirth was a common and logical decision, especially when socially respectable paths like the theoretical or actual celibacy of serving in a household or becoming a nun existed for many women.
Widows–In cities and towns, women often were much younger than their husbands, often fifteen years or more, so the population of widows could be sizable. Add male combat deaths during long, bloody wars to the picture, and you have a social reality in which at any given point in time, women are running a lot of households and businesses, at least for a while. In many cases, a female essentially ran the household businesses when the male was ailing or injured.
A social role might not be the norm, it might not be the social ideal, but holding it was a possibility that a strong-willed woman often could achieve, albeit perhaps with risks.
