Making meaning, making butter: the material world of Chester County farm women, 1750-1800
Date
1993
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This thesis is a study of eighteenth-century rural women’s work and the material culture of that work, namely butter-making equipment. Its purpose is to analyze the extent to which diversity existed in Chester County butter makers’ experiences and to broadly define a multiplicity of meanings they may have ascribed to their domestic tools. Evidence surrounding one woman, Elizabeth Smedley, her butter sales and her butter-making equipment help reveal the complexity of rural women’s lives. Her butter making responded to family and farm changes, her equipment demanded maintenance and repair, and her customers varied over time. The possibility that Smedley’s dairy implements obtained alternate meanings in different venues of her work suggests that butter makers in Chester County also ascribed individualized meanings to their domestic tools. ☐ This study is concerned with three central issues: 1) how butter makers interacted with their tools during butter making, 2) how butter makers acquired and maintained their equipment and 3) how butter makers layered this task with other social, economic and domestic responsibilities. The analysis of these issues is based on a diverse evidence base. It includes public documents, prescriptive literature, tax records, craftsmen’s and storekeepers’ account books, farm account books, and public vendue records. Surviving eighteenth-century butter-making equipment provides crucial information about use, maintenance and repair of domestic tools.
Description
"Copyrighted materials in this document have not been filmed at the request of the author. They are available for consultation, however, in the author's university library. [Pages0 54-59"--unnumbered page inserted by UMI after page 53.