Terracotta Lekythos by the Amasis Painter depicting women spinning and weaving. Image courtesy of Wikimedia.
How does a household function? Who owes what to whom, and how did people conceive of their relationships to one another? How did the realities of work in an agricultural society shape these relationships? My dissertation, “Domestic Labor and Marital Obligations in the Ancient Jewish Household,” asks these questions of rabbinic texts. It argues that rabbinic texts view domestic labor arrangements as inherently subject to variation rather than as static obligations.
Take a text like m. Ketubot 5:5. This passage from the Mishnah relates that a wife performs seven tasks for her husband: grinding grain, baking, washing, cooking, nursing her son, preparing her husband’s bed, and working in wool. The passage goes on to add that for every enslaved woman that a wife brings in her dowry, she performs fewer and fewer of the labors herself. This list of seven tasks sounds deceptively economical and all-encompassing, and perhaps for that reason, it has often been interpreted as an unruffled and neutral description of the labor necessary to keep a household running. The general verisimilitude this text accomplishes has abetted in occluding the fact that this mishnah does not reflect how things were so much as it shapes a fantasy of feminine labor as fungible.
“Domestic Labor” is less concerned with mining rabbinic texts for data about the practice of daily life, and instead reads these texts as reflecting the inherent impossibility of just such a generalized portrait of daily life. Rabbinic texts are the rare ancient literary corpus that discusses domestic labor as embedded in relationships, and that therefore provides insight into not only the practice of domestic labor but the way that work in a subsistence-agricultural society shaped familial relationships.
The dissertation is divided into an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. The Introduction lays out the concept of domestic labor. “Domestic labor” is not a term emic to rabbinic texts, but rather a modern term that marks labor that takes place within the domestic realm. The term presumes a distinction between home and outside world, and between private and public. This spatial binary is also a gendered binary, since women are associated with the private domestic realm and men with the public realm of society. Several scholars of gender and the household, including within the study of ancient Judaism, have disrupted this public/private binary by showing variously how the house was not a sealed-off private realm and by showing that these spaces did not exhibit a simple ideology of gender separation.
The Introduction argues that when used in reference to ancient texts, the term “domestic labor” can indicate the degree to which this labor was inseparable from its agricultural setting in the ancient world. This labor is most often coded female and is therefore the province of non-male or non-free members of the household, not just free women but also enslaved persons. Recognizable examples of domestic labor today may include cooking, childrearing, cleaning, and so on. In the mishnah cited above, it also prominently includes textile work as well as agriculture-adjacent work like grinding grain. I use the term “domestic labor” in this dissertation as an umbrella designation for various kinds of labors associated with wives and enslaved persons, rather than as an indication of where exactly this work took place.
Each of the first three chapters concerns a different quintessentially feminine labor: textile work, breastfeeding, and marital sex. The fourth chapter concerns the concept of maintenance, which refers to food and other in-kind support provided to those considered dependents.
The first chapter uses the case of textile work to query the relationship between house and society. Textile work is one of the most recognizable labors associated with women in antiquity. It is feminine labor elevated to cultural script. Within the textile production process, spinning the fiber represented a particular bottleneck as a stage that was time- and labor-intensive. This chapter argues that texts about spinning fibers reveal the porous boundaries between house and society. The rabbis intimate that textile work done within the house was not necessarily done for the house, and that the household was the basic unit by which women’s labor-intensive spinning entered broader networks of trade and exchange.
The second chapter uses the case of breastfeeding to investigate the role of the wage in creating a formal labor agreement. In the ancient Mediterranean, breastfeeding could be unwaged work performed by the mother, or wage-worthy work performed by wet nurses. Wet nurses moreover might be free(d) or enslaved. Rabbinic texts reflect this same awareness of breastfeeding as both wage-worthy and non-wage-worthy work. One passage in the Tosefta states that a divorced woman must receive wages for breastfeeding her own child. Since the Tosefta understands the breastfeeding obligation as being towards the husband and not the child, the end of the marriage severs the nursing obligation. This chapter discusses this remaking of a spousal obligation as a waged relationship in the Tosefta, and its implications for later discussions in the BT. I argue that through this reinvention of the breastfeeding relationship, the rabbis make the mother subject to the sexual regulations and other rules that an employer would normally impose on a wet nurse.
The third chapter discusses how the rabbis integrate marital sex into the complex of domestic obligations. How do the rabbis view the relationship between sexual availability and other labor obligations? This chapter addresses this question by turning to the figure of the moredet (recalcitrant woman). Both Talmudim debate the nature of the moredet’s refusal, and both of them propose two options: she is refusing either sex or work. This is not a simple contrast between sex and work that makes sex into the antithesis of work. The chapter discusses how sexual access intersects in multiple ways with other labor obligations and argues that the analogy with work provides the rabbis with the crucial conceptual vocabulary for discussing a man’s sexual access to his wife.
The fourth and final chapter pertains to maintenance, or the in-kind support provided to those labeled dependents within a household. Maintenance is a concept well documented in later halakhah, where it is associated in particular with wives. Tannaitic texts about maintenance, however, clearly view it as a concept applying to multiple categories of dependents — not just wives and children, but also enslaved persons and laborers. In this chapter, and in an article in preparation tentatively titled “De-coding Maintenance: Tannaitic Texts and the Family Law Framework,” I argue that the enshrinement of maintenance in halakhah and in modern family law has generally led us to view rabbinic texts about maintenance as also engrossed in the project of codifying personal status within the family. In fact, rabbinic texts do not reflect an interest in codifying maintenance, and instead view it as a discursive tool for fashioning dependencies within the household.
Social-historical questions about labor and the household are challenging to pose of rabbinic texts for several reasons. Classical rabbinic texts defy any easy dating or establishment of provenance, and the texts are famously resistant to historical contextualization based on clues internal or external to the corpus. Meanwhile, the nature of the questions invites static reconstructions of daily life as it was, without acknowledging the considerable scholarly interpretive activity that lies behind any such reconstruction. One of the major challenges of asking explicitly social-historical questions of these texts is the difficulty of marking change over time or by region. In the past, this sort of historical narration of change has relied on a strong contrast between early Tannaitic and later Amoraic texts. For instance, the Mishnah is often contrasted with the Babylonian Talmud in particular, with the former often described as presenting a more neutral or reciprocal-minded view of marriage, whereas the latter is read as having a more overtly ideological bent. This strong contrast between the Mishnah and the BT has resulted in naïve acceptance of the fantasies of household life presented in the former. I find that this contrast between a “reciprocal” Mishnah and a putatively “ideological” Talmud has been overstated. As a first step before this sort of historical contextualization can be attempted, this dissertation first argues that there was immeasurable variation in the practice of labor and daily life.
“Domestic Labor” takes the social construction of gender and the household as a starting point, as an invitation to consider the ramifications of these late antique texts that understood the household as something that was always in the process of becoming, rather than something that was already made and could be taken for granted.