Abstract
One of the most common visual images satirizing women in the late medieval period was a woman standing atop her husband, beating him with her distaff.1 More than any other material object, the distaff, the primary tool of women’s work with cloth, symbolized the danger entailed when women wielded power over men. Comic dramas like the popular Farce du Cuvier demonstrated that a man who did women’s work had lost his masculinity; to restore order, he must reassert control, whether by will or brute force.2 The invocation to husbands to beware the horrors of being forced to do housework by domineering wives runs throughout a variety of antimarriage treatises and narratives that present marriage as a kind of trial in which husbands are martyrs subjected to tortures such as being beaten by distaffs, submerged in wet laundry or soiled diapers, or stabbed by the sharp barbed tongues of their wives.3 Even today, a man wearing an apron and baking cookies can elicit a chuckle, depending on the context, and stereotypical jokes about nagging housewives persist. Yet laughter, as we know, can function as of a zone of exploration, of unease and questioning, even when the dominant values are well marked and understood. Thus, the distaff-wielding woman of comic literature invites us to ask what values concerning women’s work were in play during the medieval period.4
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© 2015 Anna Foka and Jonas Liliequist
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Perfetti, L. (2015). Taking Women’s Work Seriously: Medieval Humor and the Gendering of Labor. In: Foka, A., Liliequist, J. (eds) Laughter, Humor, and the (Un)Making of Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137463654_4
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