Bitchy History - November 17, 2025


Women and the Black Plague： Death, Dowries, and Doing Men’s Jobs


Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

158.83

Word count

3,577

Sentence count

260

Harmful content

Misogyny

110

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 Welcome to Bitchy History, where we cut through the myths and nostalgia to get to the raw, 1.00
00:00:17.360 unvarnished truth about the past. With sharp analysis, a feminist lens, and just the right 0.99
00:00:22.640 amount of bitchiness, we're here to show you that history isn't just something to study, 0.97
00:00:26.300 it's something to question. Let's get started. 1.00
00:00:30.000 Do you remember those early days of the pandemics?
00:00:34.640 The sourdough, the spreadsheets, the childcare acrobatics,
00:00:38.000 and how many women were responsible for holding it all together? 1.00
00:00:42.640 I kept thinking, we've seen this movie before. 1.00
00:00:46.640 In the 14th century, a different plague hit, and women did what they always do. 0.84
00:00:50.820 They kept people alive and the economy running. 1.00
00:00:53.840 They ran the workshops, trained the apprentices, harvested the fields.
00:00:57.020 And then when life stabilized, the system said thanks, could you get back to your old way of doing things? 1.00
00:01:04.000 Today's episode is my love letter, and a tiny bit of rage mail to those women. 1.00
00:01:08.540 It's a story about the visibility that shows up in the most boring of places. 1.00
00:01:12.760 Taxes, guild rules, and court fines.
00:01:15.900 Let's dive in.
00:01:17.180 The year is 1348.
00:01:19.320 The streets smell like incense and death, and half your neighborhood has the plague.
00:01:23.120 Races are dying faster than they can give people last rites,
00:01:26.260 and in the middle of all of this cataclysm, something even more shocking starts happening.
00:01:31.520 Women are getting job offers, because nothing says gender equality like the end of the world.
00:01:36.700 Today on Bitchy History, we're talking about the way the Black Death cracked open Europe's
00:01:40.740 rigid social order, briefly, and made space for women to do work that medieval men had
00:01:46.080 insisted could only be done by, well, men for a very long time. In three very messy years,
00:01:52.760 up to 40% of Europe's population died. That's about 25 million people. The old system collapsed,
00:01:59.500 and necessity did what sermons and statutes never could. It put women in charge of businesses, 1.00
00:02:05.660 workshops, and fields. But spoiler alert, this is obviously not a victory lap. This was a brief
00:02:11.600 window of opportunity, and that window starts closing as soon as the men can reappear to slam
00:02:16.920 it shut. Think of it as the medieval version of We Can Do It posters, only with more fleas and
00:02:22.740 fewer rights at the end. Before we watch patriarchy temporarily lose its grip then come roaring back,
00:02:29.240 let's rewind to what normal looked like. If you've been picturing the medieval housewife
00:02:34.020 as someone indoors gazing out a narrow window while waiting for their man to come home from
00:02:38.820 the wars, no. Women made up a significant portion of the medieval labor force at this point. 1.00
00:02:44.960 It's just that much of it was labeled household work, which is medieval for the entire supply 0.68
00:02:50.400 chain. Here's the short list of a confined-to-the-home woman's job. Child-rearing, gardening,
00:02:56.680 processing and preserving food, baking and cooking, spinning and weaving, and often full clothing
00:03:01.440 manufacturing, foraging and tending small stock like chickens, pigs, and goats. That is production.
00:03:07.960 Repeat, production. It kept families and villages alive. And there wasn't some impenetrable wall
00:03:13.720 between men's tasks and women's tasks. Males and female roles overlapped very often. Everyone
00:03:19.740 harvested when it was time. Women herded and helped with plowing and sowing. Men could and
00:03:24.920 did card or shear wool when needed. By the 13th century, Europe's population had boomed and land
00:03:30.960 was growing scarce. You couldn't keep a family afloat on subsistence plots alone, so women's 0.99
00:03:36.220 work outside the home expanded. They sold butter, cheese, soap, and cloth at local markets. The 1.00
00:03:41.480 commercialized economy was run by women in many cases. They also entered a growing service economy.
00:03:48.220 wet nurses, cleaners, cooks, laundresses, domestic servants, jobs that proliferated in towns where 0.99
00:03:53.860 wealthier households could outsource all that hard stuff to somebody else. So when people say that
00:03:59.260 women entered the economy after the Black Death, you can kindly correct them. Women were already
00:04:04.780 in it. They had always been in it. The plague didn't invent women's work. It just forced the 1.00
00:04:10.180 recognition of it. Then rats get busy. Between 1347 and 1351, the plague rolls through Europe
00:04:17.320 been waves. Monasteries empty out, parish priests die by the dozens, and entire hamlets cease to
00:04:23.100 exist. Simultaneously, the hundreds-year war keeps eating men at the edges of Europe's map.
00:04:28.680 It's an all-systems failure. But labor shortages do funny things to hierarchy. They flatten it.
00:04:34.980 With half the workforce in plague pits and battlefields, landlords, town councils, and
00:04:39.700 guilds had a choice. Let women do the work, or let the economy die. Shockingly, they chose 1.00
00:04:46.140 taxes, which meant choosing women. Wages went up where they could, bargaining power rose from the
00:04:52.980 grave like a very tired zombie. Suddenly, the question, can women do men's work, gets answered 0.97
00:04:58.640 with, they already are. Fields have to be sown, sheep don't spin themselves, and barrels don't 0.99
00:05:04.540 walk themselves into taverns. Women stepped into agriculture at scale, planting, harvesting, 1.00
00:05:10.480 managing hires, because someone had to do it. They also moved visibly into the urban trades.
00:05:16.140 brewing, textiles, innkeeping, market vending, and yes, even craft workshops that had once been
00:05:21.820 treated as purely male spaces. And crucially, death doesn't only change who does the work,
00:05:27.460 it changes who owns the work. The plague didn't just remove husbands, it scrambled inheritance 0.56
00:05:32.740 lines. With sons and brothers dead, women, especially widows, inherited property, workshops, 0.99
00:05:38.680 and stock at higher rates. They became, in the language of the records, femme sole for legal 0.63
00:05:44.180 purposes. Able to contract, sue, and be sued. In English villages like Thornberry, court rolls
00:05:50.620 show widows running farms, hiring labor, and even declining to remarry because they didn't need to. 0.96
00:05:57.000 In London, city authorities went beyond merely allowing this. They were incentivizing it.
00:06:02.380 City officials wanted widows of merchants and craftsmen to keep the workshops going because 0.99
00:06:06.700 idle shops meant lost customs, lost levies, and lost civic prosperity. In some cases, widows were 0.61
00:06:12.820 required to train their late husband's apprentices or make proper provision for them. Precisely so
00:06:18.280 the production chain and tax base wouldn't collapse. This isn't modern enlightenment,
00:06:24.180 it's emergency pragmatism, let's be real. But it had very real consequences. Women running shops,
00:06:30.560 signing accounts, and negotiating contracts in public. If the medieval city is looked at like 0.64
00:06:35.360 a stage, widows just got speaking roles. Guilds, those gatekeeping fraternities that regulated 1.00
00:06:41.360 quality training and prices of goods are not usually friends to female autonomy, but after 1.00
00:06:46.940 the plague, necessity pried open a side door. In England's brewers company, women were not a 1.00
00:06:52.400 curiosity, they're a constituency. The guild's records show women admitted as members, and by 0.99
00:06:57.460 1419, 39 of them are on the rolls. Why brewing? Because ale, a daily staple, was historically a
00:07:04.320 female craft. As markets expanded, it scaled from kitchen to workshop, and women scaled with it. 1.00
00:07:10.260 Textiles tell a similar story. 0.61
00:07:12.120 In the Low Countries and Northern Italy, women anchored whole segments of the cloth trades,
00:07:17.120 spinning, winding, fulling, finishing, and in some places, the silk industry itself. 1.00
00:07:21.860 Women cultivated silkworms, reeled filaments, spun and wove, 1.00
00:07:25.220 and often in female dense production chains that rested on matrilineal skill networks, 0.99
00:07:30.780 mothers training daughters, and so on. 0.94
00:07:33.320 In Florence and Lucca, you could find women in the ledgers, paid, contracted, and indispensable.
00:07:38.920 Family workshops also matter. 0.80
00:07:40.920 The master might be the husband on paper,
00:07:43.360 but the wife manages production, keeps accounts, and sells stock.
00:07:46.720 Some guilds even quietly valued a wife's labor 0.99
00:07:49.220 enough to give masters with no wife permission for an extra apprentice, 0.91
00:07:53.480 the tacit admission that a wife was, in effect, a trained shop hand.
00:07:57.760 Point is, after the plague, 0.79
00:07:59.300 women were visible in places they'd been present but invisible before. 1.00
00:08:03.360 They ran things. 1.00
00:08:04.320 They trained people.
00:08:05.500 Their names appeared.
00:08:07.360 Another side effect of depopulation, fewer people are marrying. With more women holding property 1.00
00:08:13.060 and income streams, the average age at first marriage ticks up in many locales. Women delay 0.97
00:08:19.100 or decline marriage when they can survive without it. That doesn't mean a feminist utopia, 1.00
00:08:24.380 it just means they have leverage. A woman with a loom, a yard, and a small herd is not cornered 1.00
00:08:29.920 into a bad match. A widow with a going concern isn't racing to find a new male manager for her 1.00
00:08:35.360 life. Sounds familiar. And that autonomy, partial, pragmatic, and conditional though it was,
00:08:41.940 matters. It shows up in the contracts, in the market finds, and in apprentice disputes.
00:08:46.760 When you can track women in the prosaic paperwork of daily life, you are seeing real power, 0.99
00:08:51.460 even when no one calls it by that name. You will sometimes hear historians refer to a golden age
00:08:57.140 for European women after the Black Death. And sure, relative to 1320, things look golden.
00:09:03.020 but we need to be careful. Two things can be true at once. One, women gained visibility,
00:09:08.920 income, and legal standing in specific contexts, especially as widows, producers, and small
00:09:14.360 traders. Two, women were still paid less than men for the same tasks, their access to guild 0.71
00:09:20.560 credentials was fragile, and much of their authority was explicitly temporary, an emergency
00:09:25.620 measure to keep the tax base intact. Judith Bennett's work on brewing is the cautionary tale.
00:09:31.140 Women build an industry, then lose it as technology, capital, and regulations shift, 1.00
00:09:36.180 from small-batch ale to large-scale hopped beer, from household to commercial brewery. 1.00
00:09:41.740 Sandy Bardsley warns against imagining a wholesale revolution. 0.99
00:09:46.120 Women's status improves in places for years, under pressure, and then plateaus or reverses.
00:09:52.500 Let's be blunt. What changed was visibility and leverage. 1.00
00:09:55.540 Women stepped into roles that men and institutions had long insisted were male and proved, again, that competence is not chromosomal.
00:10:04.640 They ran workshops, signed bills, sold at the market, managed the farms, trained apprentices, and kept entire towns solvent. 0.98
00:10:11.440 What didn't change was the default setting, patriarchy.
00:10:15.220 The social machine still assumed men should own, lead, and speak.
00:10:19.200 Women's participation was welcomed as long as it solved a crisis and framed as abnormal the moment it didn't.
00:10:25.540 Which brings us to the next part of the story, because as populations were covered in the
00:10:29.840 later 15th century, the system started rolling back the welcome mat.
00:10:34.080 So let's fast forward.
00:10:36.000 It's been a few decades since plague first tore through Europe.
00:10:39.660 Babies are being born again, markets are recovering, wheat waves in the fields, and across the
00:10:44.020 continent, a certain familiar voice clears its throat and says, all right, ladies, fun's
00:10:49.160 over, get back in the house.
00:10:50.860 Welcome to the late 14th and 15th centuries when men regroup, guilds lawyer up, and cities decide 1.00
00:10:56.540 that women's emergency heroics needed to go back to being invisible. Let's start with labor law. 0.99
00:11:02.080 In the first shock after 1348, wages rose and workers negotiated because half the workforce
00:11:08.100 was gone. That will not do. England moved quickly with the Ordinance of Laborers in 1349 and the
00:11:14.920 statute of laborers in 1351 to cap wages at pre-plague levels and punish people who left
00:11:21.100 service for better pay. It didn't mention women by name, but it undercut the very leverage women
00:11:27.020 had begun to exercise as day laborers, harvesters, brewers, spinners, and servants. Here's the
00:11:32.500 practical math. If you're a widow running a shop and paying two hired hands, capped wages might 1.00
00:11:37.880 look like protection, until you realize that price controls and mobility bans also let powerful 1.00
00:11:43.540 lords and big masters keep labor cheap and workers tied down. If you're a female servant 1.00
00:11:48.660 who's finally bargained a higher rate because literally no one else will do the laundry of 0.87
00:11:53.040 the living, you're now committing a crime if you demand that wage. The law pretended to restore
00:11:58.200 order, but it actually restored elite control. As the century wore on, vagrancy statutes and
00:12:04.320 master-servant ordinances tightened the screws. Towns cracked down on masterless people, a phrase
00:12:10.260 that reads one way in a plague pit and another way in a magistrate's minute book. If you're a
00:12:15.440 woman without a man's cover, husband, father, master, you're suddenly a problem to be policed.
00:12:20.880 That is the ideological pivot. The independent woman transforms in paperwork into a risk. 1.00
00:12:27.280 Now the main event, guilds. The doors that the plague crisis cracked open are about to slam
00:12:32.300 shut once more. In the 1300s, alewives, women who brewed small batch ale, were everywhere.
00:12:38.460 Their names fill manorial courts and city accounts because ale was a daily staple.
00:12:44.060 After the plague, ale scaled up, money pooled, hopped beer, more capital-intensive, longer keeping, moved in from the low countries.
00:12:52.440 Regulations and banking favored people who could command space, storage, and cash.
00:12:57.220 Guess who guild politics privileged? Not the widow with the backyard mash tun. 0.99
00:13:01.880 By the early 1400s, you can watch the linguistic shift.
00:13:06.040 Brewster, woman brewer, fades from the records.
00:13:09.140 Male brewers dominate wardenships and licensing.
00:13:12.260 In London, guild roles that once admitted women as members or widows in right of their husbands
00:13:17.380 began reading like men-only clubs, with women relegated to being assistants or pushed out entirely.
00:13:24.000 Same story in other cities.
00:13:25.540 As brewing becomes profitable, capitalized, and regulated, women are regulated away.
00:13:31.200 Textiles remains mixed, but many crafts harden into masculine monopolies by the late 15th century.
00:13:37.560 Butchery, tanning, metalwork, carpentry, guild ordinances evolve from practical rules to
00:13:42.980 eligibility fences. Women cannot bind apprentices, cannot present masterpieces, 1.00
00:13:47.980 cannot sue in guild courts without a male representative. In some places, even widow's 1.00
00:13:53.200 rights, briefly expanded during the crisis, are narrowed to a short grace period to allow women
00:13:58.980 to liquidate stock or finish existing contracts. London's blacksmith's company is often cited to
00:14:05.280 show the exception that proves the rule. In a 1430s charter, you might spot two sistren listed
00:14:11.400 among the dozens of brethren. Memorable precisely because it was unusual, and even then it didn't
00:14:17.020 open the floodgates. The default reasserts itself. Membership is male, women's labor is familial,
00:14:23.080 auxiliary, and invisible. The family workshop persists. The wife keeps accounts, oversees
00:14:28.540 production and sells, but the credit migrates to the husband's guild identity. The work stays,
00:14:34.060 the status leaves. The plague may have scrambled inheritance lines, but the recovery unscrambled
00:14:39.860 it for men. In mid-century, with heirs dead, widows and daughters inherited land and tools
00:14:45.620 at a higher rate and ran them. As population stabilized and male kin multiplied again,
00:14:51.140 custom and court leaned towards male preference succession. If a man died, the estate should
00:14:55.940 return to the male line. If a widow wanted to keep running things, she would have to remarry 1.00
00:15:00.500 and hand authority to her new husband. We should distinguish dower, a widow's life interest in a 0.97
00:15:06.100 fraction of her husband's property, from dowry, property she brought into the marriage. Either way,
00:15:11.300 the administration of estates gets nudged back towards male guardians. Cities that had compelled
00:15:16.180 widows after 1348 to keep apprentices and workshops afloat now assign male tutors or
00:15:22.160 supervisors, ostensibly to ensure quality in contracts, but conveniently to also re-embed
00:15:28.220 the business into the male civic body. Once again, paperwork tells the story. Where we once saw
00:15:34.120 widows suing and being sued in their own names, we begin seeing male names step back in. Where
00:15:39.880 daughters had negotiated sales, guardians now consent on their behalf. None of this erased
00:15:45.960 every businesswoman. There are stubborn, brilliant exceptions, but the trend line points toward the 1.00
00:15:51.580 patriarchy reasserting full control. When women's economic independence becomes inconvenient, 1.00
00:15:57.800 you don't just change guild bylaws, you change the terms of acceptable behavior. Enter the 1.00
00:16:03.000 common scold. In late medieval English towns, being a scold, a woman who quarrels, shouts, 1.00
00:16:08.860 or otherwise disturbs the peace with her tongue, becomes a chargeable offense. Courts punish with
00:16:14.440 fines, public penance, or the ducking stool. The point isn't just civility, it's silencing.
00:16:19.740 If you can redefine female speech as a nuisance or a crime, you can discipline the women who are 1.00
00:16:25.220 running markets, negotiating contracts, or, God forbid, calling out corruption. This policing 0.86
00:16:31.220 shows up elsewhere as well. Sumptuary laws fret about women dressing above their station. 1.00
00:16:36.840 Moral regulation harasses women taverners and ale sellers nominally about measure and quality, 0.78
00:16:43.080 but functionally about containing female public presence. Even the hue and cry, that communal 1.00
00:16:48.240 alarm that obligated neighbors to respond to crime gains a gendered double standard. Women's 1.00
00:16:54.000 alarms could be discounted or turned into charges of false clamor. When the voice goes, leverage 1.00
00:16:59.400 goes with it. A woman who cannot speak without risking sanction is a woman who cannot bargain. 1.00
00:17:05.020 By the late 15th century, the intellectual climate gets colder. Clerical writers and
00:17:09.880 moralists intensify familiar motifs. Female inconstancy, greed, lust, talkativeness, the usual 0.87
00:17:16.480 bingo card. Then in 1486, two Dominican inquisitors published the Malleus Maleficarum,
00:17:22.620 the manual that reads like a permit for all of Europe's worst instincts. It insists that women
00:17:27.680 are especially prone to witchcraft because of their weaker faith and stronger carnal appetite.
00:17:33.280 Delightful. While the great witch hunts escalate a bit later and unevenly, the logic is already
00:17:39.100 useful in the 1400s. Women acting outside male oversight are suspect. Midwives, healers, tavern 0.99
00:17:45.940 keepers, widows with means. Economically independent women become seen as moral
00:17:51.240 threats. It's not that London wardens read the Malleus Malvicarum and run to shut women out of 0.67
00:17:56.920 brewing. It's that the same patriarchal nervous system about women's bodies, voices, and money 1.00
00:18:02.200 fired across law, theology, and commerce all at the same time. If you stopped here, you might think 1.00
00:18:09.080 that everything rolled back to 1320. It didn't. Not everywhere, not all at once. Women continue to
00:18:15.100 show up in textile accounts across the low countries in Italy. In London, certain niches
00:18:20.020 like silk finishing, needlework, haberdashery retain women's fingerprints. Some widows keep 0.98
00:18:26.060 trading under their own seals for years, especially if they have adult children who are invested in 0.71
00:18:30.740 the business. Even in brewing, women didn't vanish. They shrink. From free men to unrecorded 1.00
00:18:36.620 labor, from wardens to wives and helpers. The expulsion from formal status doesn't magically
00:18:42.300 removes skill. It removes credit, political power, and pathways for the next generation.
00:18:47.240 But the know-how circulates, and kitchens and courts all the same. And memory lingers. Communities
00:18:53.360 remember who kept the ovens lit when the world went dark. Families remember who paid the rent
00:18:58.080 the year the harvest failed. Memory isn't law, but it is narrative fuel, and narratives have a
00:19:03.540 way of reigniting when conditions shift again. This would all be a quaint medieval morality
00:19:08.960 detail if it wasn't so repetitive. World War II. Women enter heavy industry, engineering codes,
00:19:15.540 and farms, then are demobilized to make room for returning soldiers. The COVID-19 pandemic. Women
00:19:21.960 disproportionately were represented in essential work and unpaid care, then were disproportionately 0.99
00:19:27.280 pushed out when the crisis was over. The script is old and it repeats over and over again. Crisis
00:19:33.860 leads to women's labor becoming essential and visible, which leads to recovery, which leads 0.98
00:19:38.940 to re-masculinization of wages, status, and narrative. If you're hearing the refrain,
00:19:43.780 temporary emergency, not permanent rights, you're getting the point.
00:19:48.320 Underneath the legalese and sermons, two anxieties sit like bookends. One, control of production and
00:19:55.080 pay. If women can run workshops, bind apprentices, and sign contracts, then authority in towns is now 1.00
00:20:01.880 not inherently male. That threatens the entire system that European patriarchy was based upon.
00:20:07.920 Two, control of lineage and legitimacy.
00:20:11.200 If women can hold land and delay or decline marriage, 0.65
00:20:14.700 men cannot as easily route property through male lines. 0.94
00:20:18.020 That threatens inheritance strategies that knit the elites together. 0.95
00:20:21.800 Call it patriarchy, call it the house system. 1.00
00:20:24.040 It's a structure that converts women's competence into male credit whenever possible 1.00
00:20:28.680 and declares that conversion to be the natural state. 1.00
00:20:33.380 So where to be land? 1.00
00:20:34.140 The Black Death gave women responsibility on a public stage, shops, fields, guilds, courts, because there was no other choice. 1.00
00:20:41.740 As soon as choice returned, systems were rebuilt to recenter men. 0.91
00:20:46.020 Wage caps to mute bargaining, guild fences to block credentials, inheritance maneuvers to reattach property to the male lines,
00:20:53.700 moral policing to discipline women who didn't get the hint.
00:20:56.860 By 1500, the face of urban economic power is once again male.
00:21:01.760 But here's why this story matters, even if it didn't end in revolution.
00:21:06.200 The plague years proved capacity in the most undeniable currency of pre-modern life.
00:21:11.640 Account books and court rules.
00:21:13.540 Not ideals, not epigrams, entries. 1.00
00:21:16.620 Women trained apprentices. 1.00
00:21:18.460 Women ran ledgers. 1.00
00:21:20.260 Women paid taxes. 1.00
00:21:22.060 You cannot unprove competence. 1.00
00:21:23.940 You can hide it, you can relabel it, but somewhere the receipts will remain.
00:21:28.360 And if we're honest, that's the emotional core of this episode.
00:21:32.380 The Golden Age wasn't a utopia, it was a glimpse of what society looks like when women aren't prevented from doing what they can do.
00:21:39.900 The backlash tells us less about women's limits than about how far institutions will go to ensure those limits are enforced. 0.99
00:21:49.860 Next time on Bitchy History, we pivot from the ledger to the legend. 1.00
00:21:54.060 Joan of Arc, teenage commander, holy icon, cross-dressing, cultural problem,
00:21:59.780 an exhibit A in how medieval Europe loved an exceptional woman as a symbol
00:22:03.700 while denying ordinary women the system.
00:22:06.860 We'll pull the thread from the battlefield to the bonfire 1.00
00:22:09.320 and ask why a woman in armor thrilled a kingdom but still got burned at the stake,
00:22:14.260 and how her legend has been used and abused ever since. 1.00
00:22:18.220 That's it for this episode of Bitchy History.
00:22:20.300 If you enjoyed the show, don't keep it to yourself.
00:22:22.840 Subscribe, review, and share it with someone who loves history as much as we do.
00:22:27.360 Until next time, stay curious and keep questioning the world around you.