Dr. Hurlbutt contemplates housewives and hussies

Posted on Thursday, March 12, 2009, at 12:39 pm, by Dr. Allardyce Hurlbutt.

In Act II, Scene 1, of Shakespeare’s Othello, Iago entertains Desdemona and Emilia with a teasing rant against the fair sex, in the course of which he asserts that “You are … / … / Players in your housewifery, and housewives in your beds.” Unfortunately the pun is lost on a modern audience, since housewife no longer has the secondary meaning of “hussy” it once did (the evidence of ABC’s popular Desperate Housewives notwithstanding). What Iago is alleging is that women are idle in their housekeeping and sluts in the bedroom. This sort of thing qualifies as fairly standard Elizabethan banter between the sexes. Desdemona, with her “O, fie upon thee, slanderer!”, only pretends to be offended, and Iago replies by improvising a couplet: “Nay, it is true, or else I am a Turk, / You rise to play, and go to bed to work.”

Since Iago actually spends a fair amount of time thinking about housewifery in one form or another, we should not be surprised that the subject comes up again in Act IV, Scene 1, when he alludes contemptuously to the courtesan Bianca as “A huswife that by selling her desires / Buys herself bread and clothes.”

In any event, this archaic equivalence between housewife and hussy surely demands immediate investigation.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the word housewife has existed in something like its current sense since at least the 13th century. In the 1500s, however, a secondary meaning arose, which the OED quaintly gives as “a light, worthless, or pert woman or girl.” In this meaning, the word is described as “Obs[olete]. Usually [spelled] huswife; now HUSSY, q.v.” Usage examples begin with John Heywood’s Proverbs (1546), “Ye huswife, what wynde blowth ye hyther thus right?” They also include the third edition of Robert Cawdrey’s groundbreaking dictionary, Table Alphabeticall (1613), which defines a concubine as a “harlot or light huswife,” as well as Thomas Fuller’s Church History (1655), which alludes to “Some gigling Huswives . . . [who] causelessly fell a flouting at them.” The final instance cited is Sir John Vanbrugh’s play The Confederacy (1705), which includes the line, “Impudent housewife!”

The OED describes hussy, on the other hand, as “A phonetic reduction of HOUSEWIFE, q.v.” As such, it originally shared the latter word’s primary meaning of “the mistress of a household” (with examples provided from 1530 to 1800), while in the 17th century it also became “A rustic, rude, opprobious, or playfully rude mode of addressing a woman” (with examples from 1650 to 1853). Its familiar current meaning (given as “a woman of low or improper behaviour, or of light or worthless character; an ill-behaved, pert, or mischievous girl; a jade, minx,”) does not appear to have emerged until about a century after the comparable sense of “housewife” itself. The usage examples are particularly fine, beginning with John Trapp’s Commentary on Matthew (1647), which avers, “Such another hussy as this was dame Alice Pierce, a concubine of our Edward III.” They include Bishop Joseph Hall’s Select Thoughts (1648), “The light hussy ‘wipes her mouth’ and [says] it was not she,” as well as a remark by Richard Steele in The Spectator in 1711: “The young Husseys would persuade me, that to believe one’s Eyes is a sure way to be deceived.” Jonathan Swift could hardly be expected to eschew such an excellent word, and indeed his Polite Conversation (1738) includes: “No, Miss; you are very light; but I don’t say, you are a light Hussy.” In Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1741), the heroine remarks: “I, like a little proud Hussy, looked in the Glass and thought myself a Gentlewoman.” In 1775, Fanny Burney recorded, “He . . . patted my cheek, and genteely called me a little hussey,” while in 1795, George Washington wrote regarding one of his slaves, “a more lazy, deceitful and impudent huzzy, is not to be found in the United States.” Nineteenth-century examples include George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859): “The naughtier the little huzzy behaved the prettier she looked,” and H. F. Wood’s, The Englishman of the Rue Caïn (1889): “That bonnetless, bold hussey round that corner.”

If in previous centuries, hussy was often qualified with light (meaning “morally loose or wanton”) or impudent (which used to have somewhat racier connotations than it does now), today it is most often coupled with shameless. The OED entry (which dates back to 1899) notes that hussy is often used jocularly, or in raillery, and this assessment is no doubt even more true today. Indeed, as the word has taken on an increasingly archaic flavor, it has become almost unavoidably humorous. Consider one final usage example, from an episode of the NBC comedy The Office that aired in 2006: “There are a few people I decided not to invite, and that might make things kind of awkward, but — it’s my wedding. And I don’t want anyone there who has called me a hussy.”