What is a good word for "women who would do things for the men they weren’t married to"

[M. Robert Gibson]

For some reason the phrase "a woman who does" sprang into my brain
A quick search brought up this question on English StackExchange

What does the phrase "woman who does" mean?

I've first heard the phrase on QI (season 3 episode 6) where Stephen Fry uses it as rhyming slang for "buzz" Bill: "Woman"? Stephen: "Woman who does": buzz. Bill: Buzz.

english.stackexchange.com

Where the accepted answer is :

The OED's entry for do, under Phrasal Verbs, has an entry to do for —, whose definition 1b is:

colloq. To attend to; esp. to perform household tasks for, esp. as an employee.

They give (among others) a 1997 citation from the Daily Telegraph:

Mrs Simmons has ‘done for’ Mrs Lynton-Smith for 24 years.

In context, it usually refers to light cleaning and housekeeping tasks. As chasly says, it doesn't seem to include live-in servants.

A woman who does might have been called, in earlier times, a charwoman or daily woman.

Which led me to look up charwoman

Charwoman - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

A charwoman (also chargirl, charlady or char) is an old-fashioned occupational term, referring to a paid part-time worker who comes into a house or other building to clean it for a few hours of a day or week, as opposed to a maid, who usually lives as part of the household within the structure of domestic service. A charwoman might work independently, often for cash in hand, or might come through an employment agency.

Food for thought, if nothing else

 

[farntfar]

A woman who does might have been called, in earlier times, a charwoman or daily woman.

Women of my mother's generation would also just call this woman a Treasure.

As in "I have a treasure who comes in on Tuesdays and Fridays."

 

[Montero]

Incidentally, wombling back to the point about coal and trading and transport. Coal is heavy. There is a reason a lot of the industrial revolution happened near coal mines, or especially where there were deposits of iron ore and coal. It was shipped - literally in the sense of coal being put in ships and brought down the coast - so Newcastle was famous for shipping coal and London for burning it - but canals were built for a big reason - shipping heavy goods inland. Charcoal was much lighter and could be carried by pack horse.

In terms of thread - well you'd have a go. They are currently wearing clothes, you can see what it is made of, you try one method and if it fails you try another. Some people would be better at this than others. People had to invent it in the first place. Anyone who sits and twiddles a bit of grass around in their fingers will start to see possibilities. Vines suggest rope and string, then it breaks so you twist two together and so on.

 

[Guttersnipe]

Surrogate?

 

[Bramandin]

Incidentally, wombling back to the point about coal and trading and transport. Coal is heavy. There is a reason a lot of the industrial revolution happened near coal mines, or especially where there were deposits of iron ore and coal. It was shipped - literally in the sense of coal being put in ships and brought down the coast - so Newcastle was famous for shipping coal and London for burning it - but canals were built for a big reason - shipping heavy goods inland. Charcoal was much lighter and could be carried by pack horse.

In terms of thread - well you'd have a go. They are currently wearing clothes, you can see what it is made of, you try one method and if it fails you try another. Some people would be better at this than others. People had to invent it in the first place. Anyone who sits and twiddles a bit of grass around in their fingers will start to see possibilities. Vines suggest rope and string, then it breaks so you twist two together and so on.

Yes, "put your cities near water" is a lovely rule that even the lazy can follow. I think we can thank lindybeige for thoroughly convincing me that they use horse drawn barges more often than horse drawn wagons. If USA has cities plunked down where they don't make sense in a fantasy setting, it's because of trains.

As for why they mine coal instead of making charcoal... no idea. I'm not going to futz around with rebuilding his idioms to go with pyroclastic instead of sedimentary rock.

Where would someone find bits of grass in a coal mine? I've already made it a point that they keep their hair close-cropped so I don't think they have any fiber to work with unless they pick at their clothes. I agree that someone had to think of it in the first place, but it requires material to play with.

Actually, MC does know what a cat is, I could rip that out and replace it with dog because I don't want to rip out the dogs. Between dogs and rats, would that provide decent fiber? I just remembered that they sprout some sort of seed, but that's wasting food just to play with it. They also grow potatoes under artificial light, but I'm not sure if that could make decent enough twine for them to put the pieces together to ask for better plants. I can't remember why I rejected them wearing cloth made from mushroom.

 

[Montero]

Get Crafty With Yarn Made From Your Dog’s Fur

Interested in making yarn from your dog's hair? Here's a look at the process, including how much fur you'll need to knit the items you want.

www.akc.org

Note the length of the original fibre - it is important in spinning.

If they have dogs then they could be fiddling twisting bits of dog hair around each other.

As for why they mine coal instead of making charcoal... no idea. I'm not going to futz around with rebuilding his idioms to go with pyroclastic instead of sedimentary rock.

Pardon? Really not sure what you are saying here with all these rock types and idioms.

And my point was more why would people want to buy coal off them since it is so heavy to transport? One answer is coal is better than charcoal when smelting iron BUT you can still get an OK product when using charcoal. Since what you are talking about is post-dystopian, or it seems to be, then there should be vast amounts of discarded metal lying around ready to use, or just rusting.

And by the way, before you get too deep into writing, if you haven't already been down a coal mine, try and go for a visit down a coal mine to get what it feels like, how dark it is, how hot it is. In the UK there are discontinued mines open to the public like Big Pit National Coal Museum

 

[Bramandin]

Get Crafty With Yarn Made From Your Dog’s Fur

Interested in making yarn from your dog's hair? Here's a look at the process, including how much fur you'll need to knit the items you want.

www.akc.org

Note the length of the original fibre - it is important in spinning.

If they have dogs then they could be fiddling twisting bits of dog hair around each other.


Pardon? Really not sure what you are saying here with all these rock types and idioms.

And my point was more why would people want to buy coal off them since it is so heavy to transport? One answer is coal is better than charcoal when smelting iron BUT you can still get an OK product when using charcoal. Since what you are talking about is post-dystopian, or it seems to be, then there should be vast amounts of discarded metal lying around ready to use, or just rusting.

And by the way, before you get too deep into writing, if you haven't already been down a coal mine, try and go for a visit down a coal mine to get what it feels like, how dark it is, how hot it is. In the UK there are discontinued mines open to the public like Big Pit National Coal Museum

I didn't research much on dogs, but I was thinking rat terrier. I could try pulling some of Graycat's undercoat out to see if I can make it into string, but I did that to other cats and couldn't get more than 2 inches of felt.

Rock types and idioms: Coal comes from sedimentary rock, iron is from pyroclastic rock and that might be true for any other resource worth mining. I'd rather just leave people scratching their heads about what the coal is used for than have to rewrite the idioms that the kid is using.

The post-apocalypse isn't from our modern era, more like it happened during the renaissance. Yeah there is metal around, but I have no idea how much.

West Frankfort isn't quite a daytrip, but I can take off in the evening and sleep in my car. I think I'll hit Museum of Science and Industry first to make sure the environment won't cause me to freak out.

 

[Montero]

My impression, and I've not studied this deeply that coal mines were of limited size in the Renaissance, little more than a pit in the ground and a ladder, though to counter that, there was certainly tunneling to bring down castle walls.

I just found your comment about charcoal, idioms and rock type to be opaque and I still do. Why would anyone care about the rock type, unless they are using the coal? Maybe it is clearer in your writing.

 

[Bramandin]

My impression, and I've not studied this deeply that coal mines were of limited size in the Renaissance, little more than a pit in the ground and a ladder, though to counter that, there was certainly tunneling to bring down castle walls.

I just found your comment about charcoal, idioms and rock type to be opaque and I still do. Why would anyone care about the rock type, unless they are using the coal? Maybe it is clearer in your writing.

Maybe this is a case of not worrying if it doesn't make sense? Yeah, I'm not sure why they'd barely have coal pits when the not-zombie apocalypse happened and then have this huge complex of tunnels in a coal mine after several generations of enslavement by evil sorcerers. I just looked and the tomb in Petra where they filmed Indiana Jones is only 40x36 but there's nothing to say that they couldn't have gone deeper 2,000 years ago if they wanted to. Maybe part of the cave system the coal mine is in is natural.

I believe that environment shapes idioms. Like apparently "kick over the traces" and "blow off steam" mean about the same thing. You wouldn't expect a medieval knight to yell "use your coconut" unless they were in a Monty Python sketch. Someone from an illiterate society might prefer "don't assume the contents of a jar" instead of "don't judge a book by its cover" unless it's something that hangs on after it stops making sense like "don't look a gift horse in the mouth."

 

[Montero]

OK. Yes, tunneling in hard rock can be done. Can deep tunnels that need supporting and forced ventilation? Petra is relatively broad and open and the original intention was a mausoleum not living quarters or a place where people worked every day. You might also want to look at underground stone quarries and underground salt mines. Salt was enormously valuable in Renaissance and later for food preservation.

Regarding spinning and indeed felting, there was a reason wool was so popular - it's longer and curly - which means it locks together better. I wouldn't think terrier hair would be good enough. You could possibly use it as cushion stuffing, but I wouldn't think of it as good spinning fibre. Some shorter fibres can be spun - sheep's wool comes in a wide variety of lengths - but the shorter ones can require a more skilled spinner. You'd get naff results as a beginner if you tried to start with a hard to spin fibre, so there would be no incentive to continue trying. Down a deep coal mine, where it is hot, clothes won't seem that much of a necessity, other than rules of society.

You also need to consider the safety in a coal mine - explosive gas and fires.

 

[Bramandin]

@Montero I also found this yesterday. Derinkuyu Underground City Very tempting if I didn't have to completely rework things around it. I'm probably going to use it for another location if I need one.

I did think about salt, but I was always confused about why someone would go digging for salt instead of boiling seawater unless it was a distance thing. I think that I could leave it as a coal mine and save myself having to worry about it because it is believable as a valuable resource and someone would have to look for more than a few minutes to start finding the holes. I also have the line "at least until he knew that he wasn’t running into the fire to get away from the smoke" so hopefully it was just Centralia Pennsylvania that stayed burning and most of the time the mine isn't a loss if it catches fire. How many readers are as knowledgeable as you, and out of those how many would care? I always thought that limestone was done open-pit, but maybe that's because I haven't noticed any quarries around here that aren't.

You'd get naff results as a beginner if you tried to start with a hard to spin fibre, so there would be no incentive to continue trying.

Yep, this is my line of thinking about why they didn't figure it out or ask the hunters for a monster scalp.

I also did consider having them run around naked or just wearing fundoshi. I probably made the dumbest and nonsensical choice with them wearing short tunics and subligaculum because the protection is negligible and they'd probably either wear full coveralls or just a jockstrap.

 

[Montero]

Impressive underground city. There is a smaller one in France I saw on a documentary.

Regarding salt - if you are near the coast you do evaporate sea water (traditionally wind power to pump it into salt pans for solar evaporation only use fuel if you have to) - but not if you are many days journey from the coast.
Limestone - both - Limestone extraction – underground mining techniques, drilling, blasting processes

Regarding who would care - well I think anyone who is knowledgeable would care, because it interrupts the suspension of disbelief necessary for fiction to be convincing and also makes you doubt passages in the book of which you may not have the same level of background knowledge.

You are not the first person to say "who would care" to me, but whether it is poor historic and economic details in fantasy, or totally misunderstanding gravity and momentum in sf, I care - and I will stop reading the author who is a serious offender and have sometimes criticised them in reviews - and found I wasn't the only one. You are going to a lot of effort to find the perfect word for female servant, but seem less interested in working to the same level on the plausible economics and functionality of other parts of the worldbuilding.

 

[Bramandin]

Impressive underground city. There is a smaller one in France I saw on a documentary.

Regarding salt - if you are near the coast you do evaporate sea water (traditionally wind power to pump it into salt pans for solar evaporation only use fuel if you have to) - but not if you are many days journey from the coast.
Limestone - both - Limestone extraction – underground mining techniques, drilling, blasting processes

Regarding who would care - well I think anyone who is knowledgeable would care, because it interrupts the suspension of disbelief necessary for fiction to be convincing and also makes you doubt passages in the book of which you may not have the same level of background knowledge.

You are not the first person to say "who would care" to me, but whether it is poor historic and economic details in fantasy, or totally misunderstanding gravity and momentum in sf, I care - and I will stop reading the author who is a serious offender and have sometimes criticised them in reviews - and found I wasn't the only one. You are going to a lot of effort to find the perfect word for female servant, but seem less interested in working to the same level on the plausible economics and functionality of other parts of the worldbuilding.

You have a good point. It's just that some people have been telling me to not worry about it so much and write. Though maybe the under-meaning from some of them is "take it to reddit or somewhere instead of here."

Not having a word for their seamstresses seemed a lot more glaring than why a bunch of monsters want coal, especially enough that they're willing to trade for it instead of waiting for everyone to die or give up. That they managed to set up a big enough mushroom farm to go self-sufficient once the uprising happened is probably the bigger thing to wonder about... unless their luck goddess is real.... in which case she's a terrible goddess.

(Spent some time thinking more)

Even taking the mine back by force should be possible... (I'm under the impression that even the most well-designed fortress is more about making it too much of a PITA to take than actually being untakeable.) unless there was a breakdown in communication or there's no one in charge to say they can stop bringing supplies in exchange for the product. It's a little ridiculous, but I suppose it could happen.

I don't know. I'm willing to upload this to google drive if you want to look for anything glaring, but a lot of this is going to be slow-drip and not much is in the story yet, so the chances of finding anything worth stopping the story to hand-wave might be slim.

Oh wait. This is a narrow POV and MC is a little kid. Does unreliable narrator buy me any leeway? Who's to say that the revolt actually worked? What if their liderkaste are mouthpieces for wolfman interests and it's just propaganda that the revolt was successful?

 

[Danny McG]

What is a good word for "women who would do things for the men they weren’t married to?"​

My cousin Maureen

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

If we are not talking about sex but merely tasks traditionally performed by women like mending and darning, I find it hard to believe that other women in the family besides wives—that is to say, sisters, daughters, aunts, mothers, cousins. in-laws and so forth—would not routinely and respectably perform these jobs for unmarried (or widowed) men. Why wouldn't they? It seems like an arbitrary decision on the part of the author, and something that would put a strain on the reader's ability to believe in the world and the plot.

But if you were referring to the plight of men without any living female relations at all—which I suppose could happen with some frequency in a very harsh world or society, just as there might be many women without living male relations—or even there might be circumstances, disasters, migrations, forced servitude, etc. that separate families so that for all intents and purposes members of the opposite sex might be quite missing for some people—perhaps the name for the women who would perform such tasks for men in that position might be a borrowing of a familial title, like "sisters" or "aunties," as representing the women who would, under other circumstances, be doing the work.

Or you could just call seamstresses, seamstresses and leave it at that.

As I said before, I think you may be over-complicating things. You don't have to redefine all roles in your society and come up with new names for people who perform common and familiar tasks, to give your world originality and depth.

 

[farntfar]

I'm sorry, but if we're not euphemistically talking about sex, then it's very difficult to find a word that WE would use in this case, because you want to imply the shamefulness of unmarried sewing.
I have to say that if a man or woman down the street said to me, "Hey. Are you any good at sewing on buttons? I could never get the hang of it." I'd say, "Yes of course. Show me the shirt."

But, as far as I understand it, in your society, this would be frowned on, if it were me, or my wife, of my unmarried sister.
So the word you should be looking for in the thesaurus doesn't sound like Seamstress, but Deviant.
Here I think the word you would use is more like Neighbour.

How would they feel if I asked the widow next door to help me put up a shelf or plant a tree? Or boil an egg?

 

[Montero]

You have a good point. It's just that some people have been telling me to not worry about it so much and write. Though maybe the under-meaning from some of them is "take it to reddit or somewhere instead of here."

Well, can't speak to other people's under-meaning...... but I think what looks contradictory, is a bit more nuanced than that.

What I am saying is not you must spend lot of time on the details, but what I AM saying is that the details you include are far better if there is an underlying framework that would function - that they are joined up and have a basis in the real world. As in, coal is heavy, cities tend to grow where there is a good water supply and you may have to build lots of water cisterns and aquaducts if the city outgrows the supply, unmetalled roads are muddy after rain and so slow journeys, in a medieval society processing metal is still really expensive so pewter plates are a status symbol and if a writer were to give a peasant family pewter plates it would be implausible etc.
So doing a broad brush set up for the world, thinking of the level of technology, the location, the impact of both on the people and hence the story is something I think is worth doing. That doesn't mean designing every item in use before you start, it does mean having a frame work that you can consult when your character reaches out to pick up a drink - it influences what material the cup is made out of, the shape of it, the level of craftsmanship and what it contains. That simple (or fancy) cup and its contents can also be used to give the reader information about the character - status, wealth, personal taste and the world around. If the cup was in Italy, I'd expect wine, in England beer, with nomads on the steppes fermented milk.

When I write and am in the flow of a story, I use placeholders - as in put X1 in if I don't have the name of the city yet, or xxxcup for the cup example above - and put a tag against it (I use comments in Open Office) to come back and fill it in later. So when I am in the flow of the story, I don't derail the flow going off in search of a particular detail. Also, the story influences the details it needs, and it may turn out that your character never makes it to the party, so the cup really doesn't matter. With your seamstress/auntie/drudge/tart whatever she is getting called, the floosie wot sews, you could stick xxxsew in the text, keep writing and come back later having sorted out the word you want - maybe even weeks or months later.

I had a lot of excellent advice on here on the horse thread, on how to handle a horse team and cart and did a fair bit of research on how to get my baggage train down a steep hill. But in parallel to that, I kept writing what happened after they got to the bottom of the hill. I did several passes at the down the hill scene, because I had all sorts of wonderful fascinating details which if handled wrong would have massively slowed the story and turned it into an essay on how to get a heavy laden cart down a hill. I took several passes at it, first writing the essay, then working out what characters who are accustomed to doing the job would pay attention to. (Common writers trick is to have a person new to the task on hand so they have to be taught, or are standing around going "ooh, didn't know that was how it worked". Didn't feel like doing that.) So the scene was produced in stages.

 

[Bramandin]

If we are not talking about sex but merely tasks traditionally performed by women like mending and darning, I find it hard to believe that other women in the family besides wives—that is to say, sisters, daughters, aunts, mothers, cousins. in-laws and so forth—would not routinely and respectably perform these jobs for unmarried (or widowed) men. Why wouldn't they? It seems like an arbitrary decision on the part of the author, and something that would put a strain on the reader's ability to believe in the world and the plot.

But if you were referring to the plight of men without any living female relations at all—which I suppose could happen with some frequency in a very harsh world or society, just as there might be many women without living male relations—or even there might be circumstances, disasters, migrations, forced servitude, etc. that separate families so that for all intents and purposes members of the opposite sex might be quite missing for some people—perhaps the name for the women who would perform such tasks for men in that position might be a borrowing of a familial title, like "sisters" or "aunties," as representing the women who would, under other circumstances, be doing the work.

Or you could just call seamstresses, seamstresses and leave it at that.

As I said before, I think you may be over-complicating things. You don't have to redefine all roles in your society and come up with new names for people who perform common and familiar tasks, to give your world originality and depth.

The society is highly misogynistic as in women don't even have what we would consider human rights. I'm softly going with biddies/seamstresses, and they are whores as well, but it is also shameful for a married woman to literally sew for someone who's not her husband. Even a sister once she's married. If a woman somehow outlives her husband despite maternal mortality rates, someone else would marry her.

It occurred to me a bit ago that they could have seamstress from the before-time. We still have a phrase "look a gift horse in the mouth" even though I doubt that everyone who uses it knows that you can tell a horse's age by looking at the teeth. Plus I could probably use seamstress to create a moment of culture-shock.

I suppose this means that I don't have to reinvent too many idioms. I did change "out of the frying pan and into the fire" because no one knows what a frying pan is anymore. And sometimes it's just fun to change them, like "If wishes were horses, then we'd all be eating steak."

 

[Montero]

So you need an idiom around being able to tell that a man is unmarried and an orphan by the way his arse hangs out of his trousers..... (or his tunic hem is tatty).

 

[Bramandin]

Well, can't speak to other people's under-meaning...... but I think what looks contradictory, is a bit more nuanced than that.

What I am saying is not you must spend lot of time on the details, but what I AM saying is that the details you include are far better if there is an underlying framework that would function - that they are joined up and have a basis in the real world. As in, coal is heavy, cities tend to grow where there is a good water supply and you may have to build lots of water cisterns and aquaducts if the city outgrows the supply, unmetalled roads are muddy after rain and so slow journeys, in a medieval society processing metal is still really expensive so pewter plates are a status symbol and if a writer were to give a peasant family pewter plates it would be implausible etc.

I'm not stopping for every detail, like in the text it's written out as "women who would do things for the men they weren’t married to" and the chances of not catching it as I go back for a detail-check are low enough to gamble on. I'd be well beyond it if I hadn't gotten snagged right after. Actually I stopped midway through this post and I'm not beyond the snag yet, but I did frog and rework the conversation just before it a bit and hopefully I've solved how to get past this part.

I just thought that this would be a simple question, not diving into having to lock down the schizo-tech and answer why an evil sorcerer with an army of wolfmen would want coal. When I'm stopped at a railroad crossing, I don't wonder where those coal-cars came from and assume they're going to Michigan City.

Though this discussion did change the coal mine from being actually free to only thinking that they're free and the administrators are working for the wolfmen. (Maybe the evil sorcerers put the power-plant in an impractical location because they're absolute jerks?)