Anita’s Reviews > The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society > Status Update

26 The terms housewife and husband, which had entered the English language in the thirteenth century, referred to people whose work was focused on the house. The compound word husband derived from hus, the older spelling of our house, to which he was bonded. The status of housbands and housewives dervied from home and land, the man because he had title to it, and the woman through marriage to him.