From Cato’s De Agricultura (translation by Andrew Dalby, Prospect Books, 1998) comes this job description, which makes me glad that I am not a manageress:
What are the responsibilities of the manager? I advise him thus: to attend, on the owner’s authority, to everything at the farm that needs to be done, or bought, or made, and to the allocating of foodstuffs and clothing to the household; and to pay attention to the owner’s words; and, specifically, so to deal with the manageress, and so to instruct her, that, when the owner visits, all that is needed has been prepared and attended to with care:
“Take care that the manageress carries out her functions. If your owner gave her to you as your wife, be satisfied with her. Make her afraid of you. She must not be too free-spending. She must not visit women neighbours, or any other women, more than absolutely necessary, or invite them to the house or to her own quarters. She must not go out to meals or be a wanderer. She must not perform rites, or cause others to perform them for her, unless at her master’s or mistress’s orders: it must be understood that the master performs rites for all the household. She must be clean, and keep the farmhouse sweet and clean.
“She must have the hearth ready swept all round each day before she goes to bed. On the Calends, the Ides, the Nones and on a feast day, she must place a wreath at the hearth, and on those days she must make offering to the Lar of the Household according to her means.
“She must have cooked food ready for yourself and the household. She must have plenty of hens and eggs. She must have dried pears, sorbs, figs, raisins: sorbs in sapa, pears, grapes and struthea quinces in vats, raisins in marc and in pots buried in the ground, scantia apples in vats, and other varieties that are conserved, and also crab-apples – all these she must be careful to have ready, conserved, every year. She must be able to make good flour and emmer groats.”
I particularly like how the manageress isn’t allowed to go out to lunch but has to make offering to the Lar of the Household according to her means. Sweet.