The men always had the women doing their laundry though.

Be fun to watch a movie scene with Emerson and Thoreau and Hawthorne ice skating on a pond together and the daughters watching them through the window and giggling about how they were acting on the ice, but I guess they had other bad things happening in their lives. They had lots of deaths to deal with, and they had no cures for any major diseases. A lot of death in childbirth was still going on back then, too.