Talk:Goodwife

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 August 2020 and 10 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Jevella. Peer reviewers: Mzola.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:32, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Social standing?
This article says that goodwife or goody was used as a "courtesy title of women of lower social standing" and that goodman was its "male counterpart"; but on the Goodman page, it says that goodman was a "courtesy title for gentlemen", implying a higher social standing. Seems contradictory to me... --Jfruh (talk) 13:28, 6 April 2007 (UTC)


 * According to the research I did, this was not a high ranking title, but still a better title than nothing. I touched upon this in edits I made recently. So, I wouldn't call this a title of lower social standing in the sense lower than the common people. Jevella (talk) 19:05, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Miss and Ms.
Miss and Ms. are two entirely different terms of address, that's why I changed it... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.73.46.236 (talk) 09:20, 4 April 2008 (UTC)


 * OK, but "Miz" isn't any kind of commonly-used spelling... AnonMoos (talk) 00:21, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

Geographical occurrence
"The terms were used in England and Puritan New England." Wouldn't the terms Goodman and Goodwife have been used wherever English people settled in North America in the 17th century? Why just New England? What about, say, Virginia or Maryland? — Walloon (talk) 21:34, 15 December 2008 (UTC)


 * An excellent question, posed a year ago. WP is random, so sometimes such questions don't get answered. Sometimes there is a good reason. In this case, the question now applies only to Goodman, but the question does not currently appear there. David spector (talk) 17:57, 10 December 2009 (UTC)


 * The reason for this is that these values of "Goodwife" and "Goodman" were common in Puritan communities. As the Puritans were highly prominent in New England, the term was commonly used in this area. I remember it mentioned in one source that it was used lightly in other areas, but nowhere near as significantly as in New England. So while I'm responding nearly 12 years later...I do have an answer nonetheless. Jevella (talk) 19:02, 8 December 2020 (UTC)

Goody Two Shoes
The article states "Although the expression "Goody Two-Shoes" is sometimes credited to the children's book The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765), the expression appears as far back as a century earlier. "

But if you look up the reference (published a hundred years after the book in question), the only reference to "goody" to be found is used in a modern sense, not claiming that the term has been around before. "The copy of the 1750 edition is stated in the title to be revised and corrected from the original with improvements consisting of considerable alterations and refitting of the text, supposed to be better suited to the more refined taste of the young folk of that later period. There is a certain canting, goody-goody, hypocritical tone in the preface, introducing, quite unnecessarily, paraphrases from worthy Archbishop Tillotson's sermons which had been published some seven years previously" -- 00:43, 26 August 2020 220.235.60.12