Sword-swinging mercenaries who admire the hell out of their sister-in-law’s delicate, painstaking embroidery. Mages who find their experience with running a household helps them organize and control their magic. Desperate rebels who know they are absolutely dependent on the women who cook and mend and care for the wounded.
I am so bored of heroines who sneer at ‘womanly’ things and complain of the uselessness of embroidery. Your average medieval kingdom wouldn’t last a week without people doing women’s work.
I wonder, is this artifact where it’s devalued in part due to atomic individualism? Female-coded work is necessary for the maintenance of families and societies, especially in the agregate, but it lacks the star power of the highest-status masculine-coded work.