Cover page of sheet music for “Your Mother’s Apron String,” a song by John Hogarth Lozier, 1891
9 May 2020
To be tied to someone’s apron strings is a metaphor for being unduly attached to or dominated by a woman, and it connotes immaturity, foolishness, and impotence. The metaphor is rather obvious, since traditionally it would be a woman who wore an apron.
The phrase dates to at least 1791 when it appears in George Colman’s play The Jealous Wife. In the opening scene, the character of Mrs. Oakly accuses her husband of being unfaithful with a number of women, and he replies:
Oons! madam, the grand Turk himself has not half so many mistresses.— You throw me out of all patience— Do I know any body but our common friends?— Am I visited by any body that does not visit you?— Do I ever go out, unless you go with me?— And am I not as constantly by your side as if I was tied to your apron-strings?
Colman’s use is in the sense of literal proximity. But by 1823 the sense of the phrase we’re familiar with today was in place. From the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany of July of that year:
The doating gowk, aye seen to hing
Tied to his dearie’s apron string.
There are, however, some older uses of apron-string to refer to women and that hint at their dominance over some men. An apron-string hold/tenure is when a man controls a property owned by his wife but only during her lifetime. Nathaniel Ward in his 1647 The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America writes:
I have observed men to have two kindes of Wills, a Free-hold will, such as men hold in Capite of themselves; or a Copy-hold will, held at the will of other Lords or Ladies. [...] And I am sure, a King cannot hold by Copy, at the will of other Lords; the Law calls that base tenure, inconsistent with Royalty; much more base is it, to hold at the will of Ladies: Apron-string tenure is very weak, tyed but of a slipping knot, which a childe may undoe, much more a King. It stands not with our Queens honour to weare an Apron, much lesse her Husband, in the strings; that were to insnare both him and her self in many unsafeties. I never heard our King was Effeminate: to be a little Uxorious personally, is a vertuous vice in Oeconomicks; but Royally, a vitious vertue in Politicks.
And there is William Ellis’s use of the term in his 1744 Modern Husbandman which equates having an apron-string tenure with foolishness:
There may happen some particular Cases, which may oblige a Person to transplant Trees even in Summer-time; as when he is forced to remove them in that Season, or must destroy his Fruit-Trees, if he cannot carry them away, and transplant them safely in another place; which very likely would answer better than what one of my Neighbours did, who, being possessed of a House and large Orchard by Apron-string-hold, felled almost all his Fruit-Trees, because he every Day expected the Death of his sick Wife.
Richard Brathwaite in his 1640 Ar’t asleepe husband? writes:
For a kind natur'd wench will see light thorow a small hole; yea, and with twirling of their Apron-string, have as ready an answer, if at any time taken napping.
And there is this, from the anonymous 1649 play The Rebellion of Naples or the Tragedy of Massenello, in which the main character Tomaso is speaking to his wife:
Now the hand of providence hath cal'd me to hold the Scales of Justice; now, to be President of a Councel of State; by and by, President of a Councel of War: Do you think Women are sit Creatures to be consulted with? Must the affairs of State hang upon an apron-string? Look to your dishes, and see that your rooms be well swept, and never think to teach Tomaso what he hath to do.
And a century earlier, Nicholas Udall in his 1542 translation of Erasmus’s Apophthegmes, includes a note in which he equates a mother’s apron string with foolishness and stupidity, perhaps a metaphor of an immature child:
euen of old antiquitee dawcockes, lowtes, cockescombes & blockheaded fooles, were in a prouerbial speaking said: Betizare, to be werishe & vnsauery as Beetes. Plautus in his comedie entitled Truculentes, saith: Blitea est meretrix, it is a pekish [i.e., foolish] whore, & as we say in english, As wise as a gooce, or as wise as her mothers aperen string. So a feloe that hath in him no witte, no quickenesse, but is euen as one hauing neither life ne soule, Laberius calleth Bliteam belluam, a best made of Beetes.
So. the phrase tied to apron strings dates to at least the eighteenth century, although it may be older in oral use. And the association of apron strings with female power is much older.
Sources:
Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. apron-strings, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. apron-string, n.
Photo credit: New York Public Library.