Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford, 1990.

== Summary ==
This
book examines housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. Boydston
argues that unpaid domestic labor was a central force in the emergence of an
industrialized society' in the northeastern United States. 'Through an analysis'''
of the economic contributions that housewives made, and of the implications of
rhetoric about housework’s decline as labor, she argues that the ideology of
separate spheres obscured the ways that unpaid housework bolstered American
capitalism. By clarifying the paradoxical status of housework and the nature of
its changes in antebellum America, illuminates the intimated relationship
between the gender and labor systems that characterized industrializing
America. While domestic labor was recognized in the early colonial years and
again during the Revolutionary War, they were exceptional to the larger
economic trend in American society. America’s economic development led domestic
labor to become invisible, especially as a result of growing market relations'''
and the growth in the cash/exchange economy. “Over the course of the second
quarter of the nineteenth century… Americans embrace[d] a growing conviction
that housework was not really labor at all, but rather merely a new form of
leisure reserved to married women.” (141) The paradigm of womanhood had shifted
from the good wife to mother – that is from worker to nurturer. This ideology
of “spheres” represented the final phase in the industrialization of housework
– the denial that it produced any economic value at all. Boydston terms the
invisibility of women’s labor “the pastoralization of housework.” By the 1820s
and 1830s, economic life and labor were “spherized” such that women’s labor was
ideologically separated from the “productive” labor of men. This notion was
cemented in Americans’ imagination although housework was physically taxing,
time-consuming, and supported family life and the emerging capitalist economy.
Example: Labor
activists frequently invoked the rhetoric of the ideology of spheres and
specifically pastoral images of the household to imply a sharp contrast between
the cruel system of the factor which exhausts the mechanic and his physical and
mental powers and the presumably rejuvenating powers of the home.
See also: Charles Sellers, Christopher Clark, James Henretta, Stuart Blumin