Home and work
Subtitle: housework, wages, and the ideology of labor in the early republic
By: Jeanne Boydston.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1990
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 222
Subjects: Housewives -- United States -- History; Wages -- Housewives -- United States -- History; Home economics -- United States -- History; United States -- Economic conditions -- To 1865
Description: Over the course of a two hundred year period, women's domestic labor gradually lost its footing as a recognized aspect of economic life in America. The image of the colonial "goodwife," valued for her contribution to household prosperity, had been replaced by the image of a "dependent" and a "non-producer." This book is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. More particularly, it is a history of women's unpaid domestic labor in the context of the emergence of an industrialized society in the northern United States. Boydston argues that just as a capitalist economic order had first to teach that wages were the measure of a man's worth, it had at the same time, implicitly or explicitly, to teach that those who did not draw wages were dependent and not essential to the "real economy." Developing a striking account of the gender and labor systems that characterized industrializing America, Boydston explains how this effected the devaluation of women's unpaid labor.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-215) and index.