Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic

by Jeanne Boydston

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 The image of the colonial goodwife, valued for her contribution to household prosperity, had been replaced by the image of a dependent and a non-producer.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.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Read For School, Labor

248 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 1990

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, Jeanne Boydston challenged traditional, largely Marxist, assumptions about the value of women’s contribution to the labor market in the development of capitalism in the United States. This book has become a classic of sorts, although for me it isn’t so groundbreaking as to qualify for five stars. She provides a great deal of evidence for the economic significance of women’s work, as well as demonstrating the changing definition of women’s role in the household over time. She finds, for example, that the middle-class Victorian “housewife” was a model which restricted women’s activities far more than earlier image of a woman as a partner in running a working farm. She provides many examples from diaries and other records of women running the “economy” of the household and managing money from a time when it was generally understood that they did not “own” the property of their husbands. A solid introduction outlines her key questions, methodologies, and the historiography of her subject to that time, and detailed footnotes demonstrate the source material and highlight specifics of her argument.

Boydston’s work may seem somewhat dated today, for those familiar with the area. For example, she spends a good deal of time grappling with the concept of the “separate spheres” of men and women and the usefulness (or not) of that model for feminist history. Today, the “spheres” argument is largely discounted as having reproduced the ideology, but not the reality, of the time period it described. Nevertheless, this remains a good introductory text for those interested in women’s history, and offers a useful insight into the early days of gender in history for those with greater background in current discourse.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is such a complicated subject! We still deal with the issues here. Is housework of value and domestic labor vital and important and equal and so women should delight in it and be valued or even compensated for it? Or is it a necessary drudgery that should be shared among all people and/or professionalized and compensated well for as much as possible? Or something else?

This books outlines the history of housework from the early Europeans in the Northeast of what is now the US up till just before the Civil War. And it shows how gender ideas went into who should do what in the house. Roughly, if I understood it correctly, housework goes from being part of the domestic economy in the 16th and 17th century with women’s work being valued and needed to something else under industrialization. As cash became more important and associated with men’s work, housework became both more hidden (women not being seen to work so often and many people including themselves thinking they weren’t really “laboring”). And men did much less of it.

The author shows how financially valuable all the domestic work was, but how it got left out of “labor” even tho it had a cash value. And women were increasingly in the nineteenth century seen as needing to effortlessly have a complex meal and keep a home even tho it was really really hard work and people then and now just often don’t see how super hard physically it all was, and unrelenting.

This book pairs really well with Chasing Dirt.

[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book would be near the top of my list of the history texts that have most influenced my own views.

[Andee Nero · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know that I've ever seen a history writer do so much with 150 pages. I'm surprised I didn't read it earlier.

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent work of social history. The introduction alone is a very helpful description of the state of the conversation about the role of housework in industrialization up to the point of publication.

[Evan Ash]

Solidly short yet informative ~160 pages of why women, in historical context, be shopping.

[Shaun Nicholls · Rating 2 out of 5]

So far… super boring. This reads like a list. A very long boring list. And it repeats itself a lot. It seems of the books I’ve read this summer the ones that I knew going in, or found when I started reading that clearly had an ‘agenda’ sadly bore the heck out of me. They have a point and after every 5 pages it’s just restated over and over and over. It’s not that the ‘agenda’ may not be true, it’s just that the author is so laser focused on it, it’s missing the forest, the forest is the story. Please, for the love, tell the story! We are not that stupid that we can’t see the ‘tree’ in the forest.
With that being said, it’s two stars so far because some of the ‘list” in the book IS interesting what were these women doing, just the day to day stuff that we do t hear about. I love hearing what a house was like in early American history. How much did a candle cost? Or sewing needles? That’s neat.

Will I be able to get through the ‘tree’ to hear more of these interesting facts? I honestly have NO IDEA! I’m so far glad I have about 5 others books when I just can’t on this one..

[Dean Oken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Incredibly interesting, but a deep and tedious read for my US Women’s History class.

[Yumna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great introduction to care labor and domestic work in Early America.