Title: Home & Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic
Author: Jeanne Boydston
Year of Publication: 1990
Thesis:
Argues that unpaid women's labor proved critical to the northeastern U.S. industrial development. In so doing, she critiques a Marxist framework (along with others before her) that only appears to value wage labor as a negotiation in the "work" sphere. Women's unpaid labor then must be considered inside the capitalist framework, and therefore a reorganizing of gender as well as labor relations happens hand-in-hand. In fact, she argues that "the growing social invisibility of labor women performed for their own families made housework in many ways the prototype for the restructuring of the social relations of labor under conditions of early industrialization." (xi-xix, xx)
Time: Early American period
Geography:
Organization:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
- Introduces the idea of the title, where "home" and "work" were considered two separate things & how it erased women's work (ix,x)
- Points to Blackwell - she shows how housework is unpaid labor. (x)
- This demonstrates the prioritizing of wage labor 9x)
- Cites Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution - between Civ. War & Depresssion, women seeing housework as "core mechanism of gender inequality." (xi)
- Shift is from the "Colonial goodwife" to the dependent (xi)
- Draws on Wally Seccombe (1974), who showed that women's unpaid labor actually figured into capitalist wages (which would bring the wage much lower) (xiii)
- Domestic/public is an ideological separation (draws on Michele Rosaldo as well as Linda Kerber) (xiv, xv)
- So, by removing "production" from the home, it appears that there is a shift, even though women are still working in the home. (xv)
- Also finds error in the argument that the home went from work to management
- Defensiveness of men in labor force more likely as an explanation for women being pushed out than an overarching capitalist framework (xix) <-- I guess if we think about slavery and capitalism as intertwined, and gender (especially as white m/c women are mostly concerned in this pody of literature) and capitalism as intertwined, this is another way of marginalizing within and without groups to produce the labor surplus and reproduce the inequality capitalism requires in order to function. (xix)
I. An "AEconomical Society"
- On how changes in social life undermined the perception of value in women's labor.
- Colonial life idealized by scholars and said to worsen as the world industrialized (1-2).
- "most historians now consider it unlikely that self-sufficiency ever characterized colonial settlement. Merchant capital was the driving force behind the European colonization of North America, and most European settlers arrived in North America with robust commercial aspirations." (this contests the "golden-age" theory (2)
- finds that neither economic status determines political and social status, nor the inverse." (5) Not a fan of Bourdieu, then?
- Concept of a wife as "profit" (6)
- Ministers showing women's value as contributing emotional support vs. producing (8-9)
- Attitudes change, but the work does not (11)
- Women also compelled to act as surrogate men in absence of husbands when need arose (14)
- Class, of course, affects type of work, type of surrogacy (17)
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II. "A New Source of Profit and Support"
(1776-1812)
- Market relations are developing quickly (xix)
III. How Strangely Metamorphosed"
- Narrates the development of market relations (xix)
IV. "All the In-doors Work"
(4,5,6 describe the shift in antebellum labor in the home & its significance) (xx)
V. "The True Economy of Housekeeping"
VI. The Political Economy of Housework
(6,7 - "ideological history of housework")
VII. The Pastoralization of Housework
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Type:
Methods:
Research Questions:
- What were the objective characteristics and material value of housework at various times as the United States Moved toward and through the process of early industrialization; and how did the gender culture of America before the Civil War affect the perception of the characteristics and material value of housework? (xix)
Sources:
Historiography:
- Takes Dolores Hayden's The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981) and pushes it back into Early America.
- Faye E. Dudden's Serving Women (1983)
- Ulrich - social organization vs. economic necessity much more important to look at in charting Colonial vs. post-Rev. period (3)
Norton - perception of housework declining prior to industrialization (3)
Keywords:
Themes:
Critiques:
Black women are negotiating for wages IN households.
Questions:
Quotes:
"Metaphor too easily serves as description, obscuring 'more complex questions about the social relations of the sexess,' and vieling the possibility that 'the language of separate spheres itself is a rhetorical construction which responded to changing social and economic reality.'" (xv)
Notes:
- Reminder to look more closely at the end of coverture laws (1840s-1880s, state by state)
- See Gayle Rubin - "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex"
- I'm beginning to think the shift being described in much of this literature is focused on upper-class women who can afford to hire servants and attend to the emotional needs of the family.