Home and Work

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 The image of the colonial goodwife valued for her contribution to household prosperity had been replaced by the image of a dependent and a non-producer.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