Home and Work

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 HOME
AND
WORK
Housework, Wages, and the Ideology
of Labor in the Early Republic

JEANNE BOYDSTON

Oxford University Press

New York Oxford
 Oxford University Press
Oxford New York Toronto
Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi
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Copyright © 1990 by Jeanne Boydston

| First published by Oxford University Press, Inc.,

198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4314

First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1994

Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Boydston, Jeanne.
Home and work : housework, wages, and the ideology
of labor in the early republic / Jeanne Boydston.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-506009-6 (cloth); ISBN 978-0-19-508561-7 (pbk.)
1. Housewives—United States—History.
2. Wages—Housewives—United States—History.
3. Home economics—United States—History.
4. United States—Economic conditions—To 1865.
I. Title. HD6073.H842U625 1990
331.4'8164046'0973—dc20 90-31349
 Acknowledgments

Perhaps no book belongs to a single author. Certainly this one does

not.
In a period in which external funding for research has grown more
and more difficult to obtain, I have been fortunate to receive generous
financial support for this project. I would like to thank the Danforth
Foundation, the Giles Whiting Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Na-
tional Fellowship Foundation, the Rutgers University Research Council,
and the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin—Madison. I am
especially grateful to the American Association of University Women—
not only for the fellowship that supported me through part of graduate
school, but for its continuing commitment to the education of women.
Historians generally get the credit for research that is made possible
only by the painstaking efforts of superb archivists. Therefore, I would
like to acknowledge my very considerable debt to the librarians of the
following institutions: the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
and the Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; the New York
Historical Society; the New York Public Library; the Arthur and Eliz-
abeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Rad-
cliffe College; the Sophia Smith Collection Archives, Smith College;
and the Stowe-Day Foundation.
Over the decade in which I have been working on this book, it has
become, in many ways, the intellectual property of an entire community.
vi Acknowledgments
I am especially happy, then, to acknowledge the individuals to whom
this book ‘‘belongs.”’ Carol F. Karlsen first suggested that I look for the
meaning of women’s experiences in the history of their labor—starting
me on a journey that continues beyond this single volume. She and
many others have encouraged me along the way. Nancy F. Cott and
David Montgomery helped guide my research through its early stages
as a dissertation. From beginning to end—and at critical times in the
middle—Elizabeth Blackmar provided the steady strength of her own
faith in the project. Lori Ginzberg and I have been doing joint combat
with the demon of the ‘separate spheres’’ for so long that I find it difficult
to name all of her contributions to the final product. To her, and to
Mary Kelley, whose daily generosity of spirit embodies feminist schol-
arship at its very best, I am indebted for the dual pleasures of a rich
friendship and a sustaining intellectual exchange. Linda Kerber, Gerda
Lerner, Judith McGaw, Phil Scranton, Steve Stern, and Cindy True-
love—all of whom offered valuable critiques of my argument as it
lurched through its various stages of development—demonstrate that
the community of scholars ts alive and well. I would also like to thank
the members of the Columbia Seminar on the History of the Working
Class for their comments on some aspects of the analysis in its early
form, and Gail Cooper for her aid in bringing clarity to the final man-
uscript. In their unflagging love and patience, as well as in their own
respect for the labor that is the subject of this study, Manuel Ayala,
Kirsten Harvey, Todd Harvey, Brooke Karlsen, and Joel Steiker have
immeasurably enriched both my work and my life. To Joy P. Newmann
I owe special appreciation—for the model of her own scholarly work,
for the care with which she has read and commented on mine, and for
her priceless gifts of laughter and encouragement.
I have benefited particularly from the skilled assistance of Maureen
Fitzgerald, Terry Flemming-Murphy, Kathryn Tomasek, and Kathleen
Waters; but I would like to acknowledge the contributions of a wider
community of students—at Yale, at Rutgers—Camden, and at the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin—Madison—in nourishing my understanding, not
only of women’s history, but of what research and teaching are all about.

April 1990 J.B.

Madison, Wisconsin
 Contents

Introduction, ix

I
An ‘Economical Society”’, |
II
‘A New Source of Profit and Support’’, 30
te |
‘‘How Strangely Metamorphosed”’, 56
IV
‘*All the In-doors Work"’, 75

V
‘The True Economy of Housekeeping”, 99
VI
The Political Economy of Housework, 120
VII
The Pastoralization of Housework, 142
Notes, 164

Bibliography, 197
Index, 217
Blank Page
 Introduction

Writing in the first issue of The Woman's Advocate in January 1869,

Antoinette Brown Blackwell speculated on the challenges faced by
America in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Her theme was the
theme of many writers in the post—Civil War era—the rebuilding of the
nation. As a dedicated woman’s rights activist, Blackwell was particu-
larly interested in the civil and political needs of women. What was
extraordinary about her reflections, however, even in the context of the
woman’s rights movement, was that at the head of her agenda was the
problem of housework:
The good, faithful mother is not an idler, and though she may not be
herself 4 money-maker, yet as partner in the matrimonial firm, she is
justly fully entitled to an equal share in all profits. The theory that a wife
who thus bears her fair share of their joint burdens is yet ‘‘supported"’ by
her husband, has been the bane of all society. It has made women feel
that it is their right to be dependents and non-producers; and it has fostered
man’s conceit of his own independent sovereignty. '

She offered these comments under the title ‘Industrial Reconstruction.”

For most Americans, the matter of housework simply did not figure
in the debate over the shape of the postwar American reconstruction—
industrial or otherwise. The home, after all, was presumably the an-
tithesis of the economic world—an almost sacred refuge from the ravages
X Introduction
of early industrialization and the last resort of all those qualities of
human life that were ground down by the heel of competitive materi-
alism. Indeed, the separation of ‘‘private”’ and “public” life—of ‘thome”’
and ‘‘work’’—had become over the course of the antebellum period one
of the most cherished truisms of American culture. The proposition that
‘industrial reconstruction” might include the reorganization of family
life would have struck most observers as flagrant, and perhaps danger-
ous, nonsense.
In some respects, Blackwell’s comments were atypical even among
woman’s rights activists. Certainly, in her attention to the economic
vulnerability of women in marriage, Blackwell was echoing a concern
that had characterized women’s rights agitation since its inception.
Among the “‘usurpations on the part of man toward woman” cited in
the Seneca Falls manifesto of 1848 had been the protest that, in marriage,
‘‘fhje has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she
earns.”’ The complaint was repeated in the Memorial presented to the
1850 convention in Salem, Ohio, which objected that ‘‘[a]ll that she has,
becomes legally his, and he can collect and dispose of the profits of her
labor without her consent, as he sees fit, and she can own nothing, have
nothing, which is not regarded by the law as belonging to the husband.”
Speaking the following year at a woman’s rights convention in Worces-
ter, Massachusetts, Lucy Stone gave these sentiments their most pointed
expression. She observed that ‘‘[i]n the household [woman] is either a
ceaseless drudge, or a blank.’
Yet Blackwell’s objections to the economic organization of family life
and to the general invisibility of women’s contribution to “the matri-
monial firm” also signalled a departure from these earlier analyses of
the economic vulnerability of women in marriage. They had tended to
center on women’s rights to their own wages and to separate property,
either brought into the marriage or accumulated through wages. By
inserting housework into the discussion, however, Blackwell was sig-
nificantly broadening the terms of the debate. In linking the economic
vulnerability of wives specifically to the unwaged character of house-
work, she pointed to the enormous importance that wages had assumed
in determining the status of different forms of work in America, and to
the implications of that development for workers whose labor remained
outside of the wage standard.
For the historian, Blackwell’s comments raise as many questions as
they answer: Was a wife in mid—nineteenth-century America a full eco-
nomic partner in ‘the matrimonial firm’’—or was she, in fact, ‘‘sup-
ported” by her husband? What were the origins of “‘the theory” that
 Introduction xi
wives were ‘dependents’? Who believed it? And what did the emer-
gence of such a “‘theory” have to do with the problems of industriali-
zation? How did wives themselves experience their work? What are we
to make of Blackwell's own apparent ambivalence—her contradictory
assertions that wives do bear their ‘fair share” of labor within the
household and yet that they expect to be ‘“‘non-producers’’?
Antoinette Brown Blackwell was not the only feminist thinker in the
post—Civil War ear to take up such questions. As Dolores Hayden has
documented in her study The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981), be-
tween the Civil War and the Depression a growing number of women
perceived housework, and especially its social invisibility in an indus-
trialized society, as a core mechanism of gender inequality. Further-
more, they identified *‘a complete transformation of the spatial design
and material culture of American homes, neighborhoods, and cities”’ as
the central agenda of feminism.”
Hayden's study begins at the Civil War, but, as she recognizes, the
transformations that would bring the problem of housework front and
center among feminists originated earlier, in the gradual emergence in
the United States of an industrial economy. Over the course of a two-
hundred-year period, women’s domestic labor had 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 pros-
perity, had been replaced by the image of the wife and mother as a
‘‘dependent”’ and a ‘“‘non-producer,”’ as Blackwell so aptly put it. With
the departure of any general social acknowledgement of her material
value to the family had gone the traditional basis of a wife’s claim to
some voice in the distribution of economic resources and to social status
as a “‘productive’’ member of society. To be sure, new grounds for such
claims had emerged,’ but increasingly over the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries they rested on notions of women’s nurturant ca-
pacities as a mother—a category that seemed to set her outside of the
main arena of action of nineteenth-century America: the struggle for
economic power. Stone had not been far off. In industrial America, the
housewife seemed to be ‘‘a blank.”

The study that follows 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 as a central force in the emergence of an indus-
trialized society in the northeastern United States. My interest in the
subject originated in my perception that, although women’s domestic
labor had certainly changed between the founding of the colonies and
xi Introduction
the early years of the republic, antebellum housewives were not only
working, but were working very hard indeed, and that their labors were
contributing in substantial ways to the survival and material prosperity
of their households. At the same time, it seemed clear to me that the
society these women live in—and, in many respects, the women them-
selves—had come to doubt, even to deny, the economic value of their
labors, perceiving as Blackwell suggests that the “support” of the family
came entirely from wages, and especially from the wages of the husband.
Clarifying both the nature of the changes that had occurred and the
origins of the paradoxical status of housework in the antebellum period
seemed to me essential to understanding the intimate relationship be-
tween the gender and labor systems that characterized industrializing
America. That relationship is the real subject of this study.
It is also the subject of a discussion that has resurfaced periodically
since the early days of the contemporary women’s movement—largely
in the form of a debate (at times a virtual battle royal) over the adequacy
of traditional Marxist frameworks for analyzing the role of the family,
and specifically the role of unpaid labor within the family, in the rise of
industrial capitalism.
Marx described capitalism as an economic system directed to the
creation—not of subsistence. or additional goods, or even simply of
wealth—but of wealth to produce more wealth, to produce more wealth,
ad infinitum. That is to say, he identified the product of capitalism as
the reproduction of capital itself. Thus, for Marx, the critical charac-
teristic of capitalism was in the way capitalists produce new capital (the
capitalist “‘mode of production”), which he found to be a distinctive
organization of labor. First, workers are deprived of control of the tools
necessary to make goods that might be exchanged for the essentials of
survival. Rather than by exchanging goods they have made themselves,
they are forced to secure their subsistence by exchanging their labor
power (now expended on someone else’s tools) for cash to purchase
what they need. Thus, labor itself is bought and sold and becomes a
commodity. Second, the owners of the means of production bring the
workers together in large-scale labor units, where their individual work
can be specialized and their total output increased. Finally, because
workers now have no other options for survival, they are forced to accept
remuneration for their labor according to a wage system that is based,
not on the value of what their labor power has created, but on the
(lower) cost of keeping the labor force alive. In this way, the capitalist
is able to retain a portion of the value actually created by the workers.
Converted from goods into money, this ‘“‘surplus value’’ becomes avail-
 Introduction xii
able for reconversion as new capital. Industrial capitalism ts simply a
specific instance of this model, one in which the mode of production
includes the use of machinery as well as collectivization and a wage
system.
Marx himself discussed the position of unpaid labor in this analysis
only fragmentarily, and most scholars who have relied on his framework
have concluded that unpaid domestic labor exists outside of the capitalist
mode of production. That is, since it is unwaged, housework by defi-
nition does not enter into the wage-for-labor power exchange that is
characteristic of the process of producing new capital. Where housework
has been useful to industrial capitalism, according to this analysis, is in
the reproduction of conditions necessary for the creation of capital—
primarily, in keeping the paid labor force alive and tractable from day
to day, year to year, and generation to generation.
But if this has been the orthodox view, it has not been without its
challengers. From very early on in the contemporary women’s move-
ment, feminists like Juliet Mitchell, Selma James, and Mariarosa Dalla
Costa insisted that the traditional analysis did not address the gender
dynamics that inform the operation of economic systems. As early as
1969, Margaret Benston noted the complex relationship of gender and
labor under capitalism, where a specific labor form (housework) seems
to define the group ‘‘women’’—‘‘women” being the “‘special category”
of workers with exclusive structural responsibility for the activities that
do not enter the cash marketplace.”
In 1974, Wally Seccombe offered his highly controversial revision of
the Marxist analysis. Rejecting the contention that housework has no
formal value, Seccombe argued that the housewife produces the labor
power of the wage earner, and that the wage therefore represents, in
part, her labor. It was precisely in its unwaged character that Seccombe
found the importance of housework to capitalism: the invisibility of
domestic labor, he claimed, is a “structural pre-requisite” to the mys-
tification of the wage that is necessary to the creation of surplus value.°
Seccombe’s analysis came under immediate attack. While Margaret
Coulson, Branka Magas, and Hilary Wainwright contended that “value”
was a meaningless term in the absence of a direct market exchange,
Jean Gardiner raised the problem of measuring the value of domestic
labor. She took particular issue with Seccombe’s assumption that ‘“‘the
value of the wife’s services is equal to the value she receives from her
husband’s wage packet.’’ As Gardiner pointed out, this correspondence
implies “that the economic relationship between husband and wife is
XIV Introduction
one of equal exchange,’’ and thus obscures “‘the power relations within
the family.’”’
In her now-classic article ““The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Po-
litical Economy of Sex,”” Gayle Rubin melded these strains of analysis
into a powerful statement of the limitations of traditional Marxist theory
for the study of women. Rubin herself found comparatively unimportant
the discussion of whether or not housework was, strictly speaking, ‘“‘pro-
ductive.’’ She argued: “Housework may not be ‘productive,’ in the sense
of directly producing surplus value and capital, and yet be a crucial
element in the production of surplus value and capital.’’ She criticized
Marx for his failure to account adequately for the ‘“‘historical and moral
element” in a society’s determination of the value of labor—an element,
she rightly pointed out, that Marx recognized but left largely ‘‘unex-
amined.” As a result, his analysis ignored the “long tradition . . . of forms
of masculinity and femininity” capitalism was heir to from the begin-
ning—ignored, indeed, ‘“The entire domain of sex, sexuality, and sex
oppression” embedded in the processes of capitalism."
Among the gender systems embedded in the operation of industrial
capitalism has been the tendency to conceive of the world as divided
into two sex-linked spheres, sometimes described as a dichotomy be-
tween “‘private” and “public,” sometimes between “leisure” and “‘la-
bor,”’ and sometimes between “home” and “work.” Too often, as
Michele Rosaldo argued some years ago, scholars have accepted these
dichotomies as accurate reflections of the material organization of so-
ciety. In her own review of the anthropological evidence concerning the
existence and nature of opposed-sphere dichotomies, Rosaldo discov-
ered that ‘“‘domestic/public constitutes an ideological rather than objec-
tive and necessary set of terms.’’ Unexamined for its ideological content,
she noted, ‘“‘a model based upon the opposition of two spheres merely
reflects the prevailing gender belief system; its assummes—where it should
rather help to illuminate and explain—too much about how gender really
works.”’ In words reminiscent of critiques of the traditional Marxist
approach, she concluded: “It now appears to me that woman’s place in
human social life is not in any direct sense a product of the things she
does (or even less a function of what, biologically, she is) but of the
meaning her activities acquire through concrete social interactions.”
More recently, historian Linda K. Kerber has echoed these criticisms.
As Kerber notes, the model of ‘“‘male”’ and “female” (or “‘public” and
‘“‘private’’) spheres has been extremely useful to American women’s
historians, initially providing a way of conceptualizing the limitations
 Introduction XV
placed on women in society, and later permitting the exploration of a
richly textured separate female culture. But, because it is essentially
metaphorical, the model of opposed spheres has also remained *‘vul-
nerable to sloppy use."’ Metaphor too easily serves as description, ob-
scuring ‘““more complex questions about the social relations of the sexes,”
and veiling the possibility that “the language of separate spheres itself
is a rhetorical construction which responded to changing social and
economic reality.”""”
These criticisms may be usefully focused on Marx’s analysis of capi-
talism, and particularly on his comparative inattention to the role of
unpaid domestic labor in the process of capitalist production. The dis-
tinction Marx drew between ‘“‘productive’ and “reproductive” labor
closely mirrored the divided-sphere gender ideology of the world he
wrote in—a world that found considerable solace in the belief that the
values and behaviors of the home had escaped economic contamination.
In her examination of the paradigm of spheres, Kerber notes that the
criticisms of the opposed-sphere model have been growing among wom-
en’s historians for the last decade. Little of this discussion has yet found
its way into evaluations of the history of housework, however. Indeed,
historians have tended to simply concur with the nineteenth-century
conclusion that industrial capitalism removes economic production from
the household and relocates it in large-scale, profit-directed factories.
The chief historical effect of industrial capitalism on housework has thus
been to exclude it from the economy.
Prior to industrialization, according to this view, material life was
fully integrated in the individual household; production, distribution
(both internally and between and among families), and reproduction
(not merely bearing children, but the larger project of surviving from
one generation to the next) constituted a single, largely undifferentiated
process. Presumably, industrialization fractured that unity. By removing
production from the household, it created a society of two almost polar-
opposite zones: one (the workplace) economic in nature and focused
on production, the other (the home) noneconomic in nature and focused
on reproduction. Housework was the labor of the latter zone.
Either explicitly or by implication, most analyses of the history of
housework go a bit farther. Not only was domestic labor structurally
and generically excluded from the economy, but its new sphere was a
shrunken relic of its preindustrial past. Since the growth of cash markets
required a society geared to purchasing rather than to home manufac-
turing, and since, in any event, few families in an “industrial” society
xvi Introduction
are able to control all of the resources necessary to be self-sufficient, a
sizeable chunk of the labor formerly undertaken by wives presumably
vanished from the household: increasingly, bread came from bakers,
yarn from textile mills, and eggs, cheese, and butter (foodstuffs the
colonial goodwife had been responsible for) from specialized producers.
According to this view, even women’s childbearing and child-rearing
duties underwent a marked transformation. Mothers might dote on their
children, but there were fewer children, and raising them involved little
occupational training in the home. Especially in bourgeois families,
where goods and services could be easily purchased, housework became
a largely managerial function. Indeed, the wife’s freedom from actual
labor became a badge of class status.
This version of the industrial transformations of housework has
emerged more by deduction than by direct examination—a deficiency
in the research which women’s historians have begun to redress only in
the last decade. During that time, various monographs not specifically
on the history of housework have nonetheless brought new attention to
the roles of women in the household, and to the importance of those
roles to the Jarger social and economic history of the United States.
Examining the history of paid domestic service in pre—Civil War Amer-
ica, Faye E. Dudden’s Serving Women (1983) identified changes in the
relationships of mistresses and “‘helps”’ that are strongly reminiscent of
the growing tensions between ‘“‘bosses’’ and ‘“‘workers’’ outside the
household during the same period. Both Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s Good
Wives (1982) and Joan M. Jensen’s Loosening the Bonds (1986) helped
to restore to the historical record a more detailed understanding both
of the daily labor of housewives in colonial and pre—Civil War America
and of the importance of that labor in the larger social and economic
systems of the community. Jensen’s work, in particular, offered an im-
portant challenge to the belief that household production vanished with
the advent of early industrialization.''
During the same period, at least four full-length studies specifically
of the history of housework under conditions of industrialization have
appeared: Susan Strasser’s Never Done (1982), Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s
More Work for Mother (1983), Annegret S. Ogden’s The Great American
Housewife (1986), and Glenna Mathews’ “Just a Housewife’’ (1987). As
their titles suggest, each of these works has been essentially iconoclastic,
calling in some way for a reevaluation of traditional views of women’s
unpaid labor in the home. Moreover, each has closely associated changes
in the experience of housework with the rise of industrial capitalism—
 Introduction xvii
the first two books analyzing the technological history of housework,
the latter two focusing primarily on changing images of the housewife
in American culture."
Of these recent studies of the history of housework, however, only
Cowan has proposed a fundamental revision of the traditional view of
the impact of industrialization on housework. Specifically, she con-
tended that “‘industrialization occurred just as rapidly within our homes
as outside of them.’’ Noting the attraction of the popular imagination
to a vision of the home as an ideal retreat from industrialization, Cowan
argued that although “there are three significant senses in which house-
work differs from market work (in being—most commonly—unpaid
labor, performed in isolated workplaces, by unspecialized workers),”’
there are also “‘three significant senses in which the two work forms
resemble each other (in utilizing nonhuman—or nonanimal—energy
sources, which create dependency on a network of social and economic
institutions and are accompanied by alienation from the tools that make
the labor possible).*’ Viewed from this perspective, she suggested, house-
work ts more precisely understood, not as nonindustrialized labor, but
as labor that has been “incompletely industrialized or. . . industrialized
in a somewhat different manner” than market work. Cowan’s caution
against accepting the popular image of the home as a realm distinct
from the realm of work echoes a growing rejection among women’s
historians of two-sphere analyses of social life."

In the study that follows, I have attempted to retain what is useful in

the traditional Marxist framework and to incorporate the insights and
conclusions of recent studies in the history of gender. Although Marx
did not consider unpaid domestic labor a part of the capitalist mode of
production, his discussion of the process through which surplus is created
did not necessarily exclude it. Marx analyzed the wage as a specific type
of what he called the capitalist ‘‘price-form’”’; the wage being the price
of labor power sold as a commodity. Marx argued that prices are mis-
leading under capitalism: seeming to express an objective economic
value, they in fact express “social custom”’ and the historic and contem-
porary “social relation’ prevailing among members of a society. As
Marx noted, the result of this ‘‘qualitative contradiction” in the capitalist
price-form is that “‘price ceases altogether to express value. ... Hence
a thing can, formally speaking, have a price without having a value.”
As an instance of the price-form, the wage also suffers from this
‘‘qualitative contradiction.”’ That ts to say, the wage presents itself as a
 Xvill Introduction
mathematically fair gauge of the “magnitude of value”’ created in a given
amount of labor, when what it actually measures is an historic and
current social relationship between employer and employee—usually,
the minimum that a capitalist can pay without endangering the survival
of his labor force. Thus, a particular labor form can, in a formal sense,
have a wage without having a value.
- What Marx did not consider—but what follows logically from his
discussion of the contradictory nature of the price-form—is that a thing
can also, formally speaking, have a value without having a price; or, to
put it another way, a labor form can also have a value without having
a wage. The possibility exists both in the nonobjective nature of the
wage, and (especially) in the historic character of the capitalist wage
system. Wages, understood simply as payment for labor in money, long
predated industrial capitalism. It was only with the emergence of a wage
system—that is, the widespread acceptance of money as a fair measure
of the value of labor—that labor power itself could become a commodity.
That system developed on the foundations of earlier, preindustrial social
and economic organizations and reflected their relations. Among the
historic relations that structured the nature of the capitalist wage system
was gender. As evaluation of the role of unpaid domestic labor under
conditions of industrial capitalistism must begin, then, with this distinc-
tion between the socially created relations of gender and the objective
characteristics of labor.
It is not a simple or easy distinction to draw. As a number of scholars
have pointed out, in virtually every recorded human society, gender has
functioned as a central category through which experience is mediated.
Conceptions of gender permeate social life, and symbols of gender both
delineate and depict primary relations of power, purity, and status."
Nonetheless do they shape our perception of what constitutes work, of
who is working, and of the value of that labor."
This point has been underscored by recent anthropological and so-
ciological research, which indicates that the social status of women’s
labor is seldom a direct reflection of the actual subsistence worth of that
labor. Studies of various nonindustrial societies—ranging from the Ir-
oquois of early America to the ;Kung of contemporary southwest Af-
rica—have suggested that the status of women as laborers is less a
function of the subsistence value they create than it is of their ability to
control the products of that work. And that ability appears to be closely
linked to gender, especially as expressed in the operation of kinship
groups. So long as the kin group is organized, both literally and sym-
 Introduction XIX
bolically, in a way that acknowledges women’s claims to the products
of their labor, women appear to be able to maintain visibility as
workers.”
The implication of these findings is that it may be less the advent of
commodity production per se, as the Marxist analysis would suggest,
than the advent of commodity production in conjunction with a parallel
process of the reorganization of gender, that makes domestic workers
seem marginal to the economy. Conceiving of the issue in this way does
not utterly dissociate material life from belief systems. A copious lit-
erature has now demonstrated the complex dialectical relationship be-
tween these two, particularly under conditions of industrial capitalism.
As early as 1976, Heidi Hartmann pointed to the pervasive influence of
gender systems in structuring the early industrial paid-labor market.
Hartmann argued that it was not only, perhaps not even primarily, the
actions of employers that resulted in the weak position of women in the
paid-labor force, but more importantly the actions of male workers and
husbands, who considered their prerogatives as men to be at stake.
Drawing an analytical distinction between the organization of produc-
tion and the organization of gender, as Hartmann and others suggest,
may enable us to sort out more clearly the dynamics of the marginali-
zation of women as workers. In the case of the present study, it may
permit us to observe the process through which housework came to be
perceived as removed from social production."
In what follows, I have attempted to keep two questions in the fore-
front of analysis: 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? In examining
the latter issue, I have focused particularly on gender patterns in the
household and on their impact on the larger social claim women were
able to stake to the products of their own labor. Because industrialization
came earliest to the northeastern United States, my focus is on that
region, stretching from New York northward and eastward through New
England.
In Chapter I, I examined the conditions in the early British and Dutch
colonies in North America that gave rise to a recognition of the economic
importance of women's domestic labor, and trace the changes in social
life that had undercut that visibility by the middle of the eighteenth
century. Chapter I] focuses on the years between the Revolution and
the War of 1812—the decades when the states of the Northeast began
XX Introduction
to lurch toward more fully realized regional market relations. Chapter
III provides an overview of that transition, examining especially the
changing work and ideological roles of men. Chapters IV, V, and VI
provide a detailed analysis of antebellum housework: what it consisted
of, how it was changing, and its importance in the emergence of an
industrial economy. In Chapter VII, I explore the ideological history of
housework over this same period, arguing that the growing social in-
visibility of labor women performed for their own families made house-
work in many ways the prototype for the restructuring of the social
relations of labor under conditions of early industrialization.
Home and Work
Blank Page
 Chapter I
An “‘Cé&conomical Society”

The colonial household has long held a revered place in American his-
tory. Both in the scholarly literature and in the popular imagination, it
has served as the touchstone of a simpler and somehow more straight-
forward way of life—an America before industrialization, cities, and
frantic job schedules; where work and leisure alternated in easy rhythms,
and where the struggle for survival was made agreeable by an ethos of
family cooperation. The mother at her spinning wheel, children scat-
tering feed to the chickens, a daughter carrying kindling to the hearth
in preparation for a day’s baking, the father with his older sons in the
fields, girdling trees, plowing the land, or mending a fallen fence—the
sense of harmony and shared enterprise of this vision of the colonial
family has remained compelling for Americans across a span of almost
three hundred years.
In its early years, the field of women’s history both reflected and
reinforced this celebration of preindustrial America. Much of the schol-
arship of the 1960s and 1970s focused on the problem of the origins and
implications of the nineteenth-century “‘cult of true womanhood,” a set
of ideological conventions that narrowly associated women with the
household and with political subordination and economic dependence.
Identifying the emergence of this domestic female ideal with the rise of
industrialization, women’s historians concluded that the status of nine-
teenth-century women represented a decline from the status of women
|
2 HOME AND WORK
in the colonial era. They explained this shift tin terms of the later dis-
appearance of the colonial household. In the earlier period, they theo-
rized, the family- and subsistence-based organization of material life had
rendered women’s household labor essential to survival. With economic
significance had come social significance. “‘In family production,’ one
analysis suggested, ‘‘each member contributed work of equal importance
to the group’s survival. ... Under such conditions... the woman's re-
productive work, as well as her productive work, was valued.” But
those conditions had presumably vanished with the advent of early in-
dustrialization. The rise of commercial markets and manufacturing in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had spelled the end
of the corporate colonial household. With the removal of productive
labor from the family to the factory, historians argued, women lost the
basis for earlier claims to economic and social standing. In the demise
of the self-sufficient household lay the decline of women’s status.
Although no one has challenged the economic importance of colonial
women’s labor, a substantial body of recent work has called into question
these earlier attempts to presume a high social status for women based
on the role of their labor in the “self-sufficient” colonial household. In
the wake of a decade-long debate over the nature of the American
transition to industrialization, 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. Even had they wanted to maintain self-
sufficiency, few families had the resources to survive apart from the
dense webs of trading, bartering, buying, and selling that characterized
colonial American communities.’
Women’s historians in particular have abated their enthusiasm for the
colonial past. In an early essay disputing the “golden age”’ theory, Mary
Beth Norton drew on anthropological studies from around the world to
observe that “the mere fact that a woman’s economic contribution to
the household is significant 1s not sufficient to give her a voice in matters
that might otherwise be deemed to fall within the masculine sphere.”
Norton returned to the subject in her subsequent full-length study of
women in the eighteenth century, arguing:
Modern historians can accurately point to the essential economic function
of women within a colonial household, but the facts evident from hindsight
bear little relationship to eighteenth-century subjective attitudes. In spite
of the paeans to notable womanhood, the role of the household mistress
in the family’s welfare was understood only on the most basic level.
 An “(Economical Society”’ 3
Norton concluded that “[s]uch minimal recognition did not translate
itself into an awareness that women contributed to the wider society.””
Norton’s opening salvo against the “golden age” theory was seconded
by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s close study of colonial women’s lives, Good
Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New Eng-
land, 1650-1750. Arguing that “survival” is, at best, ‘“‘a minimal con-
cept” that has never adequately explained gender relations, Ulrich
asserted that the really striking differences between the lives of colonial
women and women who lived in later periods lay less in the objective
economic necessity of the labor they performed than in “the forms of
social organization which linked economic responsibilities to family re-
sponsibilities and which tied each woman’s household to the larger world
of her village or town.’” The point was not what colonial women had
done, but where that work was positioned in the patterns of daily com-
munity interaction.
Good Wives signaled a valuable shift in the study of colonial women’s
domestic labor, a shift away from seeing housework merely as a stalking
horse for abstract questions of female status and toward a greater em-
phasis on the nature of the work itself, especially as it was constituted
in the social organization of daily life in northern New England. But
conceptual problems remained. The new localism emerged at some sac-
rifice to a broader regional perspective. Deeply embedded 1n the dense
social networks of the colonial village, housework appeared to stand
apart from the unfolding economic history of New England, neither
shaping nor being shaped by the transformation of the colonial Northeast
from a series of outposts on the Atlantic Ocean into an elaborate,
market-oriented regional economy. Most problematic for the long his-
tory of domestic labor, the matter of change over time was not ad-
dressed. Unexplained were the numerous signs that, early on at least,
housework was viewed as central to economic life—a recognition that
had faded by the close of the colonial period.
Clearly, the theory of a “golden age” of preindustrial labor will not
account for that change. As Mary Beth Norton’s study of Revolutionary-
era American women makes clear, the status of colonial housework was
declining in the Northeast as early as the mid-eighteenth century, well
in advance of the industrial transformation. However we are to account
for the diminishing status of women’s most characteristic labor in the
colonial period, industnalization alone will not do. Certainly, indus-
trialization would severely disrupt both the work and the social relations
of household labor, but the foundations for that disruption had been
laid earlier, in the fabric and evolution of colonial life itself, and es-
4 HOME AND WORK
pecially in the changing relations of gender and labor over the course
of the preindustrial period.

The debate over the “golden age’ theory has generally been cast in
terms of whether or not economic status translates into political and
social status: to put it another way, whether doing important work brings
one rewards and prerogatives as an important member of the commu-
nity. In the northeastern British American colonies, the answer to this
question was clearly no. The Europe the settlers had come from was a
society deeply defined by patriarchy. English Puritanism, in particular,
was a pervasively patriarchal belief system, and the social institutions
that it fostered—families, religious congregations, civic governments—
were all conceived and understood (as the Puritans also conceived and
understood history and creation) not merely as male-dominated, but,
more precisely, as dominated by the person and figure of the father
(ultimately, the figure of God-the-father). Virtually all relations of
power vested superior legitimacy in the decisions of men—merely a
logical reflection of the natural order, William Secker thought, since
‘‘Our Ribs were not ordained to be our Rulers”—and virtually all male
roles (including that of husband) were understood in terms of the au-
thority and presumed sagacity and experience of the father. It was on
this basis—as fathers, both the sires of future generations and the sources
of those generations’ material settlements—that men claimed social and
political preeminence. In the settled Puritan community, for a woman
‘to transgress the will and appointment” of her husband, pastor, or
magistrate was tantamount to transgressing the fifth commandment to
honor one’s father.”
Although it would later become a key commercial and cultural hub
for the Northeast, New York was founded under Dutch laws and customs
that allowed women, both single and married, a margin of comparative
autonomy in matters of property ownership, inheritance, and the mak-
ing of contracts. Like England, however, the Netherlands was a male-
dominated society, and in the New Netherlands, as in New England,
religious, magisterial, and social authority was vested in men. Moreover,
perhaps in part because the culture of colonial New York was influenced
throughout the seventeenth century by contact with the Puritans to the
north, once New York became an English colony in 1664, Dutch customs
more supportive of female autonomy appear to have faded rather
quickly.°
In order to understand the complex dynamics of gender and labor in
the northeastern colonies, it may be necessary to transpose the elements
 An “Cconomical Society" 5
of the question: to ask, not whether economic status determined social
and political status, but rather whether social and political status de-
termined economic status. Here, too, in important ways, the answer is
a clear no. While women in the early colonies were undoubtedly deemed
to be both the social and the political inferiors of men, this subordination
did not function to deny entirely women’s important contributions as
economic agents. Not only did women work, but they were recognized
as workers, and the value of that labor—both to their households and
to their communities—was openly and repeatedly acknowledged. Cer-
tainly, Puritan husbands, by and large, did not countenance women’s
usurpation of customary male occupations. John Winthrop set it down
as fact that Ann Hopkins of Connecticut could have avoided insanity
had she only ‘‘attended her household affairs . .. and not meddle[d] in
such things as are proper for men.”’’ Equally certainly, formal acknowl-
edgements of the economic valorization of women’s domestic labor did
not lead to discernible political or social power for colonial women.
Nevertheless, the economic valorization of wives as workers and the
social, religious, and economic subordination of wives as females were
not perceived to be mutually exclusive concepts. Samuel Willard cap-
tured the paradox of women’s position when he instructed that ‘the
Husband is to be acknowledged to hold a Superiority, which the Wife
is practically to allow; yet in respect of all others in the GEconomical
Society, she is invested with an Authority over them by God; and her
husband is to allow it to her.’
Seventeenth-century Europe was still a society in which, as Alexander
Niccoles indicated in 1615, a man could anticipate having in a wife not
only a companion and a source of comfort, but also ‘‘a servant for
profite.”” The English immigrants whose culture would so dominate
American experience carried this view with them to the colonies. Cer-
tainly, the labor of women in the northeastern English colonies was
largely gender-prescribed: in a rough spatial division of labor, men
worked in the fields, while women attended to the work within or more
immediately in the vicinity of the household. But a gender division of
labor did not mean that women were expected to be less productive
than men. Ministers praised the woman who “‘looketh well to the ways
of her household....’’ When John Cotton referred to women as ‘“‘a
necessary good”’ in human society, he very probably meant the material
as well as the psychological support their presence supplied. Indeed, a
woman’s work in “managing ...domestical and household affairs”’ in
general and, more specifically, ‘‘at the wash-house. . . at the needle, at
the wheel, [and] at the spindle” were considered to constitute ‘‘her
 6 HOME AND WORK
trade.”’ And she was expected to ply it. As Essex’s Mary Boutwell
learned in 1640, women as well as men could be and were brought to
court on charges of ‘‘not working but living idly.”"” In the New Neth-
erlands, meanwhile, married women proved “‘a servant for profite’’ to
their husbands through numerous commercial operations. Able to make
contracts in their own right, married women were licensed to run taverns
and inns, vended produce and manufactured goods in city markets,
taught school alongside their husbands, and, in some cases, carried on
extensive independent trading operations. ''
The importance of wives’ work in and for their families was recognized
in a variety of ways in the early northeastern colonies. Advising friends
still in England on the necessary provisions for settlement, men included
in their lists specific enumerations of the “household implements” of
women’s work: “‘1 iron pot, 1 kettle, 1 frying pan, 1 gridiron, 2 skillets,
1 spit, wooden platters, dishes, spoons, trenchers.’’ Once in the colonies,
moreover, the settlers attached concrete significance to the difference
that a woman’s work could make in the founding and operation of a
successful homestead. In a 1639 land division proposal, Sudbury, Mas-
sachusetts, inhabitants recommended that land be distributed according
to a formula that allotted 6 acres for a man, 6” acres for his wife, and
1% acres for each child. As well as an inducement to marry (and populate
the community), the allotment to the wife expressed colonists’ belief
that the addition of her labor more than doubled the viable economic
size of a farm."
That belief was specifically affirmed in men’s wills, where husbands
sometimes publicly recorded their gratitude to the “‘loveing wife’’ whose
‘‘care and diligence [had helped] to get and save what god hath blessed
, us with....°’ When husbands failed to acknowledge the value of their
wives’ labor, colonial courts had the option of rectifying the error—as
did the Plymouth Court when it moved to protect widows’ dower rights
on the grounds that a wife's ‘‘diligence and industry” were indispensable
to ‘the getting of the [family] Estate.”’"’
This was not the only occasion on which institutions of colonial gov-
ernment gave formal recognition to the value of women’s domestic labor.
Plymouth Colony deemed dairying (largely women’s work) important
enough to the colonial economy to justify making an official inventory
of the equitable distribution of milk-producing animals in 1627. In 1630,
the Massachusetts Court of Assistants allotted early male settlers whose
families had not yet arrived twenty shillings “to buy. . . helpe to washe,
brewe, & bake.”’ Seemingly of the opinion that men lacked either the
 An “Cconomical Society” 7
time or the skills (or both) to do this work themselves, the Court also
evidently concluded that men could not well do without it."*
Wrapping up their regular business in 1645, the Massachusetts Court
of Elections offered a rare and intriguing glimpse of the ways gender
and labor intersected in the colonial Northeast. In separate orders, the
Court reimbursed Richard Sherman ‘19s for lodging 3 of ye deputies
& ye Gov[e]rn[o]rs men” and “ye wife of Rich[a]rd Sherman 13s...
as a gratuity for her cares & paines ys Co[uJrt about o[u]r dyet....”
Whether the Shermans operated a regular boarding establishment is
unclear and, for our purposes, unimportant. What ts significant is that
Richard Sherman and his wife were remunerated separately—the Court
recognizing his distinct contribution in making available the property
that he owned, and her distinct contribution in preparing the Court’s
food. Moreover, in affixing a monetary value to each, the Court rec-
ognized both claims as essentially economic. '°
Neither the nature of the claims nor the values awarded were identical,
of course. Richard Sherman’s claim was based on his right in the own-
ership of property, not in direct labor; indeed, it is a safe guess that any
direct labor provided in connection with the lodging (preparing linens
or cleaning, for example) was his wife’s. That separate labor was not
identified in the Court’s action, but was, instead, submerged in his rights
of ownership. Her claim, meanwhile, was based largely on the provision
of direct labor: her work in the preparation of food. And that claim,
valued at only about seventy percent of his, was deemed inferior. The
Court clearly attached a greater value to the man’s rights in property
ownership than to the woman’s rights in labor.
The example of the Shermans raises the question of whether women’s
work was valued only when it led to a direct market exchange. That
this was not the case is suggested by a series of orders passed by the
General Court of Massachusetts in 1646 as it sought to standardize
punishments for various crimes in the colony. The Court levied ‘‘double
damage” against any person convicted of destroying timber, coal, corn,
hay, straw, hemp, or flax—all but the last commonly considered the
products of men’s work. At the same time, the Court set an award of
triple damages for the destruction of fruit trees, linen or woolen goods,
gardens, or stacked wood; all but the last of these was generally asso-
ciated with women’s household labor, but none was necessarily as-
sociated with market production. However one explains the specific
discrepancy between the two categories of damages, the comparatively
severe penalties set for the destruction of the products of women’s work
8 HOME AND WORK
attest to the Court’s understanding both that the products (fruit from
orchards, vegetables from gardens) were important to family well-being
and that producing them required labor. In particular, in setting higher
damages for the destruction of linen goods than for the destruction of
unworked flax, the Court affirmed the value added by women’s labor. '®

The inequities of the 1645 awards to Richard Sherman and his wife
expressed the limits of the recognition accorded to women’s work even
in the early years of settlement. That decision may also have reflected
changes that were already underway by mid-century and which would
be well established in the culture of the colonial Northeast by the middle
of the next century. Certainly, various signs indicate that even by the
middle decades of the seventeenth century the public recognition of the
value of women’s labor had begun to wane. In his 1653 will, Boston
merchant Robert Keayne was careful to secure to his wife her full ‘“‘wid-
ow’s thirds” of the estate. Significantly, however, he acknowledged her
claim exclusively on the grounds of her having been a “dear and loving
wife” rather than on her labor in helping to accumulate the estate.
Keayne added, moreover, that “if she desire to have a cow or two, a
piece of plate or two, or any other part of the household stuff besides
what I have given her as a legacy,” she must purchase it. Beyond her
dower rights, Anne Keayne’s relationship to the estate was that of a
stranger."’
In his will, Robert Keayne took pains to try to ensure amity between
his wife and his son. Various historians have suggested that as the century
wore on, this pattern became more and more common, with husbands
including elaborate protections for the support of their widows as regular
components of their wills. Alexander Keyssar speculates that these pro-
visos reflected an economic competition in which sons challenged their
widowed mothers’ right to any part of the accumulated family holdings.
Sermons from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries sup-
port this speculation. Regularly associating “‘widowhood” with ‘“‘pov-
erty,” ministers implied that the cause of widows’ hardships lay, at least
in part, in sons’ ‘‘readiness to Slight their mothers” and to deny women’s
‘‘Serviceableness”’ in the family enterprise."
Sermons from this period indicate that the ministers perceived them-
selves to be women’s defenders, but the manner of their defense revealed
important shifts in the grounds on which a woman might claim both
respect and a share of the family’s material holdings. Increasingly
through the early decades of the eighteenth century, ministers described
wives in a way that emphasized their freedom from labor and that framed
 An “(Economical Society” 9
their contribution to the family in emotional and psychological (rather
than economic) terms. Benjamin Colman dwelt on wives’ ‘‘Retiredness
from the Cares & Snares of the World.” Contending that widows should
be treated well, Increase Mather found his justification in the argument
that their husbands had been ‘“‘Useful Men.”’ Dropping earlier formu-
lations that praised wives as ‘‘fellow labourers,’’ Thomas Foxcroft main-
tained that women deserved respect based on their ‘‘wise Advices, their
faithful Admonitions, their holy Examples, their devout Prayers, and
Labours of Love.”
The polite literature from England that was distributed and read
throughout New England reinforced this new emphasis. Savile’s Advice
to a Daughter, a popular example of the genre, implied that women’s
only responsibilities were to preserve marital peace and family honor.
Mary Beth Norton has pointed particularly to the influence of Samuel
Richardson’s novel Clarissa in establishing a cultural example for young
womanhood. Affirming ‘““Modesty & Sweetness” as the hallmarks of the
female temperament, the Clarissa model denied any evidence of labor
in women’s lives. The opposite of Clarissa was ‘‘Masculina’’: ‘“‘her Voice
loud & manlike, her Discourse Rough & indelicate [,] her dress sluttish,
& she strides along, when she walks. ...’’ Disheveled, assertive, and
athletic, ‘‘Masculina” associated activity with manliness and suggested
by implication that the true female betrayed no sign of toil.”
Although the polite literature generally presented ‘“‘Clarissa”’ as
a positive role model for women, this image of womanhood was not se-
cure from all criticism: even as they praised women for their delicacy,
eighteenth-century observers admonished women for not working
hard enough. A poem by Nicholas Noyes, included in Cotton Mather’s
1703 eulogy of Mistress Mary Brown of Salem, took up this theme:
O Parents, Pity the fond Sons of Men, ,
And your fair Daughters well adorn for them.
With Useful Knowledge fraight their Tender Souls;
Why should they Empty be, but Noisy Fools?
Teach them the Skill an House to Guide & Feed, |
And with Kind Mates an Easy Life to lead.
Goodness to them, and all Good Humour Show;
The Pious Parents Shap’d their MARY so.”'

In the more raucous popular press, meanwhile, women’s presumed

idleness had become the stuff of overtly misogynist satire. Over the
course of the first half of the eighteenth century, wives became a favorite
object of ridicule in colonial newspapers, which portrayed them as lazy,
vain, and ‘“want[ing] sense, / And every kind of duty.” The best a man
10 HOME AND WORK
might hope for was a wife who was “prudent,” it seemed. What he was
more likely to get was a self-indulgent child who would quickly become
a parasite on the household economy: “She’s married now,” taunted a
typical newspaper barb of the 1750s, “‘and spends her time / more trifling
than a baby.”
Even when women were described as hard at work, moreover, their
very industry could easily be made into an illustration of foolishness.
The author of a letter to The New York Mercury in 1758 began by
praising his wife as ‘“‘an irreconcileable enemy to Idleness.” But the
compliment was tongue-in-cheek, for he soon made it clear that her
activity was mindless, frivolous, and without any real value to the house-
hold: ‘‘We have twice as many fire-skreens as chimneys,” he observed
dryly, ‘“‘and three flourished quilts for every bed. Half the rooms are
adorned with a kind of futile pictures which imitate tapestry. . . . [S]he
has boxes filled with knit garters and braided shoes. She has twenty
coverns for side-saddles embroidered with silver flowers, and has cur-
tains wrought with gold in various figures, which she resolves some time
or other to hang up....”’ Even when her fancy fell upon an activity
which might indeed be useful—spinning—she insisted that it be done
on inefficiently small wheels, protesting ‘“‘that great wheels are not fit
for Gentlewomen....” But eighteenth-century attacks on women as
economic leeches were not directed exclusively at women in wealthy
households, who might have been considered to be ladies of compara-
tive leisure. As Christine Stansell’s description of sexual mores in late-
eighteenth-century New York City suggests, the assumption that females
were economic vampires could be applied to hard-working women in
great economic need as easily as to the wives of the wealthy.”
There survived in the late colonial era an exception to this portrait
of female economic silliness: the image of the “notable’’ house-
wife, praised and valued for her skill at management and her clever-
ness at making ends meet. The “notable” housewife was a descendant
of the virtuous woman described in Proverbs 31, the woman whose
“candle goeth not out by night”: ‘She seeketh wool, and flax, and
worketh willingly with her hands,” “‘bringeth her food from afar,”
“riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household”;
“with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard,” and “(s]he lay-
eth her hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff.’”’ Yet the
good woman of Proverbs and the “notable” colonial housewife were
not quite the same. The wife of Proverbs is a bustling woman-about-
the-community whose “works praise her in the gates.” In contrast, as
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has pointed out, colonial women were deemed
 An “Economical Society”’ 11
most “‘notable’’ when least noticed. They were expected to be pious,
obedient, and industrious, but scarcely visible. At least prescriptively,
the ‘‘notable housewife”’ was something of a contradiction in terms: the
worker whose very claim to importance depended in part on the un-
seen nature of her labor.”

What is particularly puzzling about these changing attitudes toward

women’s labor contributions is that they were not paralleled by changes
in the work itself. Throughout the colonial period, precisely what a
given woman did depended on the overall age, wealth, and membership
of her household and on whether she lived in a more- or less-rural area.
Within these parameters, however, neither the actual labor involved in
housewifery nor the economic value of that labor to the household
appears to have varied significantly between 1650 and 1750.
At the end of this period, as at the beginning, most households were
agricultural. They were not self-sufficient; in almost all places and at
almost all times, some goods were purchased on the market and many
were acquired through trading. As early as 1633, an order of the General
Court of Massachusetts mentioned “carpenters, sawers, masons, clap-
board ryvers, bricklayers, tylars, joyners, wheelwrights, [and] mowers”
as among the various specialized workers a family might depend on.
But the market was of comparatively minor importance and payment
was often in kind; indeed, cash was rare enough in early Massachusetts
that the Court was prompted to order that
after the last day of this month [October, 1640] no man shalbee compelled
to satisfye any debt, legacy, fine, or any paym[en]t in money, but satis-
faction shalbee accepted in corne, cattle, fish, or other com[m]odities, at
such rates as this Courte shall set down from time to time. ...
Of necessity, families pieced together their livelihoods by combining an
internal system of home production with external systems of both bor-
rowing and barter. In the process, the primary category of labor orga-
nization was gender.”
On farms, men were responsible for providing grain and fuel and the
permanent structures of the homestead. They managed the pastures and
the out-buildings; made some of the equipment used by themselves and
their wives; saw to the care and maintenance of their own tools; and
supervised the work of older sons and male servants. Women were
responsible for providing fruits, vegetables, dairy products, and fowl;
for manufacturing various goods needed by the family; for managing
the distribution of goods in the household; for the daily care of the house
12 HOME AND WORK
proper, the home lot, and much of their own equipment; and for training
and supervising infants, older daughters, and female servants.”
In the business of meeting their separate obligations to the family,
both men and women grew food for the family, engaged in commerce
and manufacturing, and provided maintenance services. A woman might
bake her own bread, or trade cheese for it. She might herself spin the
yarn for the family’s clothes, or she might knit scarves for a neighbor
more skilled at the wheel than she. Similarly, her husband might man-
ufacture harnesses himself, or borrow a harness from a neighbor whose
cow grazed in his pasture. He might raise grain for his family’s bread,
or he might barter for it. Even among men who were no longer farmers,
barter, as opposed to cash, was a common form of payment. When
Thomas Cooper agreed to build a meetinghouse for Springfield, Mas-
sachusetts, he received ‘‘fouer score pounds as money . . . which is to be
paid in wheate, peas, porke, wampam, debtes, [and] labor.”’”’ The mode
one worked in counted for far less than one’s final success in providing
the goods and services needed. This organization characterized house-
hold economies early in the colonial period and it persisted into the
mid—eighteenth century.
In 1750, as in 1650, then, country women washed and cleaned, kept
chickens for eggs, meat, and feathers, tended small barnyard animals,
foraged for berries, fished, clammed, and kept kitchen gardens. They
helped slaughter animals and preserve meat, milked cows, made cheese,
butter, cider, wine, and beer. They sewed and knitted, quilted and spun,
and prepared all of the food for family consumption, collecting and
chopping kindling and spending long (and dangerous) hours coaxing
cooking fires to just the right temperature. Women often used these
same activities as the basis for networks of barter and sale. Sarah Ed-
wardes of Springfield, Massachusetts, sold and bartered the milk her
cows produced. Alice Apsley of Ft. Saybrook, Connecticut, developed
a small business selling the medicinal herbs and onions she grew in her
garden.”
Diaries surviving from the mid-eighteenth century demonstrate the
continuing importance of rural wives to the economic systems that sup-
ported their families. Mary Cooper lived on a farm near Oyster Bay,
Long Island. It was an agricultural community, but one with strong ties
to the urban markets of New York and New Haven and New London,
Connecticut. Covering the years from 1763 to 1773, Cooper’s diary
chronicles a life of hard and almost constant labor—labor that led her,
in July of 1769, to reflect: ‘‘This day is forty years sincfe] I left my
 An ‘‘(Economical Society”’ 13
father’s house and come here, and here have I seene littel els but harde
labour and sorrow... ."”
Much of Cooper’s work involved the daily maintenance of her house
and family. The single job most frequently mentioned in her diary is
cooking: cooking for her family, cooking for her friends, cooking for
relatives and visitors, sometimes even cooking for overnight boarders.
It was work that seldom gave her any pleasure. ‘‘O, I am dirty and tired
allmost to death cooking for so many peopel,” she wrote on March 7,
1769, ‘‘freted almost to death.”’ Equally onerous, however, were the
cleaning, washing, and troning required by a household of four with a
steady stream of guests. Longing to ‘‘prepare”’ herself for the Sabbath,
Cooper instead spent December 24 of 1768 ‘‘drying and ironing my
cloths til allmost brake of day.”’™
Although she purchased various items for her family’s use—dye, cot-
ton, scissors, nails, and molasses, for example—Mary Cooper produced
both food and goods for her household. She picked apples, cherries,
blackberries, quince, and peaches. What was not served immediately
was cut up and dried or made into preserves or sweetmeats for later
use; in good years, she kept up a lively business selling surplus cherries
to neighbors. Meanwhile, she also salted beef, kept bees for honey,
made wine, sausage, and pickles, and grew herbs. Although the diary
does not record that Mary Cooper herself did the family spinning, she
did comb flax. Among her other home manufactures were candles, soap,
and clothing.”!
In addition to her husband and herself, Cooper's household included
six children (two of whom survived to adulthood), four slaves, and
innumerable visitors. The entries in Cooper's diary often use the plural
pronoun—‘‘Wee are much hurred drying appels,”’ she noted on October
11, 1768, and recorded a few days later that ‘‘[wJe are cleaning the
house’’—reflecting her ability to delegate part of her work to others, as
time or the limits of her own skills dictated. Her daughters spun, for
example, and also helped clean and pick berries. The Coopers’ slaves
appear to have worked primarily in the fields, although a female,
Frances, combed wool and may have assisted with the washing. Occa-
sionally, the need for additional skills prompted Cooper to hire outside
workers. In October of 1768 and again in March of 1769, she employed
a seamstress to help with her sewing. She regularly sent her weaving
out to a professional weaver and she hired a workman to construct a
new hive for her honey bees.*
Like women a hundred years earlier, Mary Cooper was involved in
14 HOME AND WORK
an intricate network of neighborly swapping. She frequently went to
friends’ homes to assist in the delivery of a child or to help tend the
sick, and her diary indicates that, in turn, neighbors sometimes came
to her aid, helping to pull flax or giving her some of the fish they had
caught. On occasion, Cooper borrowed equipment from friends or rel-
atives. Making preserves in October of 1772, she recorded that she was
“very buise and mighty angrey becaus the cittel [kettle] is sent for before
I have don my quinces.’’”’
One might speculate that the mid—eighteenth-century satires of house-
wives were directed less to the Mary Coopers of the colonial world than
to the growing population of city women, whose work lives were more
directly altered by the development of urban markets—and especially
the women of more prosperous urban families. Certainly there were
important differences between the economies of rural and urban house-
holds. In general, both men and women in town were likely to engage
in more trade and less agriculture and household manufacture than their
rural counterparts. More particularly, the nature and division of hus-
bands’ and wives’ respective contributions to the household economy
was changed in the city: increasingly, urban husbands made their con-
tribution in the form of wages (or credit) to facilitate the acquisition of
family provisions. Wives, meanwhile, assumed a greater responsibility
for actually obtaining the goods needed by the family. In addition to
the foodstuffs traditionally considered a part of women’s contribution
(vegetables, fruits, and fowl, either from their own yards or from trade),
urban women began to assume responsibility for shopping or scaveng-
ing for the grain and wood that, in an earlier period, their husbands
would have supplied. This new distribution of work did not lighten
the load of urban women, however. Trips to the wharf and to nearby
villages to make purchases and to establish buying and trading contacts
merely substituted for trips to the woods in search of wild berries and
roots.
All colonial women were expected to be able to assume their hus-
bands’ responsibilities as need arose. Farm wives had to speak for absent
husbands, discipline sons and male servants and assign them chores,
and work in the fields as needed—although these tasks remained des-
ignated as ‘“‘men’s” work regardless of how often a woman did them.
These “‘deputy husband” functions may have expanded in urban envi-
ronments, where men were more likely to be absent from the home for
long periods of time. The wives of sea-going men assumed virtually all
of their husbands’ customary daily responsibilities. Where men’s wage
work took place in the dwelling itself, wives were often expected to
 An “(Cconomical Society”’ 15
integrate into their own schedules substantial aspects of their husbands’
occupations. The wife of a cobbler often stitched the uppers of the shoes
he sold, and the man who turned his best room into a storefront or his
home into an inn generally anticipated, as Benjamin Franklin noted,
that his wife would “assist ... by tending shop.”
Given these redistributions of specific tasks, however, the approach
to family survival that marked rural households was largely preserved
in the organization of mid—eighteenth-century urban homes. Women
remained responsible for cooking, cleaning, fire-tending, food storage,
the manufacture of a wide range of household items, the care of house-
hold linens and clothing, and child rearing, while their husbands still
provided direct labor to the family in the form of household repairs,
some domestic manufacture (mending shoes, for example, or wood-
working), and perhaps some shopping. Even among more prosperous
families, few women enjoyed any great leisure, or even found their
labors reduced to mere supervisory work. As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
has pointed out, even the “‘pretty gentlewomen”’ of the colonial period
“had few of the privileges, yet most of the responsibilities, of gentility.”
This is well illustrated in the life of Esther Burr, whose journal provides
one of the few surviving detailed records of a woman’s daily life and
work in the mid—eighteenth century.
_ Written as a series of letters to her friend Sarah Prince, Burr’s journal
covers the last three years of her life, 1754 to 1757, by which time she
had long since moved away from her family in Northampton, Massa-
chusetts, and was living with her husband and children in northern New
Jersey (first in Newark and later at Princeton). Since Burr’s husband
was a minister and a college president, the particular shape of her work
differed in some respects from that of the wife of a cobbler or merchant.
Like Mary Cooper, Esther Burr had help with her work. Although her
children were too young to be useful (Sally was born in 1754 and Aaron
in 1756), Esther’s sisters were sometimes present to assist her, and the
family had at least one household slave, Harry, and an occasional hired
woman—with the result that Burr seldom had to do her own cooking.
But the presence of additional household labor did not make Esther
Burr a woman of leisure. She remained the primary child-care provider
and nurse for her family and she herself continued to perform much of
the other housework, a point she underscored as she recorded her work
for Sarah Prince: “So busy about some Tayloring that I must beg to be
excused. You must know that I am the Taylor.” Sometimes with help,
sometimes without it, she was also the cleaner, the ironer, and the
seamstress. On one occasion she described herself as ‘‘all up in Arms a
16 HOME AND WORK
cleaning House, white-washing, rubing Tables, cleaning silver, China
and Glass, etc.,’’ work that left her, she commented, ‘almost tired out
of my sense."’ At other times she merely noted to Sarah that she was
“So very busy that I cant get time to write.”
The journal makes it clear that Burr was involved in the household
manufacture of a number of articles, particularly yarn, clothing, and
quilts. But Burr also purchased much of what her family needed—a
cash-based aspect of her domestic labor that she referred to as her
‘business.’ Much of this work was conducted at some distance from
her home. Her ‘‘cuntry business, such as speak[ing] for Winter Tirneps,
Apples, and syder, and butter,’’ generally required that she ride out
from town to buy food from more-rural neighbors. For major pur-
chases—heavy clothing or furniture, for example—Burr found it nec-
essary either to travel to New York herself or to request a friend in
New York or Boston to act as her agent.”
Like other urban women, Esther Burr bore heavy responsibilities as
a ‘‘deputy husband,” either providing for and entertaining her husband’s
associates (or boarding the college’s students), or visiting “the Widow,
the fatherless and the sick” in her husband’s congregation. Unsurpris-
ingly, since the numbers of guests in her home at one time could easily
exceed thirty, she found entertaining ‘“‘Tedious’’ and exhausting, al-
though it was ‘‘visiting” that she considered “‘the heardest [hardest] work
that I do.” Neither, as Burr well understood, was optional. Both were
required by her husband’s employment.*
To argue that even prosperous women worked hard in the mid-
eighteenth century is not to suggest that housework was unaffected by
the economic status of the household. The most obvious differences by
economic level were probably not so much in the types of labor per-
formed or in the overall importance of that labor to the material survival
of the family, but in the specific tasks, in the time allotted to each, and
in the total time spent working. For example, although virtually all
women bore some responsibilities as ‘‘deputy husbands,” the nature of
that work undoubtedly varied with the overall resources of the family:
poor women hired out to work in an employer’s fields as part of a family
unit; women in ‘‘middling” households tended shop; wives of more
prosperous men entertained guests associated with their husbands’ work.
There were some forms of work the wife in a poor family performed
regularly but her counterpart in a higher economic class undertook only
sporadically if at all. In the country, poor wives earned a few shillings
or in-kind payment weeding gardens or gathering vegetables; in the
towns, they took in wash or worked in other women’s homes sewing,
 An “conomical Society” 17
washing, or ironing. It was not uncommon for wives in middling house-
holds to add to the family resources through barter or trade, but this
was generally through the exchange or sale of goods (yarn, cheese,
butter, eggs, or poultry) rather than of labor. In both types of exchanges,
women in wealthy households were far more likely to be the purchasers
than the vendors. Middling and poor families were also distinguished
from their wealthier counterparts by the greater likelihood that they
would take in paying boarders. Elite families often had extra people in
the household, creating extra work for the wife, but they generally did
not accept payment for the service.”
Wives in middling families spent more time in some tasks than did
either their poorer or their wealthier counterparts. With fuller larders
and more extensive equipment than poor women, they devoted a greater
effort to food preparation and preservation. Lacking the servants who
might be present in elite households, middling women tended to do this
work themselves, sometimes delegating parts of it to daughters or young
women hired from the neighborhood as ‘‘helps.’’ While all women spent
time acquiring the family’s food, poor wives, whose household econo-
mies required that they piece together an elaborate combination of
production, purchase, trade, and scavenging, were likely to spend a
disproportionate share of their time in the labor of physically acquiring
the family’s necessities, while their husbands (day laborers, mariners,
mercenaries, poorer artisans, and the wandering unemployed) made
their contribution in whatever cash they could earn and sometimes in
the savings realized from their physical absence.
Some of both the similarities and the differences in women’s house-
hold labor—between country life and city life and (to some extent)
between households of greater and lesser wealth—are made concrete
in a comparison of Burr and Cooper. Both women cleaned, washed,
ironed, made and mended clothing, preserved food, and manufactured
necessary items for the family’s use. Both women supervised other
household workers. Both were personally involved in the rearing of
their children. Both spent exhausting hours providing for visitors in the
household. Yet the contrasts between the two women’s lives are striking.
Burr spent far more time shopping than did Mary Cooper—and did
almost none of the work that so determined Cooper’s daily schedule,
cooking. Neither was she engaged in the extensive horticulture that
helped shape Cooper's work life.
Among the most dramatic differences between the two diaries is not
the work performed, however, but rather the two women’s conscious-
ness of themselves as laborers. Mary Cooper loathed much of what she
18 HOME AND WORK
did, and apparently rarely received direct recognition for it. Neverthe-
less, she understood well enough that what she was engaged in was
indeed ‘‘harde labour.’’ This was less clear to Esther Burr, who seemed
at times reluctant to claim her labor as real work, noting instead at the
end of one busy Thursday in October of 1755 that she felt “as if I had
been heard [hard] at work all day.” By the mid—eighteenth century—
well before the beginnings of industrialization in North America—the
denigration of women’s household labor was becoming an established
cultural practice for some women as well as for men.
The changing perception of housewifery appears to have reflected
changes in the larger social and economic context, rather than changes
in the nature and economic value of housework itself. A variety of early
conditions had created a cultural setting favorable to the recognition of
housewifery’s economic contribution. More specifically, early conditions
had preserved and fostered a cultural context in which women’s social
subordination did not determine their economic status. As the colonial
period wore on, those conditions disappeared. Increasingly, men’s claim
to social superiority was based on a claim to an exclusively male eco-
nomic agency. In this context, the likelihood that women’s domestic
labor would be counted on a par with the work of their husbands de-
clined. Many of the changes were material in origin, but the key shifts
were ideological. By the eve of the Revolutionary crisis, colonists had
largely ceased to perceive housewifery as a part of the real economy.

To some degree, the visibility of wives’ domestic labor in the early

settlements may be attributed to the Puritan definition of economy,
which traced its origins to the Greek oikos, *‘the household.” Reflecting
this concept, Puritan minister William Perkins gave his 1631 sermon
‘““CEconomie’”’ the subtitle ““Or, Household-Government: A Short Survey
of the Right Manner of Erecting and Ordering a Family, according to
the Scriptures.” All labor that contributed to the material viability of
family life—whether it was growing food or cooking it, tending livestock
or tending children—was ‘“‘economic.”’ Within the household, as Samuel
Willard had declared, woman was “invested with an Authority... ; and
her husband is to allow it to her....°”*'
Although it fit rather closely, this emphasis on the household as the
origin of economic life should not be interpreted as a simple and direct
reflection of how Puritans actually organized material affairs; as we have
seen, families were not utterly self-sufficient. Nonetheless, traditionally
the Puritan household had been formed and was operated as a joining
of two types of resources: the tools and skills in housewifery of the bride
 An “(Economical Society”’ 19
and the lands and skills at husbandry of the groom. Both components
were understood to be essential to household success.
The valuing of women’s work was undoubtedly encouraged by the
underrepresentation of women in the early settlements, and by the fact
that many women who did participate in the migration died during their
first years in North America. Their relative scarcity may well have cre-
ated a psychological atmosphere in which women’s domestic work as-
sumed a more visible family and community significance than would
otherwise have been the case.”
The importance that the Protestants who settled the northeastern
colonies attached to the institution of the family reinforced this psycho-
logical and communal visibility. When Puritans described the family as
“the very First Society,” they meant politically and religiously, as well
as materially: God had chosen “‘to lay the foundations both of State and
Church, in a family... .’’ Because of its central position as a model for
all social relations, the seventeenth-century nuclear family was not pri-
vate, especially among the Puritans. To be sure, New England settlers
had always shown a proclivity for the nuclear family form: within a few
short years, Plymouth Colony had done away with its communal or-
ganization because “‘the yong men...did repine that they should...
worke for other mens wives and children. ... And for mens wives to be
commanded to doe service for other men... , they deemed it a kind of
slaverie. ...’’** Nevertheless, the household was subject to intervention
and restructuring whenever its operations or its composition appeared
to deviate from the social goal. In 1642, for example, the Massachusetts
Court created a panel of men in each town to correct “‘the great neglect
of many parents & masters in training up their children in learning, &
labor, & other implyments which may be proffitable to the common
wealth. ...’’ An important consequence of this permeability of house-
hold boundaries was the nonprivatization of housework. Indeed, Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich has suggested that housewifery was so fully perceived
as part of the community domain that if courts failed to give satisfaction
against a stingy housewife, her neighbors might make redress on their
own: Patience Denison of Ipswich, Massachusetts, successfully prose-
cuted her servant for giving household goods away to the poor, but the
community’s sentiments were sufficiently strong on the side of the ser-
vant to give Denison a lasting fear of her.“
At the same time, the Puritan belief in the ‘“calling’’ underscored
qualities of contribution and service, rather than profit, as the distin-
guishing traits of culturally recognizable labor. Based on the belief that,
just as each person had a religious ‘‘calling’’ from God, each individual
20 HOME AND WORK
had a “‘calling” to an appropriate sphere of labor, the concept infused
secular work with an ethical dimension: the goal of labor was to be
useful to the larger purposes of creation, as expressed in the common-
weal of the society. ““CEconomy,”’ then, was the process of ‘‘stewarding”’
(or conserving and enriching) material resources to the end that the
general welfare of both household and community was strengthened.
There was nothing in this definition that denied—and much that em-
phasized—the importance of housewifery to material life.
Other conditions supported this general cultural visibility. In the fun-
damentally barter-based economy of the early settlements, husbands’
and wives’ work were understandable in the same economic terms. To
be sure, men sometimes dealt in acres while much of women’s work
was counted out in stitches and cupsful, but both often dealt in bushels
and pecks. More to the point, men and women were engaged in com-
parable and interdependent systems of production: both brought raw
materials into the household, both spent long hours processing raw
materials into usable goods, and both conducted the exchanges necessary
to supplement the family’s own resources. Men raised the grain that
women brewed into beer; women manufactured the clothing that men
wore into the fields.** Moreover, the local, informal scale of trade pre-
served the similarity of transactions outside of the household: for both
men and women, labor was valued in both money and in-kind exchange.
The exception to this rough parallelism may have fain in the produc-
tion of tools. Men and women both manufactured at least some of their
own equipment, but men also manufactured a good many of the tools
that women depended on in order to do their work. Men carved the
wooden bowls and stirring spoons used to prepare food, for example;
laid the fireplaces used in cooking; and made the lye for soap; while,
with the possible exception of brushes and cordage, women manufac-
tured few if any of the tools used by men in their husbandry. In this
sense, women experienced a special practical and daily dependence on
men, particularly at times (the period of early settlement) and in places
(rural areas) where trading for provisions was especially difficult.

Over the course of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,
transformations of colonial life not immediately related to the economic
function of women’s domestic labor served to slowly undermine the
visibility of housework. Among these transformations were a growing
sense of constriction in material opportunity and the emergence of es-
sentially commercial habits of mind. These shifts in the culture of co-
lonial society heightened the association of men with the symbols of
 An “(Economical Society" 21
economic activity and profoundly weakened the ability of women to lay
claim to the status of “‘worker.” |
From roughly 1670 onward, the colonials perceived their material
opportunities as increasingly restricted. There was some basis for this
perception. Although immigration to New England began to drop off
after about 1660, and although recurrent epidemics took high tolls
throughout the colonial period, the first generations of settlers had set
in motion a cycle of relatively large and long-lived households that was
reflected in an impressive rate of population growth. By 1700 the Eu-
ropean population of the northern colonies had reached 144,000; by
1775, it stood at over a million and a quarter. The crowding caused by
this demographic pattern was intensified by the effect of periodic wars
with the native Americans, which shut down—or at least gave pause
to—the Europeans’ drift inland. King Philip’s War (1675-1676) accom-
plished this end so successfully that it was fully a quarter of a century
before all of the outlying English towns destroyed in the conflict were
resettled.”
Much of the increased population density was in the older large towns
and cities, where it made itself felt in a generally decreased standard of
living and in a more stratified economic structure. In Essex, Massachu-
setts, the number of households that were transient increased by 56
percent between 1740 and 1750 and by 116 percent in the next decade.
Between 1687 and the eve of the Revolutionary War, the percentage
of Boston's adult male population who were propertyless more than
doubled, to 29 percent; while the wealthiest 5 percent of males increased
their share of the total wealth from 26 percent to 44 percent.“
The countryside was not secure from these pressures. New England
farmland had never been of superior quality. By 1686, in communi-
ties like Windsor, Connecticut, ‘“‘only marginal land [remained] to be
brought under cultivation’’; by the early eighteenth century, most of the
land in many towns was ‘‘worn.” In western Massachusetts the number
of transient households increased by as much as 76 percent between
1740 and 1750, and by as much as 248 percent between 1750 and 1760.
By 1771, propertyless men comprised almost a third of the adult male
population in some communities.“
These figures represented the results of processes that began in the
late seventeenth century and have been documented for virtually every
colonial New England town so far studied by historians: a growing
shortage of both town and family lands, culminating by the third gen-
eration in delayed access to land, differential inheritance among sons
by order of birth, the settlement of some sons on land purchased outside
22 HOME AND WORK
of the community and others in trades, and out-migration. In at least
some places, however, a mentality of hoarding seems to have preceded
actual insufficiency. An average rural colonial family required only about
forty acres to live. The original grant to Dedham, Massachusetts (to use
that community as an example), was sixty-four thousand acres—enough
to support sixteen hundred families. Less than fifteen percent of that
land had been distributed when Dedham closed admission to the status
of proprietor in 1656.”
Fear found many causes. In his study of Andover, Massachusetts,
Philip Greven has suggested that the decline of open-field farming, the
rise of individually owned but nonconsolidated holdings, and concern
that time and population growth would blur the collective memory of
boundary decisions all combined to create, within fifteen years of the
town’s founding, anxiety about property titles and land ownership.
These worries had other origins as well. The colonies’ land-tenure sys-
tems (based on a corporate form not strictly allowable under their chart-
ers) were vulnerable to challenge by England—a possibility that loomed
large after the Restoration in 1660 and did finally occur in the 1680s.
At the same time, settlers’ claims to the lands of native Americans were
often legally tenuous, at best.
The shortage and depletion of the land, in combination with ongoing
population growth, helped foster an increased cash dependency in the
northeastern colonies. This transformation can be easily exaggerated.
The colonists were not changed overnight from a community of simple
peasants to a society of entrepreneurs. In the first place, they had never
been simple peasants. The New Netherlands, in particular, had been
settled as a commercial center, and as we have seen, the colonies to its
north had been active in trade since their founding. On the other hand,
on the eve of the Revolution, New England and the colony of New
York were far from committed to the commercial way of life. On the
contrary, most of the population continued to engage in semisubsistence
farming. Even the wheat for Boston's burgeoning population, for ex-
ample, was the surplus from essentially family-based farms in the sur-
rounding area. Although a variety of English-made goods made their
way into colonial households, between 1700 and 1760 English settlers
in North America consumed only about eighteen shillings’ worth of
imported goods per person per year—a figure that includes both urban
and rural areas and also includes goods consumed by English soldiers
stationed in the colonies. Most of what northeasterners lived on was
still produced either in their own homes by their own families or by
their immediate neighbors.*!
 An “Economical Society”’ 23
If not market-dependent, however, between roughly 1700 and 1765,
both rural and urban northeasterners do appear to have become much
more market-conscious, finding ways to accommodate traditional activ-
ities to the new potential of expanding commercial networks. With over
sixteen thousand inhabitants by 1743, Boston exerted a powerful influ-
ence over the economic lives of surrounding communities: ‘‘[T]here are
above one thousand able bodied Men in towns not far from Boston,”
complained one Evening Post writer in 1748, *‘who have wholly left off
Labour ...to buy up, at any Rate, Cattle, Sheep, Calves, Fowles, etc.,
(dead or alive) to sell out at an exceptional Price in Boston.”’ Even
frontier towns like Northampton, Massachusetts, and Kent, Connecti-
cut, claimed enough merchants and craftsmen for these to be identifiable
groups in the community. Indeed, Kent had been founded in the spirit
of commerce. In contrast to earlier-settled towns, which had pursued
programs of gradual distribution of lands to inhabitants, the lands of
Kent (established in 1738) were sold off in one-thousand-acre parcels,
mainly to absentee speculators.”
Land pressures also increased market contact. In the mid—eighteenth
century, Franklin’s ‘‘Father Abraham” advised farmers who wished to
prosper to ‘“‘plough deep”’ to ‘“‘have corn to sell and to keep.” It was
advice worth taking. In Northampton, by the 1740s, fathers who wanted
to see their sons settled on farms were forced into the market, for
additional land had to be purchased, and as historian Patricia Tracy has
observed, ‘‘{o]nly those fathers who had advanced beyond subsistence
level had the capital to buy farms... .’’ Advancing beyond subsistence
level often meant undertaking some form of commercial labor. As one
observer remarked, there was scarcely a husbandman who did not want
“besides his Farm. . . to be fingering of Trade. .. .’’ Sometimes farming
had to be abandoned altogether: a quarter of third-generation Andover,
Massachusetts, sons were settled in trades. Some sons went without a
settlement and supplied the ranks of the landless agricultural workers
dependent on the wages paid by their more prosperous neighbors.”
The growth of organized markets affected the status of money as an
exchange medium. As late as 1704, and in a community as trade-oriented
as New Haven, exchange occurred in a visibly mixed mode: “‘Pay,”’ as
Madame Knight explained in her journal, ‘is Grain, Pork, Beef, etc.
...mMony is pieces of eight, Ryalls, or Boston or Bay shillings... or
Good hard money, as sometimes silver coin is termed... .’’ Over the
next half-century—and long beyond it—barter would remain essential
to the daily lives of most households. Doctors took payment in “pigeons,
cranberries, bees wax, considerable wood, turnips, bricks [or] tur-
 24 HOME AND WORK
keys,” and artisans and shopkeepers accepted both goods and services
for their labor, either paid immediately or deferred through the elab-
orate credit systems that characterized colonial exchanges. Yet money
was making inroads into both the conduct and the perception of eco-
nomic life. Massachusetts’ 1747 decision that the value of its paper
currency should be adjusted as needed to fit the availability of “provi-
sions and other necessaries of life’ indicated the growing importance
of money in exchanges directed to simple survival. By 1748 it would be
said of New England that ‘[a] man who has money... . is everything,
and wanting that he’s a mere nothing....”’ The statement was un-
doubtedly an exaggeration, but it reflected a heightened awareness of
money as a means to both economic and social success.”
This consciousness was evident both in internal tensions and in the
— colonies’ dealings with England. Colonial merchants agitated for tight
money; rural folks replied that ‘“‘the Country inhabitants... would be
ruined”’ by such policies. England revoked the power of colonial leg-
islatures to authorize currency and asserted Parliament’s right to remove
specie from the colonies through taxation; the colonists retorted that
England meant to reduce “‘the Inhabitants... to the necessity of prim-
itive Times... , of going to Market. . . with Rum[,] Sugar[,] Melasses|,]
Ozenbrigs{,] &c &c instead of Money....”””

It is in the context of these larger social patterns that the changing

evaluation of housework must be traced and interpreted. Population
growth, land speculation, anxieties over property titles, the increasing
familiarity of money in market relations—none of these fundamentally
affected the economic role or importance of women’s domestic labor.
What they did accomplish, however, was a widespread dissociation of
wives and wives’ work from the symbols of economic value.
The first of these symbols was property itself. Although they had
recognized women’s contribution to the accumulation of family prop-
erties, most of even the early European settlers had considered own-
ership rights to reside almost exclusively with males. Women became
legitimate owners of property only by exception: in the event of a hus-
band’s death, for example, or if a family had no male heirs, or by special
legal instrument. Even the common-law custom of the ““widow'’s thirds”
provided for outright ownership only of personal property; the widow's
rights to a third of the real property was for her lifetime use only. In
the atmosphere of shortage that prevailed in the latter part of the sev-
enteenth century, even this limited recognition of women’s property
rights was challenged. In effect, men acted both to consolidate the actual
 An “CEconomical Society”’ 25
ownership of property in their own hands and to strengthen the linkage
of property ownership with manhood. In a study of witchcraft in sev-
enteenth-century New England, Carol F. Karlsen has discovered that
many of the accused were women without brothers or sons—that is to
say, increasingly, as the period wore on, a woman who either had or
stood to inherit property found herself in danger of being accused as a
witch. Similarly, both Alexander Keyssar and Patricia Tracy have con-
cluded that early-eighteenth-century husbands expressed a growing con-
cern in their wills that their widows needed to be protected against the
greed of sons, whose resentment at their mothers’ lifetime claim on a
part of the estate might be manifested in mistreatment.”
These developments were accompanied by an increasing cultural aver-
sion to images of women actively engaged in business. The few female
innkeepers and merchants notwithstanding, the witchcraft trials had
brought to the surface deeply held Puritan associations of woman with
Eve: vain, domineering, greedy for what was not hers to possess. With
the world outside the household ready ‘‘to traduce for, A Witch, Every
Old Woman, whose Temper with her usage is not eminently Good,”
the kind of assertiveness required for visible economic enterprise carried
with it palpable danger. In 1692-1693, Massachusetts spinsters faced
enough public hostility for the General Court to deem it necessary to
legislate their right to try to earn a living.”’
Meanwhile, the land shortage clearly interrupted the traditional pro- |
cess of household formation. As sons waited longer to be settled on
their own land, the northern colonies experienced something of the
reversal of the earlier shortage of wives: a practical shortage of mar-
riageable men. The situation was reflected in the ages at first marriage,
which rose from the late seventeenth century on. In the emphasis that
this situation placed on the groom’s contribution to household forma-
tion, it encouraged the belief (noted by the clergy) that families main-
tained material viability solely ‘at Mens Estate.” |
It was in the context of this growing emphasis on the centrality of
men’s contribution to family formation, and on men’s superior social
claim to economic resources, that the early—eighteenth-century clergy
undertook their defense of women. Against the image of Eve, the min-
isters attempted to pose the image of Mary, long-suffering mother of
Christ. It was an argument for the social rehabilitation of women, but
only at the expense of their claim to social recognition as workers. If
women’s economic visibility had marked them as witches, their emo-
tional contribution to the family might now mark them as good mothers
and wives.
26 HOME AND WORK
At the same time, the developing reliance on money weakened the
visible parallels between men’s and women’s work and reinforced the
apparent contrasts between their contributions to household life. Co-
lonial women as a group had never had as much access to money as
colonial men had. A wife’s trade networks were likely to remain informal
and local and to involve simple exchanges among known values. There
was relatively little need for the equating function that is one of the
important attributes of a monetized system. Equally important, the
money wives did earn was not theirs, in fact or in social perception. A
wife conducted economic activities (running a business or contracting
for goods and services) only under the husband’s aegis and as his sur-
rogate—that is, in her role as ‘‘deputy husband.”’ Whatever gain she
realized was legally his, as if the husband himself had performed the
labor leading to it. This ideological fiction was encouraged by the grow-
ing use of money, which dissolved the specific identity both of the worker
(as a woman) and of the product (as one traditionally produced by
women).
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has argued that, by the eighteenth century,
the husband who let his wife control her own cash earnings was the
exception, and a cause for general amazement among his peers. But the
cultural dissociation of women from cash-earning appears to have been
underway by the late seventeenth century. Wives maintained some vis-
ibility as ‘‘workers’’ well through the turn of the century: in his 1692
‘Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion,”* Cotton Mather still described
them as “labouring bees”’ in the family. But even in 1692 Mather was
far from clear that most women really did anything very useful, and he
apparently accepted it as a matter of fact that women’s activities were
distinct from the cash-earning enterprise of the household: “‘it is as often
so, that you have little more Worldly Business, than to spend (I should
rather say, to Save) what others Get, and to Dress and Feed . . . the Little
Birds, which you are Dams unto.’ For emphasis, he added: ‘And those
of you, that are Women of Quality are excused from very much of this
trouble, too.”
Mather’s allusion to ‘“‘women of quality”’ was inaccurate as a simple
description of the labor of any but a tiny fraction of women in the
northeastern colonies. It was nonetheless a resonant and powerful image
that gained credence through the conjunction of two strands of colonial
belief. On the one hand, European culture had traditionally conceived
of women as vain, irresponsible, and dependent creatures. On the other
hand, the colonials were disposed to view England as a nation of pam-
pered aristocrats. Propagating new standards of bourgeois womanhood,
 An “Cconomical Society” 27
the influx of polite literature from England encouraged the colonials to
identify women especially with the corruptions and indolence of wealth.
Both aspects of this identification—the belief that women were by nature
undependable and the special association of women with English dec-
adence—would flourish in the later eighteenth century, as colonial men
from all economic ranks began to articulate a revolutionary ideology of
civic republicanism that explicitly joined political status to economic
status, excluding women from both. At the time Mather spoke, however,
the two strands functioned together on a more covert level, subtly
strengthening a general inclination to discount the significance of wom-
en’s economic endeavors.
These specific changes in women’s experiences and status were aspects
of a larger ideological transformation throughout the last half of the
colonial period: the emergence of a new cultural understanding of what
constituted “‘economic”’ and what constituted “non-economic” terrain.
Eventually, the core cultural definition of ‘‘economy” itself—the house-
hold—would change. In the meantime, the events of the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries served to chip away at many of the ide-
ological supports of the traditional ‘‘ceconomical” society. The disen-
gagement of individual households from a tight communal identity, and
so from the concept of the general good, began almost at once in the
northeastern settlements. In Sudbury, for example, the conflict between
common and private lands brought the town to the verge of a split only
thirteen years after its founding. Nor were the heads of household ar-
rayed on the side of private property willing to submit to that customary
arbiter of social conflict, the church. The pastor was requested not to
‘‘meddle.”’ It was suggested that he would be better off confining himself
to “the conversion and building up of souls."
The fear of scarcity that set in toward the end of the seventeenth
century exacerbated this drift toward individualism. Rather than pro-
tecting the general good against the wayward impulses of its members,
the town structure increasingly served to protect the private households
that comprised it against the possible claims of outsiders. By the mid—
eighteenth century, “warnings out’ (not expulsions, but official dis-
claimers of community obligation for support) were common tools of
civic security in both older and newer settlements, and their rate of use
was increasing.”!
This growing independence of individual households was probably
echoed in a number of ways in the perceptions and conditions of women’s
labor. The breakdown of the original fervor and homogeneity of the
Puritan community resulted in a population less willing to submit to
28 HOME AND WORK
scrutiny of their interior family lives. Certainly, as early as 1666, John
Barret of Wells, Maine, felt confident of his own dominion: charged
with abusing his wife, he replied coolly, ““What hath any man to do with
it...?° Fueled by the patriarchalism that had always informed Puri-
tanism, but that now increasingly assumed the individualistic qualities
also appearing in other aspects of New England life, such assertiveness
by husbands diminished the social permeability of the household and
literally “privatized” the life and labor of the wife.
At the same time, the incursion of markets and cash relations into
daily life helped undercut the association of “‘stewardship”’ and “‘service”’
with economic activity. Markets connected individual households in
ways that were often outside of—and not necessarily consonant with—
the good of the immediate community. Men might argue, as they had
in Northampton, Massachusetts, as early as 1668, that in trade “‘is the
advance of people’’; but increasingly it was a population of individuals
rather than a strongly bound community that constituted the definition
of ‘‘a people.”’ As the cultural definition of economic labor became more
individualistic, it also became narrower. Increasingly, labor that was not
directed to cash markets seemed questionable as a form of ‘‘economic”
activity. Indeed, by the mid—eighteenth century, Jared Eliot suggested
that monetary incentive was what distinguished work from sloth: the
absence of the prospect of a profit, he insisted, ‘“‘tends to enervate and
abate the Vigour and Zeal,” rendering the worker ‘“‘Indolent.” Far from
strengthening the spirit, labor without profit, it seems, had become a
threat to the character.”
Historian J. E. Crowley has suggested that these tensions between
the private good and the commonweal were at the heart of the religious
revivalism that spread through the colonies in the 1740s. The Great
Awakening, he argues, redefined “‘service” as “an attitude of mind,”
thus “‘providing a religious context for the secularization of the social
ethics of the calling.’’ That is, the revivals constituted a social ritual that
sanctioned the separation of the spiritual and the occupational aspects
of the concept of one’s ‘‘calling.’”” Employment was thus placed outside
of the realm of religious concerns, and ‘“‘service” outside of the realm
of material relations. The emerging formulation of “economy” as an
extra-household activity encouraged the perception that the work that
went on within the household—especially if it was work that did not at
some point realize an external cash value—was not a part of the material
ordering of social life. As Franklin’s famous maxim—‘‘a penny saved ts
a penny earned’’—suggests, the twin functions of conserving and en-
riching (the traditional basis of the household economy generally and
 An “Cconomical Society” 29
of housewifery specifically) continued to matter in the eighteenth-
century definition of economy, but they mattered chiefly in monetary
terms. Economic life, while still based in the family unit, was coming
to be seen as an activity shaped by individual interest, characterized by
market contact and money-making (the ‘‘penny’’), and focused on extra-
household activity—none of which well fitted the work of housewifery.
In this context, the patriarchal presumptions of colonial households
assumed a new meaning: to be a ‘“‘keeper at home,” as John Cotton
had instructed women, was not merely to recognize one’s subordination
to one’s husband, but to surrender to him all claim to economic activity
in the family enterprise.” By the eve of the Revolutionary crisis, social
and political position had indeed become determinative of the economic
status of women.
 Chapter II
“A New Source of Profit
and Support”

The Revolutionary War era brought to the Northeast the first of those
abrupt reversals that have periodically characterized the status of house-
work ever since: having been impugned in the 1740s as virtual parasites
on the family economy, by the 1760s and 1770s women suddenly found
themselves and their work in the household elevated to a position
of social and political preeminence. In the turmoil of the coming con-
flict, the Boston Evening Post declared in 1769, women would challenge
men “in contributing to the preservation and prosperity of their
country....” The Post cited approvingly a sermon that claimed that
in the discharge of their daily labor women possessed the power to
‘“‘recover to this country the full and free enjoyment of all our rights,
properties, and privileges....”’ Even after the outbreak of the war,
statesmen like John Adams would agree that the success of the rebel-
lion depended in large part on women’s economic efforts in their
households. '
However heady the language, this recognition of the importance of
women’s domestic labor would not survive the Revolutionary crisis.
Americans would continue to associate political independence with eco-
nomic agency. Indeed, the Revolutionary experience served to reinforce
that connection. But in the new republic, this conflation of political and
economic agency would be reserved for the work that men did—paid
work that was more and more often pursued outside of the household.
30
 ‘‘A New Source of Profit and Support” 31
The shift is illustrated by a 1789 petition of the associated tradesmen
and manufacturers of Boston requesting favorable tariff treatment from
Congress. Using language that was virtually identical to that of
the Evening Post twenty years earlier, the Boston group now argued
that ‘‘on the revival of our mechanical arts and manufactures depend
the wealth and prosperity of the Northern States....” As men as-
serted a unique association with wage-earning and with the health of
the economy, the tributes to women’s work would be replaced by a
narrower emphasis on their responsibilities as child-rearers and as the
shapers of the next generation. In this roller coaster of changing per-
ceptions were the first signs of a new and distinctly industrial culture of
gender in the northeastern United States, a culture in which “labor”
would become synonymous with wages, and wages synonymous with
manhood.’

The origins of the Revolutionary-era celebration of women’s work are

not immediately apparent. It was a sentiment that emerged in part in
the context of prewar boycotts and nonimportation agreements, a co-
incidence that might suggest that housework underwent a wartime con-
version and was newly valued for its productivity simply because it
became newly productive. Such a conclusion fails to withstand careful
scrutiny, however. Most of the affected goods were not items tradition-
ally produced by women, and they were not items that women suddenly
began to produce during the war. The important shortages were in
hardware, farming equipment, household utensils, livestock, and grain,
the products of men’s labor.
Equally important, colonial housewives had not ceased home pro-
duction in the preboycott years. Much of the new attention paid to
women’s work was focused on the production of yarn and homespun
cloth—labor that had persisted at a sufficiently high level through the
early eighteenth century to raise complaints from British agents in 1715
that the manufacture of homespun had ‘‘decreased the importation of
[English cloth by the New England] provinces above £50,000 [sterling]
per annum.”’ By 1748, when newspapers were heartily disparaging the
importance of women’s work, New England’s cloth production was ad-
equate to ‘‘clothe themselves and their neighbors.” To be sure, long
after the war, Tench Coxe would declare that ‘‘a great advance” in
manufactures had occurred between 1774 and 1782. In the main, how-
ever, the wartime expansion seems to have taken place in manufactures
other than those carried on by women in their homes, and particularly
in the production of steel, powder, salt, paper, glass, pottery, and some
32 HOME AND WORK
articles of ironware. Women may have been producing more cloth during
the Revolutionary period, but it was not so much the activity itself as
the notice the activity attracted that was different.”
Nor should the wartime attention paid to women as producers be
understood to reflect the movement of women into traditionally male
fields, such as farming. Many women did take over the management of
family farms when their husbands went to fight. But taking over
men’s work was not new to women during the Revolution. In their
‘deputy husband” role, colonial women had traditionally performed
aspects of the labor that theoretically belonged to men—with little no-
ticeable effect on their status as workers. Furthermore, Mary Beth Nor-
ton’s analysis of Loyalist women who filed postwar claims for property
losses suggests that many women did not assume additional “‘male”’
responsibilities during the war. Of 468 women who filed, only 71 were
able to provide sufficiently detailed information to be awarded com-
pensation for their losses in the colonies. The critical data missing from
their claims concerned such matters as property value, debts, and shop
accounts—precisely the information we would expect them to have
known had they assumed active management of their family estates
during the hostilities. There is no reason to think that these women’s
experiences differed significantly from those of their “rebel’’ counter-
parts; as Norton points out, ‘‘the 468 claimants included white women
of all descriptions, from every colony and all social and economic lev-
els... .”
The broad reevaluation of the importance of women’s domestic work
arose less from the economic than from the social relations of housework
during the Revolution. In a variety of ways and for various reasons, the
contribution made to material life by women in the course of their
regular domestic labor again became visible to their families, their com-
munities, and themselves. As it did, the culture’s definition of ‘“economic
labor’ once more expanded to include housework.
Although it was largely for the rights of private property that the
colonists fought, the ethos of the Revolutionary years represented a
striking return to mid-seventeenth-century values of the “common
weal” and to the right of the community to pass judgement on individual
behavior. When storekeepers hoarded goods, for example, the patriot
mobs simply stormed their shops and took what they wanted. For the
moment, individual enterprise had been subsumed by the corporate
good.”
This renewed communalism increasingly associated households with
the business of the larger community, an association that undermined
 ‘‘A New Source of Profit and Support’ 33
the tendency to see men as the whole of the household labor system.
Attempting to stabilize household economies during the war (and prob-
ably to limit household dependence on the community), the town of
Enfield, Connecticut, expressed its concern for the families of soldiers
by assuming control of the men’s pay: their wages were deposited in a
fund from which money could be withdrawn only with the permission
of the town.°
This permeability of the household was further enhanced by the gen-
eral patriotic fervor of the times. During the period of the nonimpor-
tation agreements, individual household consumption patterns became
a matter of absorbing community interest. Hearing of a home where
tea was being hoarded, the good citizens of Poughkeepsie determined
what they considered to be a fair price and helped themselves to the
family larder. Wives who refused to serve boycotted goods earned lavish
attention and approval from journalists and the clergy. Those who did
not, earned an equally public scorn. Although it was only with difficulty
that a wife separated herself from her husband’s political views, in the
management of her household she might establish the outlines of an
autonomous social identity.’
At the same time, the Revolution moved the point of consumption
of many of the products of women’s labor out of the individual house-
hold. Providing quilts, socks, mufflers, bandages, biscuit, and nursing
care for one’s husband was a personal economic relation. Provisioning
the same man in his capacity as a Continental soldier visibly served the
economic interests of the community, the state, the region, and the
nation. Indeed, both formally and informally, women were the shadow
‘‘quartermaster corps” of the Revolution. This role was reflected in
official acts of the new governments. As historian Linda Kerber has
pointed out, Revolutionary laws regulating production for the army were
sometimes framed in both the male and the female pronouns, rather
than (as had been the custom in colonial legislation) in the generic ‘‘he.”’
The shift in language signaled the revived cultural understanding that
women working in their households were important participants in the
economy.”
The deterioration of money as an exchange medium, and consequently
as an index of economic worth, supported this cultural shift. As specie
grew short and the value of Continental bills plummeted to a ratio of
100:1 (paper dollars to gold or silver) by 1780, labor once more became
the currency of fact. Abigail Adams wrote frequently to her husband
about the worthlessness of money, noting in 1777 that it “‘is lookd upon
of very little value, and you can scarcly purchase any article now but
34 HOME AND WORK
by Barter.” Indeed, economic life began to be measured by both official
and unofficial tables of barter equivalence. Of particular significance for
the economic visibility of women, the exchange values were often ex-
pressed in terms of traditionally female products. For example, all but
two of the barter equivalences for payment of a 1782 New Hampshire
tax were given in quantities of textile goods, traditionally women’s prod-
ucts. The remaining exchange standards were men’s “‘neat leather shoes”
and ‘‘good felt hats” —in the manufacture of both of which women often
had a hand.”
As labor process overwhelmed political and social structures, the def-
inition of ‘“‘“economy”’ itself underwent a temporary change. Boycotts
underscored the importance of labor aimed at avoiding the purchase of
goods and made that work a respectable as well as necessary part of
wartime considerations. Not only must dependence on English imports
be terminated for political ends, but the money that might be spent
paying for those goods must go to the prosecution of the war. As John
Adams wrote to Abigail in 1774: “Frugality must be our Support. Our
Expences, in this Journey, will be very great....’* Meanwhile, up-
heavals in trading patterns and the shortage of sound money helped
create conditions that emphasized the value of labor contribution (rather
than property ownership) in determining economic activity. These dis-
locations also recreated a similarity in men’s and women’s work by
returning men’s work to the barter nexus where women’s labor had, in
great part, remained. The Providence Gazette was accurate when it
affirmed that the colonies must “‘depend greatly upon the female sex
for the introduction of economy among us’’—for the stretching, skimp-
ing, and substituting that enabled the colonies to survive their own
revolution was an economic process far more familiar to women than
to men."”
By the late 1780s, nevertheless, little remained to suggest that, for a
time, northeasterners had considered women’s economic efforts to be
at the very heart of the struggle for political independence. As John
Adams had predicted, the founders of the new nation knew “better than
to repeal our Masculine systems.” In most of the new states, women
were excluded from political participation on direct grounds: suffrage
was limited to males.'' Once again, economic contribution did not reap
formal political rewards. Indeed, very nearly the reverse was true. In
the context of the emergent ideology of civic republicanism, women’s
exclusion from the franchise bore heavily on their status as economic
agents. Although domestic labor would remain crucial to the economy
of the Northeast—both to its individual households and communities
 ‘‘A New Source of Profit and Support” 35
and to the developing regional economy—the political culture of the
early republic reinforced late colonial tendencies to denigrate the con-
tributions of women to material life.

In many respects, the world in which northeastern households operated

and attempted to become viable after the Revolutionary War remained
essentially rural, and many of the old ways and resources still constituted
the wherewithal of family survival: a good settlement of land, a knowl-
edge of farming and housewifery, and a trading network for materials
and services to circulate through the community.”
At the same time, much had changed in the former colonies by the
end of the eighteenth century—changes that eroded the conditions under
which housework had become visible and valued during the Revolution.
Chief among these was the reemergence of the cash-based market. The
expansion of overseas commerce encouraged population growth in the
port cities, increased the complexity of their dependence on markets,
fed the coastal carrying trade, and gradually drew even rural households
to the cash market. There were other changes as well. Although it would
be several decades before capitalized manufacturing was established
with any great permanence in the Northeast, observers noted that almost
every neighborhood had its mechanical genius who was looking for a
better way to make nails or duck cloth or paper. Many communities
boasted operational, if small, manufactories. Traditional forms of home
industry both persisted and increased during this period. Ironically,
however, household manufacture often supported the incursions of cash
into the household economy, since such production not only added to
the supplies of the family but, in some instances, ‘‘yield{ed] a consid-
erable surplus for the use of other parts of the union.”
These often small and slow changes did not result in a family economy
that was cash-based. An enormous amount of domestic labor was still
required to convert the raw materials of a household into a living main-
tenance. The shifts did increase and give a more elaborate shape to the
ways the market touched family life, however. First, a growing variety
of services was obtained from outside the household. In addition to a
doctor, two school teachers, and hired agricultural workers, for example,
author Samuel Goodrich recalled that his parents’ comparatively pros-
perous turn-of-the-century rural Connecticut household had drawn upon
no fewer than eleven types of specialized laborers: a butcher, a tanner,
a fuller, a flax spinner, a wool spinner, a carpenter, a weaver, a tailor,
a shoemaker, mantua-makers, and milliners. Although Goodrich re-
membered the transactions as having occurred mainly in barter—‘‘meat,
36 | HOME AND WORK
vegetables, and other articles of use’’—their nature was probably more
complex. Travelling through New England in the post-Revolutionary
period, Englishman Joseph Hadfield remarked on the flaxseed operator
who charged ‘‘one quart or a sixth part of the produce for making it.”
At the same time, late—eighteenth-century diaries are filled with entries
denoting cash transactions: ‘“‘Received of Abigail Lyman the sum of
forty-three dollars & 2 shillings. In full of all demands for one year[’s]
service ending this day,’’ and ‘‘Mr. Savage made the irons for our loome.
I paid him 4 shillings in cash."’ Probably most common were transactions
that combined barter and cash relations: “‘he ... has got a good place
..., one writer explained, ‘‘10/a day & found that is in cloaths [,] bed[,]
fo{o]d & washing.’
Growing market contact reshaped both a family’s work and its pur-
chase patterns. Although most households still drew upon the same set
of basic resources that had characterized colonial households—land,
labor, cash, credit, and barter—the combinations were becoming more
elaborate and the role of cash was expanding. Even full-time farmers
worked with an eye to the market. By the late eighteenth century,
Massachusetts agriculture had become sufficiently commercial to sup-
port a lively traffic between country and city, with “professional teams-
ters’”’ carrying ‘‘wool, butter, [and] cheese”’ to the city, and returning
with loads of ‘‘salt, molasses, dry goods, [and] rum” to stock the country
stores; while farmers ‘‘took a trip or two yearly to market, carrying their
own produce, beef, pork, or whatever they had to sell, and returning
with articles for home consumption or for merchants.”’ According to J.
P. Brissot, many rural men were doubly linked to the market, working
as ‘both cultivators and artisans; one is a tanner, another a shoemaker,
another sells goods; but all are farmers.’’ Other men (perhaps a third
of the adult male population in some rural areas) owned no land and
were entirely wage earners. Most of these men probably worked as hired
agricultural laborers, but some of them were the butchers, weavers, and
peddlers who came to homes like Samuel Goodrich’s."°
In the cities, cash became even more central to decisions concerning
family welfare. Visiting in Boston in 1797, Abigail Brackett Lyman wrote
that her husband was “much engaged... .in making money” and com-
mented: ‘‘[W]hen the former stopes we must all retreat. For you know
there is no way of living in this town without Cash.’ William Bentley
argued that it was the lure of cash that siphoned people off the land
into late—eighteenth-century cities: “‘10 families enter Salem, for one
that retires into the Country, with this difference that the families which
come from the country are commonly young enterprising tradesmen,
 ‘‘A New Source of Profit and Support”’ 37
while those which retire are generally possessed of a competence, which
they hope to enjoy more at their ease or with less expence & hazard.”’
Although some men involved themselves in the operation of small family
garden plots or in the raising of hogs and chickens, most urban husbands
made the bulk of their contribution to the household in the form of
cash-earning—from commerce, unskilled manual labor, craftwork, or
shopkeeping. In these capacities, they provided their families either with
cash directly or with credit contacts that could function as cash for the
purpose of obtaining raw materials."
Cash-earning was not confined to men, however. In poor urban house-
holds, wives often engaged in regular or near-regular wage employment.
Some married black women and probably a smaller portion of married
white women hired out as domestic servants and washerwomen, earning
meals and a shilling or two in cash each day. Women became midwives
and ‘‘doctresses” to their neighborhoods. When she had the skill, a
woman might go out as a seamstress. Other women worked at piece-
rate both in and out of urban manufactories. As early as 1788, Brissot
commented on the number of mariners’ wives who took employment
in Boston’s cordage industry during ‘“‘the long voyages of their sea-faring
husbands.”’ Some wives from poor urban households took up more or
less permanent and regular occupations as hucksters, circulating through
streets and market areas, selling everything from coffee, chocolate, and
muffins to “roots, berries, herbs, ... birds, fish [or] clams” they had
collected on the beaches and outskirts of the city.'’
Wives of urban artisans, marketmen, and shopkeepers were also ag-
gressively present in cash and credit work. Because the larger resources
of their households often enabled them to keep a garden, a few animals,
or some fowl, these women sometimes went to the market as ‘‘green-
women,” vending their own fruit, vegetables, butter, and eggs. Like
New York’s Mary Simpson, a woman might open a small shop to sell
“cookies, pies, and sweetmeats of her own manufacture. ...’’ Some-
times women operated small businesses in sundries, retailing needles,
pins, and combs. From these means, along with the husband’s income,
a family might save enough money to purchase or rent a larger dwelling.
This in turn became additional capital for the wife’s work; a residence
could either be converted into a full-fledged inn or boardinghouse, or
could be used for taking in a “private” boarder or two, for whom the
wife cleaned, cooked, and sometimes washed."
In addition to the money they earned in their own right, women who
were married to artisans or small shopkeepers frequently participated
in their husbands’ businesses. Anna Bryant Smith of Portsmouth, Maine,
38 HOME AND WORK
waited on customers and helped purchase the stock for her husband’s
shop. She was, she confided to her diary, both “Maid about house, &
Cleark in the store.”’ The wife of Andrew Paff, a butcher in Catharine
Market in New York City, ““brought down his breakfast, and while he
was eating she would attend [the customers]”; when Andrew was fin-
ished, she packed up the breakfast utensils and pushed them home in
the wheelbarrow her husband used to carry meat to the market each
morning. It was not uncommon for the wives of butchers to help slaugh-
ter and cut the meat for the market. Similarly, wives of cobblers routinely
bound and closed the shoes their husbands made."”
Rural life enabled a family to provide more of its own goods and
services and so took some of the pressure off the cash and credit cycles
that drove late—eighteenth-century urban households. At the same time,
the evidence points overwhelmingly to the involvement of country
women in market-based operations. Rural wives spun and wove and
made lace, hats, and handkerchiefs, either for sale or on account to a
local shopkeeper. Some women did spinning for the manufactories that
were beginning to dot the countryside. Particularly if their families lived
close to a larger town or city, wives might travel to the urban market
to sell their own fruit, vegetables, eggs, butter, cheese, or milk. Long
Island egg-women commonly paid their ferry passage to Manhattan with
a percentage of their produce. In the country, as in the city, wives hired
out their skills at spinning, weaving, baking, and cleaning to other
households.”
Women’s household manufacturing was not always for a local market.
Living in Creekvale, New York, in 1815, Mary Ann Archbald’s family
purchased ‘‘a spinning machine for wool [perhaps a jenny] to spin with
16 threads at once.” In addition to “blankets & cloth for the family,”
Archbald produced ‘“‘five handsom fine pieces for sale.”’ But an over-
stocked local market required that ‘‘we must send it off to N[ew] York.”
Wethersfield, Connecticut, women cultivated the onions known as
‘‘Wethersfield Reds,’’ which were sold up and down the East Coast and
shipped as far away as the West Indies.*'
In Maine, Martha Moore Ballard’s household responsibilities illus-
trate the important involvement of rural women in cash transactions.
Ballard’s husband was a farmer, surveyor, and sawmill operator, and
Ballard herself was a midwife. In many ways, the patterns of her work
resembled those that had characterized the lives of colomal women.
While much of her labor occurred within her household, both as a
midwife and as a housewife Ballard also engaged in exchanges that took
her beyond the boundaries of her family. In both roles, Martha
 ‘A New Source of Profit and Support’ 39
Ballard sometimes conducted her transactions in the barter system of
the colonial period. When she hired Mr. Hallowell to mend her pewter
in December of 1785, Ballard paid him three pecks of corn. When she
served as midwife to the birth of the Williams’ child, she received in
payment “6 gallons rhum, 2 Ibs. coffee, 5 Ibs. sugar and some tobacco
and 1 Y bush. salt.””
But Ballard was also actively involved in cash exchanges. Her diary
indicates that she often received money for her services as a midwife:
seven shillings for service and medicine for Mrs. Springer, six shillings,
eightpence for the difficult delivery of the Sewall’s third child, six shill-
ings for the delivery of the Brown’s daughter. Ballard made money in
other ways, too. In the summer of 1803, for example, she earned six
shillings, sevenpence baking and two shillings shocking stalks for a neigh-
bor. Ballard also paid money out: thirteen shillings for a spinning wheel,
two shillings, ninepence for textile cards, six shillings for “some cam-
brick,” three shillings for a bushel of apples, and two shillings for having
her wash done.” The importance of these transactions to Ballard is
indicated by her careful periodic tallies: ‘“‘In 1794, I received 20 Ibs., 10
shillings, 9 pence. In 1[7]95, I received 18 Ibs, 7 shillings, 7 2 pence.
In 1796, I received 19 Ibs., 8 shillings, 6 '4 pence. In 1797, I received
20 Ibs,. 7 shillings, 4 “2 pence.”
Ballard kept equally close track of the cash she spent for various goods
and services: ‘In 1794 I paid 19 Ibs., 11 shillings, 9 pence. In 1795 I
paid 14 Ibs., 14 shillings, 4 pence. In 1796 I paid 15 Ibs., 7 shillings, 1
% pence. In 1797 I paid 20 Ibs. , 6 shillings, 8 ‘4 pence.’’ The expenditures
were not incidental to her household’s overall economy. Like her hus-
band’s earnings, Ballard’s helped to purchase the tools, food, raw ma-
terials, and finished goods her family required: brooms, coffee, a
handkerchief, knives and forks, needles, pins, fabric, the services of a
weaver, a cloth-dresser, a chair-bottomer, and several household
workers.”
Whether obtained through the labor of the husband or the wife,
however, purchased goods and services did not constitute the whole of
the household economy. Raw grain was not bread; a length of cloth was
not a shirt; and a fish was not a broth to feed a family. There was still
the business of converting what came into the household into a stable
system of consumables. Martha Moore Ballard manufactured candles,
soap, pickles, and sausage, and brewed beer. She hatcheled and combed
flax, carded cotton, picked and pulled wool, and spun shoe thread. She
made blankets, quilts, leggings, nightcaps, mittens, and hose.”
Moore also kept a garden where she produced much of her family’s
40 HOME AND WORK
food: onions, beans, corn, cabbage, and winter squash. She kept currant
bushes, apple trees, and a strawberry patch, and gathered wild straw-
berries. Her turkeys and chickens yielded, not only meat and eggs for
the table, but also feathers for stuffing mattresses and pillows. From the
cows she tended came milk, cheese, and butter.’
Other women documented similar activities. On October 10, 1807,
Mary Ann Archbald noted that, ‘after being bussy for some time,’’ she
‘had just got all the family clad in cloth of my own spinning.” Archbald’s
letters from rural New York to friends and family in Scotland also record
that she picked and preserved apples, tended a garden, raised chickens,
and preserved “meat of every kind” for her family’s consumption.
Learning housewifery from her mother in the 1790s, Elizabeth Fuller
of Princeton, Massachusetts, made pies, sausages, and cheese; picked,
broke, and carded fibers; spun yarn, wove cloth, sewed and quilted
clothing, and made candles. Her mother worked with her in all these
activities and also made clothing and manufactured soap. Other women
produced sugar, syrup, butter, bread, pickles, lard, mittens and hosiery,
quilts, carpets, bedding and household linens, cider, and beer for their
families.”
By manufacturing directly for their families, women enabled their
households to increase their independence from the cash market. The
monetary importance of this work was occasionally made explicit in the
letters of turn-of-the-century Americans. Mary Archbald wrote to her
cousin in Scotland that, in New York, her spinning and weaving were
‘“‘more thrift than 1t was at home as wool and woolen cloath of all kinds
is high priced & of a bad quality."’ John Pintard (who considered $1,000
a year “a slender stipend” and whose household included hired domestic
servants) noted that the coat his daughter was making him “will be
better than those purchased at the sale stores, & less than half price.
... What an immense difference in expenditure.”
As had been the case in the colonial period, a household’s overall
economic standing determined the specific shape of a woman’s labor.
The amount and types of family-directed home production engaged in
by a given woman depended on the amounts and types of resources
available in her household. Whether she lived in the city or the country,
a poor woman was unlikely to have at hand the quantities of raw ma-
terials necessary to spur extensive home manufacture or food-preser-
vation activities. At the same time, poor families stood in especially
urgent need of the benefits of this type of purchase-avoidance work.
Those benefits were realized through scavenging rather than manufac-
turing. In the city, women needed a sharp eye for discarded items, and
 ‘‘A New Source of Profit and Support"’ 41
a knack for the skillful intermeshing of the help available from charity
institutions. From the former might come rocks to build a fire grate,
wood or fat to burn, bits of food, old clothing, furniture, or tools; from
the latter, a woman might obtain firewood, food, coupons for food, or
even cash. Rural women foraged for berries and wood chips, cut pine
knots to burn in place of candles, dragged trees out of the forest to serve
as Clotheslines, and provided the ‘hand unknown” that stripped many
a fruit tree in the autumn.”
Wives in elite urban households—women whose husbands were
professionals or successful merchants, for example—appear to have
done less household manufacturing than the wives of farmers, trades-
men, and mechanics. Still, they were not entirely outside of this system
of home industry. At the turn of the century, Abigail Brackett Lyman
counted among her responsibilities both plain and fancy sewing, tailor-
ing, and making butter. Writing to his elder daughter from New York
City in the second decade of the nineteenth century, John Pintard por-
trayed a wife and younger daughter who sewed, tailored, preserved
food, cooked, and baked.”
With the exception of wives in very wealthy families, turn-of-the-
century women in all places and of all groups in the Northeast also
provided much of the daily maintenance required to keep a household
operating. Most women cooked for their families—sometimes with help,
often without it. Even Mary Ann Archbald, who declared that ‘‘there
is nothing I like so ill as cooking,” and counted herself fortunate to have
daughters who did most of the kitchen work, was unable to avoid doing
some of the cooking herself. To women also fell the daily labor of
trimming the candles, tending the fires, cleaning the house, and washing,
ironing, mending and putting away clothes and linens, as well as much
of the basic care of the dwelling proper. To draw an illustration from
the economic extreme, Pintard took it as a matter of course that his
wife and daughter would lime the basement, attend to basic carpentry
and to the whitewashing of the fences, and clear and clean “‘the yards
and borders.” When needed, Mary Ann Archbald also served as the
family veterinarian, resuscitating sick livestock.”
Different women organized their work differently. Like Archbald,
Martha Moore Ballard appears to have delegated much of the clothes
washing, cleaning, and cooking to others, either her daughters or paid
help. She noted on January 4, 1793: “I have washt the first washing I
have done without help this several years.”” But even Ballard did not
| escape the routine labor of maintaining a household: she cut firewood,
built fences, baked, bleached, mended, shoveled snow, scoured flat-
42 HOME AND WORK
ware, and scoured rooms. Like those of most other women of her period,
Ballard’s contributions to her family combined cash-earning with unpaid
labor that mediated between household interests and the cash market

day.” ,
while also keeping the family nourished and functioning from day to

Despite the enormous size of the workload undertaken by turn-of-the-

century women as part of their obligations to their households, and
despite the persisting importance of that work to family well-being, by
the opening of the nineteenth century, prescriptive literature addressed
to women accorded a vastly diminished role to their work in the house-
hold economy. The “Genius of Liberty” that had once resided in
women’s material contributions to home and state now ‘“‘hover[ed]
triumphant” over their role as child-rearers. “‘Let us then figure to
ourselves the accomplished woman,” suggested the speaker at Colum-
bia’s 1795 commencement, “surrounded by a sprightly band, from the
babe that imbibed the nutritive fluid, to the generous youth just npening
into manhood...”’:
Let us contemplate the mother distributing the mental nourishment to
the fond smiling circle, by means proportionate to their different powers
of reception, watching the gradual openings of their minds, and studying
their various turns of temper; see, under her cultivating hand, reason
assuming the reins of government, and knowledge increasing gradually to
her beloved pupils. ... Already may we see the lovely daughters of Co-
lumbia asserting the importance of their sex. ...
‘‘While you thus keep our country virtuous,” the speaker declared, ‘‘you
maintain its independence.”™
Designated by historians ‘‘the ideology of Republican motherhood,”
this emphasis on women’s role in child-rearing had some roots in de-
mography. The new nation was a nation of children: in 1800, 34.6 percent
of the population was nine years old or younger, and visitors to New
England frequently commented on the importance that parents attached
to their children—an importance that Brissot found ‘‘almost idolatrous.”’
In rural areas, and especially among families who owned their own land,
the rearing of children past infancy was still accomplished mainly by the
parent of the same sex. Mary Ann Archbald’s letters describe this world
of sex-segregated labor—her husband and son working in the fields,
‘riding home firewood, filling the icehouse with ice &c{.],"° while she
and her daughters tended the chickens, cooked, spun, and preserved
food. Nevertheless, there are indications that these patterns had begun
to change. In her study of attitudes toward child-rearing in the late
 ‘‘A New Source of Profit and Support” 43
eighteenth century, historian Ruth Bloch has discovered a shift in the
depiction of fathers in published prescriptive literature; by 1800, fathers
had not only lost their earlier role as the primary instructors of children,
but had begun to disappear from the literature altogether.”
What is of chief significance to the history of housework, however,
is that Republican motherhood emphasized women’s child-rearing re-
sponsibilities almost to the exclusion of the remainder of their work—
a vision of domestic labor which was sharply at odds with the reality of
their lives. While their letters and diaries suggest that some wealthy
women may have focused their time and attention largely on the rearing
of their children, for most women, as historian Lisa Norling has pointed
out, “[c}hildcare was just one task, no more or less important, among
many.””°
The full significance of the ideology of Republican motherhood for
the visibility of women’s labor is evident only in the context of the rise
of the political culture of civic republicanism in eighteenth-century
America. To the extent that historians have assessed the meaning of
civic republicanism for women (beyond the emergence of the ideology
of Republican motherhood), they have focused their attention on the
impact of the Revolution in expanding women’s legal rights to prop-
erty.’ More telling, if more diffuse, was that the ideology of civic re-
publicanism revived a rationale for denying women’s significance as
economic agents. In this sense, civic republicanism was a transitional
gender ideology, bridging the old notions of rural patriarchy and nine-
teenth-century industrial ideologies of the male breadwinner.
Even the strongest supporters of republicanism in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century England and British North America feared for the
safety of a form of government that depended on the potentially ca-
pricious will of its people. The survival of the republic was presumed
to require a number of specific attributes in its citizens—among them,
a commitment to the commonweal, industriousness, virtue, and a love
of equality. But the most critical characteristic of the republican citi-
zenry, and the one all the others rested on, was its economic inde-
pendence: citizens of the republic must not be susceptible either to
bribery, to threats, or to promises of wealth. Indeed, ‘‘citizenship”’ in
the new Republic was directly contingent upon economic standing. Not
only did the federal constitution privilege the rights of property own-
ership, but even the most liberal of the new state constitutions (that of
Pennsylvania) included economically based restrictions on voting.”®
Some level of property ownership had been a common qualification
for formal political participation in the colonies, but the political culture
44 HOME AND WORK
of civic republicanism elevated the association of political and economic
identities to a new level of social importance and invested it with a new
social urgency—with profound implications for the gender culture of
the new nation. European and colonial culture had traditionally defined
females as economic dependents, not only on the basis of actual indi-
vidual dependence, but categorically, on the grounds that females as a
group were irresponsible and required male political and economic su-
pervision. Embracing this presumption about women, who were rou-
tinely included in the lists of categorical dependents, civic republicanism
reinvigorated traditional Euro-American patriarchalism.
At the same time, civic republicanism supported the growing cultural
predisposition in the colonies and new Republic, not simply to conceive
of women as economic dependents, but to deny that they contributed
to the household economy at all. Indeed, this dimension of civic re-
publicanism may in part account for its broad attractiveness to men in
the eighteenth-century colonies. In a technical sense, economic inde-
pendence was evidenced by property ownership or the payment of taxes.
In a more diffuse cultural sense, however, economic independence was
evidenced by the presence of economic dependents. The true citizen of
the Republic was the man upon whom others depended; his economic
obligations to subordinates both expressing and solidifying his commit-
ment to the common good of the Republic. To the extent that household
members asserted autonomous economic identities, the household
head’s claim to the status of citizen was undermined. Conversely, to the
extent that males laid exclusive claim to economic agency within their
households, they buttressed their position in the new political order.
The diminishing recognition accorded to women’s domestic labor
other than child-rearing was part of a more general revolution in per-
ceptions in the early national period. That revolution occurred simul-
taneously on two fronts. On one hand, cash-earning became more and
more closely identified with economic activity; unpaid labor, or labor
did not bring cash profit, became marginal to the definition of economic
agency. At the same time, husbands became more and more closely
associated with cash-earning. While these changes certainly reflected the
early stages of the transformation to industrial capitalism, what they did
not accurately reflect was the full range of activities necessary to provide
for family survival. In particular, they obscured the considerable portion
of that labor—paid and unpaid—that was being provided by wives.
Some of the timetables that would lead to this end had been in place
since long before the Revolution and (the celebrations of housework
 ‘‘A New Source of Profit and Support” 45
during the war notwithstanding) had been further ratified by it. The
communal rhetoric of wartime, which had helped reveal the labor dy-
namics inside the family, had been in direct contradiction to the values
the colonies contended for, particularly private property and freedom
from unwanted intrusion into economic affairs. Unsurprisingly, the
ethos of community surveillance did not long outlast the war. To the
contrary, by the latter years of the conflict, speculation in money and
land were on the rise, watchdog committees were having a difficult time
implementing wage and price guidelines, and many citizens were utterly
disenchanted with emergency confiscations of food and clothing. Linda
Kerber has speculated that, if anything, the household disruptions fos-
tered by the war encouraged a new conservatism—a tendency to idealize
the sanctity of the individual home.”
The visibility of women’s unpaid labor during the Revolutionary pe-
riod had also been supported by the temporary failure of money as a
meaningful index of economic worth. Those conditions persisted for a
time after the war. Separation from Great Britain had come at the price
of tens of millions of dollars in foreign loans and, by 1779, an internal
issue of paper money of almost two million dollars. By the eve of the
ratification of the Constitution, both state and Continental currencies
were depreciating wildly; the resumed importation of English goods was
succeeding in draining off the nation’s specie; and the international credit
of the new nation seemed on the edge of collapse.“
The Federalist response to these problems was a large-scale involve-
ment of the national government in the fiscal life of the society: the
assumption by the federal government of state war debts, the funding
of the old currency, the minting of new currency, and the development
of new sources of national revenue. These strategies amounted to a
federal policy emphasis on ‘‘active wealth, or, in other words, moneyed
capital.”’ It was an important step in the creation of a culture in which
only paid labor was comprehended as a part of the economy.*'
Nowhere is this intrusion of the Federal government into the discourse
on “economy” more evident than in Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 ‘‘Re-
port on Manufactures.’’ Less a survey of existing manufacturing in the
United States than an argument for extensive future capital investment,
the ‘“‘Report” constituted a monumental redefinition of the concept of
‘‘manufacturing” in American economic culture, and in that, of ‘“‘econ-
omy” itself. Traditionally, ‘“‘manufacturing” had been a term with mul-
tiple references. In the correspondence leading to the “‘Report,” for
example, Peter Colt of Hartford, Connecticut, had felt compelled to
46 HOME AND WORK
clarify which forms of manufacturing he was discussing: ‘““The Manu-
factures of this State naturally present themselves to our view under the
following Heads,” he wrote:
Those carried on in Families merely for the consumption of those Fam-
ilies;—those carried on in the like manner for the purpose of barter or
sale; & those carried on by tradesmen, single persons, or Companies for
Supplying the wants of others, or for the general purpose of merchandize,
or Commerce.

Written in 1791, Colt’s description fitted well with the concept of “‘man-
ufacturing” as Martha Moore Ballard or Mary Ann Archbald would
have understood it.”
To a degree, this same spectrum of meaning was evident in Hamilton’s
‘‘Report”—but with an important difference. Hamilton was interested
in Colt’s first category, family-directed manufacturing, solely as an early
and imperfect stage of development, deserving of mention only because
it had the potential to evolve to that “degree of maturity” in which
manufacturing is geared toward exchange outside of the household. But
even barter exchange outside of the household was depicted as a flawed
form of commerce. Although Hamilton ostensibly wished only to dem-
onstrate that manufacturing could be as useful as farming in enhancing
the ‘“‘maintenance...of citizens,” his overriding interest was in “the
total produce and revenue of society,” with produce and revenue here
deemed virtually indistinguishable. Only goods that created revenue
were included in Hamilton’s conception of “the total produce... of
society.’’ What attracted Hamilton about manufacturing was its potential
as a component of a cash market network; that is, as it conformed to
Colt’s third definition. Gradually, over the course of the document,
“manufacturing” became synonymous with “capitalized manufactur-
ing” —manufacturing “for the general purpose of merchandize,”’ in
Colt’s lexicon. Ultimately, Hamilton attributed a “superiority of...
productiveness” to labor whose product was, not subsistence, but cir-
culating revenue.”
The implications of this line of argument for women’s domestic work
were evident throughout Hamilton’s “Report.” The labor that a woman
spent in manufacture for her family was gradually set in opposition to
“productive” work: “The husbandman himself,’’ Hamilton insisted,
“experiences a new source of profit and support, from the increased
industry of his wife and daughters, invited and stimulated by the de-
mands of the neighboring manufactories.”’ Echoing the rationale of the
1751 Boston Society for Encouraging Industry and Employing the
 ““A New Source of Profit and Support’’ 47
Poor—that ‘cour own women and children. . . are now in great measure
idle” —Hamilton concluded that “‘[i]t is worthy of particular remark that,
in general, women and children are rendered more useful... by man-
ufacturing establishments, than they would otherwise be.”’ The denial
of the value of women’s domestic labor was once more being enlarged
into a denial of the social usefulness of women themselves.“
This ideological separation of women’s non—market-based labor from
“productive” labor evolved throughout the last decade of the eighteenth
century, and the first several of the nineteenth. In his 1792 “‘Reflections
on the State of the Union,” for example, Tench Coxe in effect defined
‘‘agriculture” as farming for the market, not as land-based household
subsistence, and so was able to conclude that women played no part in
rural economic life: ‘““The objection, that manufactures take the people
from agriculture,” he insisted, “‘is not solid... since women, children,
horses, water and fire, all work at manufactures, and perform four-fifths
of the labour... .’’ Coxe’s implication that the labor of women was
comparable to that of fire and water—forces of nature—would reappear
as a central theme in nineteenth-century views of housework; but for
the moment the important feature of his writing was its association of
ideas of the useful and productive with the cash market. In his 1787
“Address to the Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures and
the Useful Arts,” for example, Coxe focused entirely on goods “in our
own markets.”” When he published the speech in 1794, he appended his
opinion that among the great values in manufacturing was the advantage
that ““women, valetudinarians, and old men, could be employed; . . . the
portions of time of housewives and young women which were not oc-
cupied in family affairs, could be profitably filled up.”” Although he did
acknowledge the existence of women’s family responsibilities, Coxe con-
sidered that work meager enough to leave women with a substantial
amount of free time. It would be almost half a century before the relative
valuations of work implied in this passage would become dominant
enough to create clearly differentiated gender languages—consistent
distinctions between men’s paid work and women’s ‘‘family affairs.’ But
analyses like Coxe’s helped formulate them. In the process would be
lost the voices of women who, like Martha Moore Ballard, continued
to insist that ‘“‘{a] woman’s work is never done, as the song says, and
happy is she whos[e] strength holds out to the end of the rais [rays].’”*°
The new economic discourse was not limited to individuals directly
concerned with the market or with the encouragement of capitalized
manufacturing, however. In 1793, John Cosens Ogden, pastor of Con-
cord, New Hampshire, addressed his congregation on the subject of
48 HOME AND WORK
women’s education. Well within the clerical tradition of female pre-
scriptive literature, Ogden’s sermon affirmed that “home is the mother’s
province” and based its proposal for female education on that assump-
tion. What distinguished this exposition from its predecessors, however,
was that the domestic labor that interested Ogden was solely the part
that was destined for the market, “‘those useful and necessary branches
of industry which are peculiar to their sex .. . [and which] furnish... a
source of wealth and profit.” The value of a woman’s spinning was that
“‘{b]y this she is furnished with a means to open a merchandize.”’ The
value of her gardening was that she might come to know the market
value of land. Women’s traditional work-swapping and bartering, mean-
while, were functional chiefly for what they might teach about com-
merce, “which gives her the productions of distant regions.’’ Strikingly
absent from this encomium of the “‘useful and necessary” was the non-
market-based labor of housework. In fifty pages, there was scarcely a
mention of baking, cooking, cleaning, sewing, or even child-rearing.
Only work that earned cash and further access to the cash market was
“visible.”
Also of interest in Ogden’s sermon was the recurrence of the theme,
touched on by Coxe, that, while men must learn their business and
cultivate their abilities, women’s work comes to them naturally. ‘“‘The
peculiar nature of the occupations of women,’’ Ogden observed, ‘‘gives
them every necessary art, at a much earlier period in life than men can
obtain a knowledge of the laborious and extensive business that naturally
falls to their share.’”’ Somewhat contradictorily in a tract on female
education, little education seemed necessary, for women’s skills were
reduced to being a function simply of age and gender. Ultimately, the
tract undercut its own argument. After all is said, the wife remained
simply “‘one of those guardian angels, who... attend around the good
in this world.’”’”’
The growing invisibility of the economic value of women’s domestic
work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not merely
a function of the power of prescriptive literature, however. The daily
experiences of family life also created the conditions necessary for the
new ideologies of capital and market value to take root.
While some merchants had windfall profits from the expansion of
trading opportunities immediately after the Revolution and later during
the Napoleonic Wars, for many families these were times of general
disorientation punctuated by periods of severe distress. The growing
importance of cash to the family did not make household economies
 ‘A New Source of Profit and Support” 49
fully market based, but it did measurably increase household sensitivity
to the vagaries of the market. And vagaries aplenty there were. Prices
rose steadily: a bushel of Indian corn that cost 67 cents in 1786 cost
$1.08 in 1800 and $2.00 in 1813. Potatoes went from 17 cents a bushel
in 1784, to 36 cents a bushel in 1800, to 62 cents a bushel in 1813.
Molasses tripled in cost between 1785 and 1813, and salt doubled. The
cost of wood rose by 1,100 percent. Currency finally stabilized, but access
to it was not evenly distributed throughout the society. The banking
system Alexander Hamilton had encouraged was not designed to meet
rural needs. Even in urban areas, the proportion of wealth controlled
by the bottom sixty percent of the population dropped between 1771
and 1790 to less than five percent.”
Market fluctuations were particularly hard on urban families, to which
the husband’s contribution was more exclusively in cash. Dips in com-
merce, such as those that characterized the credit crises of the late 1780s
and the embargo of 1807, meant widespread under- and unemployment
among mariners, laborers, and mechanics, in whose households half the
family resources might thus be slashed off at a single stroke. Their
vulnerability was not confined to periods of crisis, however. As Matthew
L. Davis noted at the time, by the close of the eighteenth century,
the necessaries of life had progressively risen . . .in many particulars be-
yond what was ever remembered before... . [T]he rise of mechanical la-
bour had by no means been equal. . . . The one had risen in many instances,
an hundred per cent. While the other, generally speaking, had not risen
more than twenty-five to thirty. The rent of houses had also nearly dou-
bled... .”
The observation is generally borne out by available wage data: wages
were not keeping pace with the prices of goods the wages were supposed
to cover.”
The pressure on cash resources was not confined to the households
of journeymen and laborers, however. By 1801, master bakers in New
York City were protesting that cost increases had completely offset their
profits. Meanwhile, master shoemakers struggled to stay even with the
costs of production by denying wage hikes to their employees; and
chandlers, soap makers, and textile manufacturers repeatedly petitioned
Congress to hold down the costs of their raw materials. Caught between
two systems of exchange, domestic merchants also felt the pinch. As
John Mix, Jr., of New Haven explained the problem: ‘‘{T]he retailer in
general sells his goods for Produce; therefore he will not give us our
50 HOME AND WORK
Price, in Cash{.] [W]e are oblidged to... Barter... for articles which
we are oblidged to make a very great discount to get them Into money
again... for we Cannot Purchase one Oz of Stock without money{.]’’*'
In the countryside as well as the city, there were signs of a growing
anxiety over the impact of the market on the household economy. AIl-
though farm prices rose through the early part of the period, they leveled
off in the mid 1790s and did not improve significantly after that time.
Meanwhile, farm costs climbed—the cost of land and farm wages, par-
ticularly. Visitors to the Northeast found farmers complaining bitterly
about their growing tax burden, which, in the experience of one couple
who had come to the United States to escape starvation, meant there
was “‘little difference between this country and Ireland.”” One measure
of the growing market-dependence of rural households may be farmers’
willingness to travel longer and longer distances to sell their goods.
Another may be the new practice, in towns like Augusta, Maine, and
Princeton, Massachusetts, of paying ministers’ salaries entirely in cash.
Since the clergy also received land for farming as part of their orig-
inal settlement in a community, the conversion to currency may have
reflected an increased need for cash even in land-based household
economies.””
Given this pressure on the cash-based dimension of household econ-
omies and the special republican association of men with cash, it is not
surprising that as mechanics, shopkeepers, and small manufacturers be-
gan to articulate the survival problems faced by their households, they
framed their protests and memorials in language that depicted male
cash-earning as the whole of the economic system. By 1801, for example,
the mechanics and merchants of New York City and Providence would
suggest that not only did the general ‘“‘prosperity of a State’? depend
exclusively on the market activities within it, but that “the industry of
its inhabitants [and] their usefulness to each other’’ consisted solely in
the degree of their engagement in market activities. The echoes of
Hamilton were growing strong.”
Embedded in this assertion of the primacy of market-based labor was
an assertion, shared across a broad class spectrum, that waged work
represented the entire labor system of the household, and that that
waged labor was exclusively men’s. The Journeymen Hatters of New
York complained “‘[t}hat your petitioners ...did expect, by their in-
dustry and attention to that art, to gain an honest livelihood for them-
selves and families....” The seamen who met at City Hall in 1808
sought “wages which may enable them to support their families,” and
the journeymen cordwainers tried in 1809 for conspiracy and unlawful
 ‘“‘A New Source of Profit and Support” 51
combination argued “that the wage rates contended for... were rea-
sonable, and no higher than to afford them a bare maintenance’”’ for
their households.™
Although the absence of agricultural combinations during this time
makes it somewhat more difficult to trace, a similar perspective began
to mark discussions of rural life. ‘‘Farming”’ was construed to be a market
activity, and only the portion of the farm labor that contributed products
directly to the market was included in this category. Coxe had suggested
as much in his 1782 “Reflections on the State of the Union.” In the
same year, Crevecoeur published Letters from an American Farmer,
which also depicted the rural household as market-dependent: ‘100
bushels [of wheat] being but a common quantity for an industrious family
to sell....”’ By the early 1790s, agricultural tracts had begun to make
this changing concept of the farm explicit. In his essay Rural Economy
(printed in the United States in 1792), Arthur Young dismissed the
“frugality” that lay at the heart of subsistence farming as “‘but a narrow
idea.’ He argued instead for a concept of a “rural economy” that was
both rationalized and fully market-based—a ‘“‘system of GENERAL MAN-
AGEMENT’ in which prices and acres planted were carefully calculated
to realize the greatest profit possible. By the end of the century, rural
produce dealers in New York markets petitioned for altered regulations
on the grounds that their cash earnings, which were being interrupted,
were “the support’ of their families.
It was not only men for whom an awareness of the impact of the
market led to a conflation of ‘“‘cash income” and subsistence. Women’s
private diaries and letters suggest that they also discounted their con-
tribution to the economic needs of their families. During this period,
for example, some wives began to draw a distinction between the labor
of cooking, cleaning, and washing, and the other work they performed—
particularly work that created goods associated with the market, whether
the goods were actually sold or not. The former was often clustered
together, undifferentiated, under the category “housework”: ‘‘Ma began
to spin . . . [I] do the housework,” for example, and “I finished knitting
...and mended Dickey’s stockings. ... Hannah did housework, the
other girls turning cotton sheets and other mending.”’”’
Some women failed altogether to see the value of their own economic
contribution. Lydia Almy, of Salem, Massachusetts, who wove, at-
tended to livestock, made cider, carted wood, tanned skins, took in
boarders, and sometimes worked in the fields, nevertheless recorded in
her diary that she was “in no way due any thing towards earning my
liveing which seems rather to distress my mind knowing that my dear
52 HOME AND WORK
husband [a mariner] must be exposed to wind and weather and many
hardships whilst I am provided for in the best manner.”’ Separated from
her husband, Henry, by the War of 1812, New Englander Mary Lee
wrote, “I know not why the wife should not work a little as well as the
husband labour so hard.” She begged him to “return to me and give
me the delightful occupation of attending you’’"—apparently a different
category of activity from his “labour.” From very early on in her daugh-
ter’s life, moreover, Lee inculcated in the child a similar consciousness
of the superiority of men’s cash-based labor. “I have lately hit upon a
method to make her feel her dependence on you,”’ Mary informed her
husband:

I had noticed that she understood the use of money, and one day when
she wanted some cracker ...I gave it to her and then asked if she knew
who gave it to her. She, of course, answered—mama—I told her “‘yes,
but who do you think gives it to mama?” This puzzled her and I told her
‘“‘papa”—then enumerated the clothes, etc. purchased for her and me—
she was highly delighted, and now never mentions buying anything without
recollecting, and saying ‘‘papa buy.”

She declared herself ‘‘very much pleased with the success of it.”’**
The War of 1812, which is generally considered the end boundary of
this period, provides a measure of how deeply the cultural meanings of
‘‘labor,”’ ‘manufacturing,’ and ‘“‘the economy” had altered over the first
quarter-century of United States history. By and large, the second war
with England did not spark the positive reconsideration of the value
and status of domestic labor that had been one of the hallmarks of the
Revolution. There was, to be sure, some renewed discussion of the
importance of home manufacturing. One writer insisted that ‘{o]ur most
dashing bucks are proud to boast a homespun coat; and the prudent
house-wife delighted exhibits her newly made table linen, sheets, car-
pets, &c.” Agricultural societies awarded premiums for the largest quan-
tities and finest qualities of homespun yarn. The importance of these
homemade articles to their communities seems to have been chiefly
symbolic, however, and alongside discussions of their merit ran a parallel
but more deadly earnest argument for the development of commercial
manufactories. The main cry during this period was less for homespun
than for mill-spun goods, and the truly patriotic act was not so much to
make as to buy American.”
The prewar assaults on United States shipping offered a particu-
larly good opportunity to couple the encouragement of capitalized
manufactures to the patriotic cause. In 1811, Vermont’s governor,
 “A New Source of Profit and Support” 53
Jonas Galusha, justified the special treatment of manufactories in
the preceding session of the legislature on the grounds that “‘an ob-
ject so beneficial in the system of economy & so favorable to our
real independence, will ever be kept in view and fostered by every
prudent legislature.’’ By 1812, the editor of Niles Weekly Register
quipped that the construction of cotton manufactories running eighty
thousand spindles near Providence, Rhode Island, was simply ‘‘the
practical operation” of the policies of England and France. In ‘‘the
establishment of numerous manufactories,” in ‘the many, many
thousand spindles, now in motion,” was “the treasure at home.” In
the encouragement of the manufacturing interest lay the road to
“entire independence.”
The failure of the War of 1812 to generate a renewed recognition
of the value of housework was not the result of a market so fully
developed as to remove productivity from the household. Capital-
ized manufacturing was still in its early stages. The products it pro-
vided to families were useful and often necessary. Wethersfield,
Connecticut, women used their onions to purchase store credit to-
ward cloth, food, and ribbon. Theodora Orcutt of Whateley, Massa-
chusetts, kept a running account with shopkeeper Wells, trading her
yarn for beef, pork, cheese, and occasionally, even cash. As the
continuing volume of women’s household manufacture indicates,
however, the goods of the marketplace were neither of a quantity
nor of a nature to offset the bulk of the wife’s work. Even among
city dwellers, women still produced an array of essential goods and
services for their families. Moreover, much of that production was
still geared toward the market. Visiting the United States shortly
after the War of 1812, Adam Hodgson was “surprised to find to
how great an extent this species of manufactures is carried, and how
rapidly the events of the last two years have increased it.”
In an earlier period, the recognition of women’s market work had
been associated with an appreciation of housework generally—in part
because the Revolution had also led to a temporary weakening of the
privacy of the household. What had been visible and of concern to the
community was not solely women’s paid work, but also their daily de-
cisions within the family. By the turn of the century this connection had
been severed. As Ogden’s sermon on female education demonstrated,
if women’s market-oriented labor was emphasized out of a belief in the
superiority of cash systems over barter and subsistence work, that em-
phasis could operate to denigrate, rather than reveal, the importance
of other forms of domestic labor.
54 HOME AND WORK
The War of 1812 did not foster the sense of community and of the
commonweal that had helped break down the boundaries of household
privacy—and thus expose the importance of family-directed labor—
during the Revolution. There were no foreign troops stationed at the
door, and no large populations of enemy sympathizers abroad in the
town, to create a mentality of embattlement and mutual scrutiny. The
meaning of community itself had also traveled a long way from Puritan
days. Western lands had opened up and the population was pouring out
of old communities—and away from old community ties—to occupy
them.
Perhaps most important, the conditions of the War of 1812 did not
interrupt either the growing stature of money as the dominant index of
economic value or the perception that family survival depended pri-
marily on the wage. Banking and transportation networks were suffi-
ciently developed to permit a switch from overseas to interregional trade.
The results were successful enough to double the specie holdings of
some New England banks, maintaining the value of the currency and
forestalling the large-scale return to barter systems that had character-
ized the Revolutionary period. Shortages occurred, but they were tem-
porary, and the workers who were left unemployed by the embargo
were largely absorbed by manufacturing. By and large, Americans were
not turned back on their own resources to rediscover the role of unpaid
labor in subsistence. Indeed, by 1820, wage earners comprised 21 percent
of the paid work force.
The experiences of 1776 and 1812 suggest that the cultural impact
of a war on the position of women—in this case, on the recognition
of women’s work—depends on the nature of the society at war and
on the particular characteristics of that war. The patriots of the Rev-
olutionary period had begun the transition to industrial capitalism,
but that transition was uneven and was, moreover, still in its earliest
phases. The Americans were still a preindustrial people, yearning, as
Robert Gross has pointed out, to resurrect the past. The old ways
of perceiving economic life, including housework, remained vital
enough to be reenlivened by the exigencies of conflict. This was no
longer the case by the outbreak of the War of 1812. The full devel-
opment of the wage system still lay in the future. But the patriots of
the second war with England were people who believed that their
household economies and their identity as a nation depended on
growing cash markets and capitalized manufacturing, and their ener-
gies were largely directed to working out the terms of a new eco-
nomic order. As one facet of that process, they had already
 ‘A New Source of Profit and Support” 55
developed a perspective on wage-earning that associated material
survival with men. By the early nineteenth century, “embargo,”
‘‘boycott,’’ and ‘“‘shortage’’ were conditions that sounded the alarm
less for a recognition of women’s economy in the household than for
a stress on men’s role in the marketplace. What had originated in
the northeastern colonies as a gender division of labor was becom-
ing, in the culture of the new republic, a gendered definition of
labor.
 Chapter III
“How Strangely Metamorphosed’”’

In the late seventeenth century, New Englanders had found in the

culture of gender a way of mediating the economic stresses within
their communities. When land shortages had prevented young men
from claiming their places as heads of households, the Puritans had
identified women as the source of the problem: women who had aban-
doned their proper place, women who resented their subordination,
and, above all, women who had bargained with the devil to interpose
themselves between males and property—literally, between men and
manhood.
Albeit in more secular forms, eighteenth-century American society
had also responded to the uncertainties of change through the idiom of
gender. Amid the social, economic, and political upheavals of the Rev-
olutionary era, Americans found reassurance in widely shared percep-
tions of manhood and womanhood. In the tenets of ‘‘manhood”’ were
the promises of an orderly political life, of economic stability, and of
the material welfare of the family. The precepts of “womanhood,” on
the other hand, promised private morality and sentiment and the co-
herent transmission of culture from parent to child. A dualism of ap-
pealing balance and comprehensiveness, this ‘‘republican”’ system of
polarities was not merely an intellectual convention, but a deeply held
and profoundly comforting way of conceiving secular society. Most im-
portant for the future, the “‘republican” gender system vitalized and
56
 “How Strangely Metamorphosed”’ 57
extended the range of social experiences that might be organized through
the culture of gender. This malleability helped insure the viability of
gender as a primary category of experience through the industrial trans-
formations of the next half century.
Those transformations were myriad. They touched virtually every
aspect of daily life, from the patterns of city street sociability to the
ways parents tried to raise their children. But at the core of the industrial
transformation was a redefinition of labor—a reorganization of labor
itself, a redistribution of its material rewards, and a restructuring of the
relation of labor and social power. Historians have examined this phe-
nomenon chiefly in terms of the impact of industrialization on paid
labor—on the men who left their farms for the city, on the artisans who
struggled against the demise of the craft system, and on the young
women who entered America’s first factories.
But the redefinition of labor attendant upon the coming of industrial-
ization was equally, and simultaneously, a redefinition of unpaid labor.
As paid labor was largely (although by no means exclusively) the prov-
ince of men, so unpaid labor was largely (although by no means exclu-
sively) the province of women, in the form of the unpaid household
labor of wives and daughters. The gender system that had established
that division had its origins far back in the European past. But the
specific history of housework during the antebellum period reflected an
interplay of that system with the ongoing redefinition of labor associated
with early industrialization. An analysis of housework over the course
of the first half of the nineteenth century, then, must be made in the
context both of the regional economic changes of the period and of the
impact of those changes in the largely male-defined realm of paid work.
Over the first half of the nineteenth century, the economic stirrings
of the late eighteenth century assumed clearer shape and greater for-
mative power in the northeastern United States. Several ancillary de-
velopments supported this process. Gradually the region evolved the
more complex financial infrastructure required for industrial growth. As
early as 1815, the banks and brokering facilities and insurance companies
of the Northeast were sufficiently matured to encourage an initial re-
direction of investment capital from commerce to manufacturing. At
the same time, state legislatures began to employ their powers of in-
corporation to promote improved internal transportation. Between 1800
and 1850, turnpikes, canals, and railroads began to crisscross the North-
east, Opening up new markets, new patterns of commerce, and new
regional economies. By 1812, Massachusetts alone had granted 105
charters for turnpikes, and New York, 57.' In 1817, the State of New
538 HOME AND WORK
York authorized construction of the Erie Canal, which would quickly
turn the upstate region into a shipping and receiving station for New
York City’s import commerce and manufacturing. Meanwhile, the
steamboat had transformed the rivers into highways for the speedier
and cheaper movement of raw materials and manufactured goods.
The extension of transportation networks reflected the internal mi-
gration of Americans through western New York and Pennsylvania to
the states and territories beyond. Ohio grew from 45,000 to 231,000 in
just the ten years between 1800 and 1810. Farther west, Indiana qua-
drupled its population from six to twenty-five thousand between 1800
and 1810. In the next decade it would shoot up to 147,000. Accounting
for less than 1 percent of the total population in 1800, by 1830 the north—
central region would hold 12.5 percent of the people of the United
States, providing a growing market for the manufactured goods of the
Northeast.”
The capitalized manufacturing that would exploit this new market did
not develop evenly or suddenly in the Northeast. The large, power-
driven factories that loom so large in American industrial mythology
were not to become the norm until much later in the century, although
they did appear early on in some parts of the region, most notably in
Massachusetts. By 1836, the once-wooded banks of the Merrimack and
Concord Rivers at Pawtucket Falls had spawned an industrial complex
of eight textile companies, controlled by absentee owners in Boston and
employing over 6,000 men and women altogether. The Hamilton Com-
pany alone employed over a thousand workers in Lowell, 316 of them
(all women) in the single job category of weaver.
But large factories and extensive mechanization were not the hall-
marks of early industrialization for most northeasterners. Throughout
much of the region, economic change proceeded more slowly and along
different lines. In western Massachusetts, papermaking evolved from
artisan labor toward mechanized factories through a prolonged inter-
mediate period that combined considerable technological innovation
with relatively small and locally owned mills. Shoemaking shops also
remained small throughout most of the antebellum period. In the early
1830s, the largest shoemaking establishments in Rochester, New York,
employed only fifteen to twenty workers and were not mechanized.
Similarly, as late as 1850, fewer than one third of New York City’s
journeymen were employed either in factories or in unmechanized man-
ufactories of twenty workers or more. Like Rochester shoemakers, most
of New York City’s craft workers remained in shops that were both
small and unmechanized.*
 ‘How Strangely Metamorphosed”’ 59
The transformations extended beyond factories and mills. Early in-
dustrialization created an army of outworkers—needlewomen, tailors,
hatmakers, shoe-stitchers and others who labored for piece rates away
from the master’s shop, often in their own homes or in the shops of
subcontractors. In 1850, almost half of New York City’s craft workers
fell into this category, and the tentacles of outwork extended from the
cities deep into the countryside. Men and women in “‘dozens of villages
scattered throughout rural Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine
were doing work put out to them by Lynn and other cities,”’ according
to Alan Dawley. In 1850, a single general store in the small farming
community of Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, purchased palm-leaf hats,
destined for Boston wholesalers, from over 800 outwork hatmakers
residing in the area.”
Especially in the cities, outworkers were among the most vulnerable
of early industrial wage-earners. Although workers in the countryside
frequently had other resources to draw on, urban outworkers were more
heavily dependent on their wages. It was not a secure position. Not only
the vagaries of the market, but the character and temperament of job
contractors determined when and whether outworkers would work, and
how much and whether they would be paid for that labor. It was not
uncommon to return work to employers only to be told that payment
would be deferred or that the quality of the work merited only partial
payment or no payment at all.°
The industrial transformation also required the power of uncounted
manual laborers, largely native-born free blacks and immigrants who
laid and maintained the canals and railroads, built the warehouses and
docks, and moved raw materials and finished goods through the wharves
and streets and across the roads of the Northeast. Like outwork, this
was the wage work of the marginal in the antebellum Northeast. Ex-
cluded from the trades, black men found themselves largely restricted
to these jobs; in addition to personal-service occupations, they worked
most often as laborers, seamen, porters, and hod carriers. On rare
occasions (but even then, only in the face of de jure as well as de facto
discrimination) they worked as carters and draymen. German immi-
grants often took jobs as tailors in New York City’s outwork garment
industry. Especially after 1840, Irishmen (who also worked as watchmen
and section hands on the completed railroads) began to replace black
men as construction laborers and in various carrying occupations. When
their husbands travelled with canal and railroad gangs, women some-
times went along as service workers.’
The new market networks that black and immigrant workers built
60 HOME AND WORK
with their labor steadily transformed antebellum agriculture. The growth
of cities and improvements in transportation encouraged farming fam-
ilies to orient their production more fully to the city market and to
depend on the cash they earned there for supplying many of their own
needs—a dependence that was reinforced by the spread of cash-paying
outwork. By the 1850s, general stores, acting as conduits between the
countryside and the cash markets of the city, found it inconvenient to
conduct exchanges on a barter basis. At the same time, the country
custom of working for one’s keep was quickly being replaced by the
payment of wages. The interdependence of city and rural economies
was felt in other ways as well. When the city market failed, now more
than ever, agriculture felt the repercussions. During the panic of 1837,
dianist Philip Hone took it as a sign of impending economic disaster that
‘‘(t]here is no money in circulation, and the farmer is compelled to
‘dicker’ his wheat for molasses and tea and sugar,” rather than sell it
for cash.®
As they increased the infusion of cash relations into the countryside,
the economic transformations of the antebellum period profoundly af-
fected the human relations of daily working life. Probably most visible
was the increased pace of work that attended the introduction of ma-
chinery. As Thomas Dublin has demonstrated, from the 1830s on, textile
operatives were subjected to repeated speedups in production; between
1840 and 1854, the number of spindles per operative in the spinning
department of the Hamilton Company more than doubled (from 129 to
294), as did the number of looms per weaver (from 1.3 to 2.9). But for
many workers the pace of work accelerated even without mechanization.
Declining piece-rates could, and often did, accomplish the same end,
forcing workers to work faster and longer to maintain overall wage
levels.’
The industrial speedup was accompanied by a slow erosion of the
artisan system. Journeyman craftsmen—carpenters, coopers, mill-
wrights, printers, bakers, and tailors, for example—found their labor
increasingly divided into smaller and smaller components and their op-
portunities for upward mobility eroded. In the garment and shoemaking
industries, the rise of the central shop signalled the coming of these
changes. Often a combined retail and manufacturing establishment op-
erated by a merchant entrepreneur, the central shop displaced the shops
of master craftsmen, subdivided the work of journeymen into increas-
ingly discrete units, and relied heavily on outworkers. By 1860, jour-
neymen in the shoemaking industry in Lynn, where the central shop
thrived, were no longer ‘‘shoemakers”’ at all, but pieceworkers on
 ‘How Strangely Metamorphosed”’ 61
shoes—indeed, not even the makers of whole parts, like ‘‘heelers,’”’ but
‘‘nailers,”’ “shavers,” “blackers,”’ or ‘‘polishers” working on parts of
parts. The master craftsman disappeared, to be replaced by the shop
foreman and, above him, the entrepreneur. Their labor reduced to small
operations, workers could be quickly trained, and as quickly replaced.
Correspondingly, they lost their ability to bargain for better wages on
the basis of their mastery of the whole craft. Together they produced
more shoes; individually they earned less money. In 1856, shoemaker
Francis Rhodes retained enough of the old skills to make 792 pairs of
women’s shoes in fifty days ‘“‘entirely by hand.” It was a noteworthy
accomplishment, but of an antiquarian sort; his competition was with
the cheaper production costs of the factory, and he earned only 22 cents
a pair.'°
For black workers, these degradations of labor were compounded by
the degradations of racism. A black mechanic had trouble getting paid
work at all, for throughout the region white men refused to work along-
side blacks. One visitor to Boston in the mid—1830s claimed that black
men were entirely excluded from the craft shops employing whites in
New York, and that in Boston, “with the exception of one or two
employed as printers, one blacksmith, and one shoemaker, there [were]
no colored mechanics in the city.”” Black journeymen who did find
employment often had trouble collecting their wages from white em-
ployers, ‘“‘and, as they know how strong the prejudice is against them,
they dare not complain to a magistrate.””"'
Foreign visitors repeatedly warned workers in the “handicrafts and
trades’ against emigrating to the United States, arguing that their
chances of success were ‘at best problematical.”'? Certainly working
conditions and wages changed over the course of the antebellum years,
but rarely did laboring men, black or white, earn more than $1.00 a day
early in the period, or $1.75 a day toward its close. In Massachusetts,
for example, both carpenters and foundry workers saw a rise from about
$1.00 a day to about $1.25 a day between 1825 and 1845. Masons’ helpers
averaged only about 90 cents a day in 1825, however, and only about
97 cents a day by 1845. In 1860, their average daily wages stood at $1.00.
(Over this period, masons’ wages ranged from $1.25 a day to $1.60 a
day.) Laborers could hope for 70 cents a day in the mid-twenties; by
1855 their daily wages had risen to just under $1.00. In the early 1860s,
they sometimes exceeded that amount. On the eve of the Civil War,
watchmen and section hands earned about $1.00 a day."
Several caveats should be attached to these figures. Few men in this
group had year-round employment; four days a week through three
62 HOME AND WORK
seasons of the year was good work for a laborer. At that rate, an
apparent annual income of $313 for a laborer in 1860 (calculated at $1.00
a day, six days a week, year-round) was reduced to an actual income
of closer to $156 a year. Even better-paid journeymen carpenters, bring-
ing in $1.50 a day, would earn less than $250 a year on this basis.
These general speculations are supported by data from local studies.
Norman Ware’s early study of antebellum industrial workers concluded
that mid—nineteenth-century New York shoemakers and journeyman
printers had trouble exceeding $250 a year. In his more recent study of
New York City workers, Sean Wilentz found that the average annual
income of male workers in the trades in 1850 was $300—only half of
the amount estimated by the New York Times to be the minimal sub-
sistence income for a family of four. Even the highest paid of the trades,
shipbuilding, averaged only $579.24, still below the Times’ $600 floor.
In Oneida County, New York, in March and April of 1827, textile
worker Peter Billington averaged only 75 cents a day; on a full-time,
year-round basis, that would have yielded an annual income of only
$234. Over the period roughly from 1836 to 1850, the mean daily pay
of male workers at the Hamilton Mills in Massachusetts declined from
about $1.02 a day to 98 cents a day. For female operatives, the average
daily pay remained unchanged at 59 cents, but that figure hid a significant
restructuring of the labor force: a decline in average income at the upper
end of the spectrum and a greater reliance on lower-paid workers. Be-
tween 1836 and 1860, the average daily pay of spinners at the Hamilton
Company declined from 58 cents to 48 cents, of weavers from 66 cents
to 60.5 cents. Alan Dawley has speculated that in 1850 the average male
shoemaker in Lynn, Massachusetts, earned but $20 a month, or $240 a
year."
Urban life had always been characterized by the presence of large
numbers of people working on the margins of the organized economy,
earning small incomes in whatever ways offered. This remained true of
the antebellum city. Indeed, as the structure of labor in general was
degraded, the ranks of the laboring poor swelled. The poor sometimes
trekked to the limits of the city, where they “eked out a precarious
semirural existence” by keeping a few animals and working in quarries
or as laborers, cinder-gatherers, or ragpickers. Others tried to make
money as hired hands or street vendors, selling brooms, confections,
chickens, eggs, milk, berries, coffee, and small merchandise. Often im-
mortalized in children’s books describing the busy street life of the
antebellum city, the vendors’ lot was in fact far from picturesque. Living
 “How Strangely Metamorphosed”’ 63
from penny to penny and day to day, they gave the lie to the belief that
in America there were no extremes of poverty and wealth.”
Antebellum reformers also provided evidence against that belief. In
1845, for example, Dr. John Griscom published a thin volume of ob-
servations entitled The Sanitary Conditions of the Laboring Population
of New York. It was a subject he knew well. Former health inspector
of the city, he had had a number of opportunities to examine firsthand
the pestilent circumstances half of New York City’s population lived in.
He fortified his book with story after story of what he had seen: the
white woman, wife of a laborer and mother of two children, who had
been sick constantly since her family had been forced to move into a
dank, dark cellar apartment; the two families (‘‘consisting of ten persons,
of all ages’’) who lived in a single ten-by-ten-foot cellar room with only
one small window on Pike Street; the black couple on Sheriff Street
who died within months of each other from fevers ultimately attributable
to substandard housing. '°
Griscom’s was not the first or the only voice to be raised against the
deteriorating living conditions of the laboring classes of New York City.
Again and again, newspapers cited the dangers of fire and overcrowded
conditions. In 1841, for example, the New York Tribune reported that
a fire in a single house at 133 Canon Street had left forty black families
without shelter. The following year, Charles Dickens published his
American Notes, describing his visits to black families who lived in rooms
without ventilation and relied for heat on charcoal fires whose ‘“‘vapours
issue forth [to] blind and suffocate.”” A decade later, D. W. Mitchell
described ‘‘the extensive neighbourhood of excessively crowded tene-
ment-houses; generally... three or four stories high, containing from
ten to twenty rooms, badly lighted and ventilated; often a family—mostly
foreigners—in each room. In the streets the air was foul, and, in the
hot weather, sickening, with putrefying garbage. ...In the Warm sum-
mer evenings all were out of doors or at the windows, men, women,
and children....[D]eath, langor, listlessness, and disease hovering
around and over them.”"”
The problems of survival for the poor may have been magnified in
New York, but New York was not the exception among antebellum
northeastern cities. The industrial housing of Lawrence, Massachusetts,
consisted largely of highly flammable ‘“‘shacks” built from ‘“‘slabs and
unfinished lumber with over-lapping boards for roofs’”’ and lined with
sod for insulation. In New Haven in the 1820s and 1830s, some white
workers were able to live in individual frame dwellings, but many poorer
64 HOME AND WORK
whites lived in ‘tenement houses” erected specifically for the working
class, and blacks and the Irish occupied housing that reminded one
observer most of all of “‘barracks.’”"*
Not all of northeastern America’s wageworkers and their families lived
in such dire circumstances. Many did, though, and even those who were
able to escape the worst of the cellar apartments and overcrowded
conditions found decent housing harder and harder to come by and
decent food harder and harder to afford. Overall, the antebellum period
was characterized by rising prices. Although improvements in trans-
portation and the growth of textile mills helped to reduce fabric costs,
many ‘“‘necessaries”’ grew more expensive over these years. In Massa-
chusetts, the average cost of Indian corn rose from 70 cents a bushel in
1830, to 81 cents in 1840, to $1.17 in 1850; while pork showed a 50-
percent rise between 1830 and the late 1850s. In 1834, $100 a year rented
a city house large enough to accommodate a family of six; twenty-five
years later, a cramped apartment in New York City cost as much. During
the same period, the cost of wood for heating rose by about half in the
Bay State. Coal, which was rapidly replacing wood as a household fuel,
did not show a steady rise in price, but between 1833 and 1857 it was
not uncommon for the cost per ton to spike as high as $9—a 30 percent
increase over the more normal $7-per-ton price.'”
Although improvements in transportation were increasing the variety
of foods available to many people and lengthening the seasons during
which those foods were available, tight budgets limited the extent to
which working-class families could enjoy these improvements in the
standard of living. Food historian Edgar Martin concluded that the
working-class diet was confined largely to potatoes, corn, peas, beans,
and cabbage. Whole milk was available from the surrounding country-
side, but most urban working-class families probably drank a cheaper,
watered-down variety or the swill milk from cows fed on the slop of city
distilleries—if indeed they were able to afford milk at all. In the early
antebellum period, city workers sometimes kept chickens or pigs, who
were allowed to roam free in the streets. Much to the delight of the
wealthier classes, that practice was gradually curtailed. Both meat and
poultry were available in city markets, of course, but they were expen-
sive, even when purchased for reduced prices at the end of the day.
Both remained rare in the diets of working-class and poor families.”
The furnishings of working-class homes varied according to the ability
of the family either to buy or to scavenge what it needed. In the second
decade of the century, Ezra Stiles Ely complained of impoverished
households in which “‘[o]ne bed, one chair, and the half of another, one
 “How Strangely Metamorphosed”’ 65
table, one candlestick, one cup, an old pot, and a piece of a frying pan”’
made up “the complete inventory” of the furnishings. Other families
had more: rag rugs to cover the floor, inexpensive factory-made tables
and chairs, and perhaps a homemade mattress. A plain drinking tumbler
could be bought for a dime and white granite plates and cups sold for
about eight cents apiece.”'
Cheaper furnishings, shoes, and clothing were now available for pur-
chase by workers. On the other hand, their diet remained largely un-
altered. Even at the close of the Civil War, when some forms of indoor
plumbing were making their way into some American households, they
remained unknown to working-class families; some did not even have
outside privies. At a time when new forms of illumination were entering
the homes of the more prosperous, the laboring classes still depended
on candles for light. Their cooking was often in open-hearth fireplaces
or over cheap (and dangerous) braziers. Ice, which allowed some fam-
ilies to preserve food against spoilage, was unaffordable among working-
class families. Early industrialization was creating a distinctive working-
class standard of living.
That ever-more-visible disparity was the focus of much of the orga-
nized labor protest of the antebellum period, as members of the working
class questioned how they were to survive the steady erosion of their
wages and standard of living. Speaking in Brooklyn in 1836, labor or-
ganizer Seth Luther charged that while “the nominal value of every
article of necessity has been greatly increased, . . . the price of labor has
not received a proportionate advance,” and claimed that soon the work-
ing classes would be unable to afford even living space:
It is much more difficult now, for a man to become possessed of a house
to shelter his family than it was at that [the Revolutionary] period. The
difficulty is constantly increasing in consequence of the rag money system,
which is placing all the real estate, or nearly all, in the hands of unprin-
cipled speculators and monopolizing aristocrats. ...[T]hose who build
houses in these days have none of their own and are dependent on a
‘“‘combination”’ of landlords for shelter from the weather, and compelled
to pay enormous rents or to be turned out of doors.
‘“{T]he producing classes” of America, he asserted, had been ‘most
grossly, wickedly, and most abominably deceived.”
Clergyman William Henry Channing captured the same sense of be-
trayal as he surveyed the changes in American society over the course
of the antebellum period:
The victorious world, so confident and easy and jocular, so beautiful in
its own right, so wrapped about in kingly purple—how strangely it ts
66 HOME AND WORK
metamorphosed to the eyes of the child of God! Its factories change into
brothels; its rents to distress warrants; .. . from under the showy robes of
its success, flutter the unseemly rags of an ever-growing beggary; from
garret and cellar of its luxurious habitations stare out the gaunt forms of
haggard want....
Channing may have exaggerated: early industrialization had not ground
all segments of the working classes into poverty. But it was beginning
to define sharper lines between the more and the less prosperous in
Northeastern society.”

Concurrent with the demise of the old artisan culture was the gradual
formation of a new middle stratum in northeastern society. The term
middle class, as this group would come to be called, would begin to
appear only toward the close of the period. Seth Luther generally en-
visioned the social order as consisting of “but two parties... the pro-
ducers on the one part and the consumers and accumulators on the
other.” In his Address to the Working Men of New England in the
early 1830s, however, he acknowledged a more complex division: “‘the
poor,” “the middling classes,” and “the rich.” Visiting the United
States in the late 1830s, George Combe identified in Boston a “‘middle
class of citizens” who owned enough real and personal property to pay
city taxes but who were distinguished from the “rich,’”’ whose wealth
allowed them to “‘live beyond the limits of the city... .”’° By the 1840s,
the anonymous ‘“‘mechanic’”’ who authored Elements of Social Disorder
would drop the older distinction between “the rich” and “‘the workers”’
and draw the contrast instead between “‘the laboring classes,’ on the
one hand, and ‘“‘the rich and middling classes,” on the other.”’ Other
writers employed the term in a more positive sense, contrasting the
middle class with the rich rather than with the workers. In 1850, George
Foster defined ‘“‘the great middle class’’ as the families “‘of the substantial
tradesmen, mechanics and artisans... whose aspirations, reaching the
full standard of well-to-do content, wisely fall short of that snobbish
longing after social notoriety” associated with “‘aristocracy.”” In the
linguistic trail suggested by the appearance of this new term lay the
dimensions of a sea change in the structure of society.
Central to the culture of late—eighteenth-century America had been
concepts of “virtue,”’ “equality,” “industry,” “independence,” and a
devotion to the “common weal.”’ Taken together, these terms had de-
scribed a system of values and aspirations based largely on the experi-
ence of manual work—both agriculture and the social relations of the
craft shop. They expressed the belief that wealth properly resided in
 “How Strangely Metamorphosed”’ 67
the act of production and belonged to the producer, and that men who
worked steadily to perfect their skills—as yeomen or as artisans—de-
served both economic independence and community stature. Especially
from the model of the craft shop, this culture also revealed a strong
strain of communalism, for personal ambition was to be tempered by
the needs of the group. In the balance of the two—individual skill and
devotion to the larger good—lay the essence of “‘virtue.”’
Deeply shared as these values were in colonial and early national
America, they by no means described a culture of leveling. In the midst
of the Revolution, the simple American craftsman or the honest Amer-
ican yeoman made an effective propaganda foil to the alleged decadence
of the English, but some American craftsmen and some American farm-
ers amassed considerable wealth. At the other extreme, this culture was
in many ways a closed system: for blacks, native Americans, and women,
neither artisanship nor industrious husbandry merited independence and
community stature.
These ambiguities rendered the dual languages of artisan and yeoman
virtue vulnerable to profound redefinition under pressure from the
changing social and economic environment of the antebellum period.
To be sure, the old meanings did not fade suddenly or completely. The
vision of the independent American farmer retained its powerful grip
on the American imagination throughout the antebellum period (and
well after). At the same time, the memory of the social relations of the
artisan shop underlay the theory of labor value that informed most labor
dissent during the era. But even as labor activists called for a return to
the ‘‘equality”’ that had presumedly characterized the pre—Revolutionary
War period, and deplored the ‘‘dependent” condition “‘the producer’’
had fallen into, a new group of social observers had begun to associate
that language with a very different set of social and work relations—
and especially with entrepreneurship and economic individualism.”
This refocusing was evident in discussions of “industry,” ‘““economy,”’
and the ‘“‘ccommon weal” in prescriptive antebellum literature. A case
in point is a short piece that appeared in the August 1842 Manual of
Self-Education titled ‘‘How to Get Rich.” Like that of the artisan cul-
ture, the world described by the Manual remained profoundly male; yet
two key changes had occurred. First, the republican association of “‘in-
dustry” with the craftsman or yeoman was replaced by a new association
with ‘‘the man of business,” who now became the embodiment of the
virtue of ‘“‘industriousness.’’ Equally important, the concept of “‘indus-
try” itself was altered. The purpose of industry was no longer conceived
of as simple economic independence, but rather as profit and wealth.
68 HOME AND WORK
Even the most diligent activity, if it did not yield a profit, was but an
inferior and misguided effort:
Be industrious. Every body knows that industry is a fundamental virtue
in the man of business. But it is not every sort of industry which tends to
wealth. Many men work hard to do a great deal of business, and after all
make less money than they would if they did less.

At the same time, the profit-making relationships of the world of busi-

ness replaced the old webs of mutual obligation as the networks through
which the ‘“‘common weal” was maintained: “Let your business be some
one which is useful to the community,” the editors of the Manual cau-
tioned. “All such occupations possess the element of profit in them-
selves....” In a sharp reversal of imagery from the earlier artisan/
yeoman culture, individual profitability became the chief evidence of
the value of an undertaking to the good of the community. The Manual
did warn against an excessive love of money, but only, finally, because
“the extravagant desire of accumulation’”’ could lead to an imprudence
that would defeat the goal of “getting rich.””
Other publications directed especially to boys and young men echoed
this new formulation of the concept of the ‘“ccommunity”’ as a creation
of business and commerce. In his Enterprise, Industry, and Art of Man,
popular children’s author Samuel Goodrich was at great pains to explain
that the important interdependencies and obligations among humans
were those founded on national and international trade networks; con-
cluding that ‘the true philosophy is to regard the whole human race,
who hold commercial intercourse, as one family, and continually con-
tributing to each other’s happiness.” ‘‘Virtue”—certainly for men—
consisted in upholding one’s specialized role in this complex economic
community.”!
The association of the old language of virtue and industry with the
world of business and profit reflected an important restructuring of paid
labor over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and par-
ticularly the expansion of certain forms of paid work. As Stuart Blumin
has observed, much of the growth occurred 1n occupations that were
fully withdrawn from “‘direct participation in production” and existed
exclusively ‘‘to organize and supervise the manual labor of others.”
In combination with the professions—most notably teachers, physicians,
lawyers, and ministers—these new positions would form the paid oc-
cupational basis for the emerging middle class.
This restructuring of paid labor had been underway as early as the
late eighteenth century, when a new office work force had begun to
 “How Strangely Metamorphosed” 69
emerge to provide the support services required by the financial insti-
tutions, exchanges, and insurance companies. In giving rise to a growing
number of work-crew supervisors and to the subcontractors who op-
erated between entrepreneurs and outworkers, the decline of the mas-
ter’s shop and the growth of the regional and national market had
augmented the new middle ranks. Among these were lower-level man-
agement positions, supervisory jobs, jobs as shop clerks, distributors,
agents, bank tellers, and nonproducing retailers and wholesalers. Over
the course of the antebellum period, clerks, bookkeepers, and bank
tellers constituted the fastest-growing sector of the paid labor force in
many communities. In Utica, New York, the number of clerks increased
by over 13,500 percent between 1817 and 1860. By 1855, there were
almost 14,000 clerks employed in New York City, making that group
the third-largest occupational category in the city, outstripped only by
domestic servants and laborers. The 7,000 professionals comprised the
eighth-largest category.”
Some of these positions were filled by failed farmers, some by former
shop masters overwhelmed by the expansionism of the antebellum years,
and some by former journeymen. But many of the holders of the new
middle-level jobs were young men who no longer thought in terms of
the old artisan/yeoman system at all. The sons of artisans, farmers,
ministers, small merchants, or school teachers, they now turned their
expectations of success and prosperity to business. Undoubtedly, many
of them hoped one day to achieve the status of entrepreneur and
employer.
As the reorganization of labor proceeded, drawing an ever-clearer
line between manual and intellectual work, this group evolved an in-
creasingly distinct identity, and its members began to claim for them-
selves and their occupations a special place and mission in the new
republic. Even as they aspired to prosperity, they prided themselves on
presumably remaining free from the corruptions of wealth and claimed
for themselves the mantles of honesty and hard work. Contrasting their
own bright expectations with the struggles of the emerging working
classes, they perceived themselves as exemplars of eighteenth-century
industry and independence. More than any other single value, they based
their emerging identity on individualism and on the belief in self-culture
and personal success.”
Clearly, this was a diverse group and included men who worked with
their hands in a shop or factory or on the farm, as well as men who
spent their days in offices and behind bank and retail counters. The
income continuum did not necessarily move upward from manual to
70 HOME AND WORK
professional work, however. At the lower end, some forms of skilled
labor (for example, some blacksmiths, confectioners, hatters, and print-
ers) realized $700 annually, working six days a week for three quarters
of the year. A shop foreman, risen from the ranks, might earn $800 or
so, an income that equaled that of many teachers and ministers and
surpassed the annual cash earnings of clerks and most farmers. Some
professional men did much better than this, of course. Calvin Stowe, a
college professor and the husband of Harriet Beecher Stowe, earned
about $1,300 in 1850. As a young editor in the late 1830s, Thomas
Nichols earned approximately $1,000, about what a successful small-
town lawyer cleared annually during the same period. In 1857, Hunt’s
Merchant’s Magazine suggested that the average businessman in New
York City earned about $1,500 a year.”
Intellectual or not, some of the labor that underlay the new middle
class was both rote and tedious, a point that Herman Melville made
with particular force in his description of Bartleby the scrivener. A
transcriber of legal documents, Bartleby copied “by sun-light and by
candle-light,”” working ever on, “silently, palely, mechanically.”
Yet for much of the emerging middle class, as for much of the working
class, the organization of paid labor remained decidedly nonindustrial.
That is, the paid work of the new middle class was largely characterized
by the absence of mechanization and even standardized procedures, by
the importance of personal networks, and by a marked degree of flex-
ibility in scheduling. The most common business form was still the part-
nership, usually based on family ties. The double-entry accounting
system invented by the Italians five hundred years earlier remained
common, and accounts focused on income and outgo rather than on
capital expenditures. Most businesses were small. With perhaps as few
as five or six employees, little management hierarchy was required, and
both supervision and transactions were carried out largely on a personal
and informal basis. Even Melville recognized the persistence of these
conditions. Sharing the position of scrivener with Bartleby were two
other men: Turkey, whose noontime tippling imparted to his afternoon’s
work ‘‘a strange, inflamed, flurried, flightly recklessness,” and Nippers,
a young man of ‘“‘brandy-like disposition” who viewed his worktable as
‘‘a perverse voluntary agent, intent on thwarting and vexing him.” In-
deed, the lawyer who employed the two men counted himself fortunate
to get a half day’s work from each.”
There is no doubt that this emerging middle-level business and profes-
sional group was in a better, more prosperous economic position than
were vendors, laborers, outworkers, or the bulk of craft workers during
 ‘How Strangely Metamorphosed”’ 71
the antebellum period. This is perhaps most visible in the material cir-
cumstances of their households. While working-class families were
forced into smaller and smaller dwellings, and often into cramped and
overcrowded apartments, the emerging middle class expressed itself in

space. ;
terms of growing, separated, and increasingly elaborate residential

The ideal home of the- emerging middle class was the “‘cottage’’—a
detached residence, often two-story, with a small yard. Designs for the
structure varied, but typical was the one suggested by Catharine Beecher
and Harriet Beecher Stowe in their 1869 American Woman's Home,
which included a drawing room, a kitchen, a breakfast room (which
might also serve as a sitting room and extra bedroom), and two second-
floor bedrooms. Of these spaces, it was the drawing room, or main
parlor, that most essentially defined the ideal middle-class home. Pro-
viding a separate “‘public’’ space where guests might be received, the
parlor simultaneously protected family life from intrusion and provided
a showcase in which the household could present the tangible evidence
of its middle-class status: woven carpets, sofas, chairs, ottomans, tables,
plant stands, vases of flowers, pillows, miniatures, statues, engravings,
books. These were the objects whose possession stated the claim to
industry, independence, and prosperity.”
Not all members of the emerging middle class lived in picturesque
cottages, of course. Young men just entering the paid work force often
took rooms with private families or in boardinghouses, as did some
young married couples. Indeed, a number of observers were troubled
that young urban married couples often chose boardinghouses or family
hotels over the virtues of a private home, thus sacrificing privacy and
domestic feeling to convenience. And although the practice was begin-
ning to disappear, the families of grocers, small shopkeepers, and profes-
sionals still often lived above or adjacent to the husband’s place of
business.”
Middle-class household furnishings and diets depended on family
budgets, but a few generalizations may be made. Most important, mid-
die-class homes were fully furnished. Many articles were still homemade
(pillows, bolsters, chair covers, and even some picture frames, for ex-
ample) but prominent among the furnishings of the middle-class family
was an array of tables, chairs, bed frames, and wardrobes that would
have been unusual in the homes of even the moderately wealthy fifty
years earlier. A growing number of middle-class homes also included
both heating stoves and the new cast-iron cooking stoves—and some
middle-class families were able to afford central furnaces and iceboxes.
 72 HOME AND WORK
Although illumination was from a mixture of sources (candles were still
used in some more-rural homes), kerosene and oil were common in
more-urban areas. And middle-class families had a far greater access to
the foods that growing market networks could provide. Especially out-
side of the large cities, middle-class families often owned enough land
to have their own gardens and to keep a few chickens and a pig or two.
In the cities, bakers and country farmers supplied bread, vegetables,
fruit, eggs, and milk to their doors—or these might be purchased in city _
Open-air markets, where shoppers might also find poultry, pork, and
beef, cakes, crackers, grain, and delicacies like strawberries.
Nevertheless, these were not the wealthy of antebellum society. In
his study of wealth in antebellum cities, Edward Pessen suggests that
one needed $20,000 in taxable property to qualify even for the lower
ranks of the elite, and perhaps $6,000 or $7,000 of taxable property to
place one among the ‘“‘upper middle”’ levels of society. These levels of
accumulation were beyond the reach of most members of the emerging
middle class, or were achievable only over the course of a lifetime. As
Pessen has demonstrated, regardless of the myth of “rags to riches,”
there was little dramatic social mobility in antebellum America. Only
about 7 percent of those who began in the “upper middle group” were
able to parlay their money, property, and family connections into real
wealth. For the roughly 90 percent of the population that owned less
than $4,500 in taxable property, such improvements in fortunes were
rarer yet.“ Even the ownership of a modest two-story house—a con-
siderable expenditure for a clerk, schoolteacher, or shop foreman—
represented taxable wealth of only about $700 to $1,500.*!
For all of its exuberance and apparent self-confidence as the new
arbiters of America’s morals, moreover, the emerging middle class ex-
pressed a constant anxiety over its economic vulnerability. Ominously,
Lydia Maria Child closed her 1828 advice manual, The American Frugal
Housewife, with a section entitled ““How to Endure Poverty.” Visiting
the new nation only two years later, Alexis de Tocqueville exaggerated
the extremes of individual mobility, and yet he wrote as if to confirm
Child’s fears: “In no country in the world are private fortunes more
precarious than in the United States. It is not uncommon for the same
man in the course of his life to rise and sink again through all the grades
that lead from opulence to poverty.’
The specter of economic disaster loomed large in the fears of middle-
class men. In both their private and their published writings, they re-
turned again and again to stories of friends wiped out ‘‘by the vicissitudes
_ Of commerce”’ and offered wisdom against “‘those seasons of pecuniary
 ‘How Strangely Metamorphosed”’ 73
and commercial embarrassment, which have become of late so frequent
and so distressing in our country.”’ As diarist Philip Hone noted in the
mid—1830s, the mood of speculation that fueled a constant rise in the
cost of living in New York was “‘pretty hard” even upon the wealthy,
but ‘‘harder still upon that large and respectable class consisting of the
officers and clerks of public institutions, whose support is derived from
fixed salaries.’’ Pessen’s study of wealth and power in antebellum Amer-
ica suggests that Hone may have been essentially accurate and that,
among property-owners, the emerging middle class may have been in a
particularly vulnerable position: examining Boston during the Panic of
1837, he discovered that ‘‘more than one-third [of the owners of the
modest property assessed at $5,000 to $7,000] were badly hurt.” This
substantial portion of the upper-middle class was far larger than the
roughly 2 percent of the wealthy harmed by the crisis.** Early indus-
trialization had helped create the material base of the new middle class.
At the same time, though, it had created conditions that made that
material base difficult to maintain. -
That precariousness was reflected in heightened anxieties about how
even middle-class men would manage to fulfill the role of ‘“‘breadwinner”’
that underlay their claims to familial and social dominance, that is, how
even middle-class men would achieve manhood. It was a concern that
informed much of the prescriptive literature on manhood published
during the antebellum period. In his 1846 Lectures to Young Men, Henry
Ward Beecher criticized (but also revealed the magnitude of) the pres-
sure put on young men to choose lucrative careers, and to move up in
them quickly:
Shall the promising lad be apprenticed to his uncle, the blacksmith? ...
[T]he mother shrinks from the ungentility of his swarthy labor; the father
... finds that a whole life had been spent in earning the uncle’s property.
These sagacious parents, wishing the tree to bear its fruit before it has
ever blossomed, regard the long delay of industrious trades as a fatal
objection to them. The son... must be a rich merchant, or a popular
lawyer, or a broker....
Writing in 1864, Thomas Nichols described the search for wealth that
defined manhood in antebellum America: “{W]hy the universal and
everlasting struggle for wealth? Because it is the one thing needful; the
only secure power, the only real distinction. Americans speak of a man
being worth so many thousands or millions. No where is money sought
so eagerly; no where is it so much valued. ...’’ He added that he sus-
pected that ‘the American husband unconsciously values his wife in the
Federal currency... .””
714 HOME AND WORK
Nichols may have been correct in his assessment: middle-class hus-
bands may well have unconsciously looked to their wives as sources of
prosperity. But moneymaking was not woman’s chief role. Rather, her
responsibilities were assumed to include, first and foremost, the unpaid
labor of housework. Many women did participate in the paid labor
force—as daughters before marriage and as wives with continuing (if
small and periodic) obligations to add to the family income. But re-
gardiess of whatever else they might do, regardless of the ways and
extent to which they crossed into the “male” realm of wage-earning,
women bore the primary, virtually exclusive, responsibility for the day-
to-day emotional and material arrangements of the family. An unmar-
ried man, or a married man whose wife was temporarily incapacitated,
might on an emergency basis be required to cook, clean, wash, or tend
the children, of course. But no man with a healthy wife or adult daughter
would expect for a moment to take on these duties. Housework was,
above all, women’s work.
Women’s historians have long posed the following conundrum: is
housework devalued because women do it, or are women assigned to
housework because it is devalued labor? The history of housework dur-
ing the antebellum era suggests that the puzzle cannot be solved—at
least, not when it is framed this way. Gender and economic organization
had never existed separately in the northeastern United States. Neither
were they separable in the antebellum period. Men experienced early
industrialization simultaneously through their economic lives and
through their gender identities, with each of these shaping and being
shaped by the other. In the same way, it was in both of these forms—
as work and as distinctly women’s work—that the history of housework
unfolded through the antebellum period.
 Chapter IV
“All the In-doors Work”

In January of 1845, Martha Coffin Wright was recovering from child-

birth—and worrying about her housework. She had been doing the best
she could, she reported to her sister Lucretia Mott: trying to keep an
eye on the children, giving the house a perfunctory clean-up each day,
wrestling with the growing pile of mending, and even managing some
cooking. But most of the big jobs were going undone. ‘You advise me
not to go and make myself sick, cleaning too early,” she wrote; “‘it is a
poor way, you say, and only has to be done again. You add that you
and Maria [Mott’s daughter] are going to do a little temporary cleaning,
such as shaking carpets, washing windows, &c.[,] that ‘&c’ being very
comprehensive. Why bless you, that is all J mean to do.”’ Perhaps she
paused for a moment before adding: “‘ ‘Temporary’ quotha. If I could
find a kind that would be permanent, I would take out a patent.””'
The gentle irony of the retort was characteristic of Wright’s letters,
but it was a gloomy joke she indulged in. As she put it elsewhere in the
same letter, even in her period of recuperation she often felt that she
was simply “too busy to live.” Other women echoed the sentiment. In
Brunswick, Maine, Harriet Beecher Stowe described her family re-
sponsibilities as a constant round of “hurry, hurry, hurry, and drive,
drive, drive.”” Sarah Smith Browne of Salem, Massachusetts, prayed
that her daughters “‘never will have to drudge’’ as she had. Susan B.
Anthony, who remained single but had ample opportunity to observe
75
76 HOME AND WORK
the lives of married women, suggested that for a woman to marry was
for her to accept ‘“‘the position of maid of all work and baby-tender!”’
Growing up in the 1820s and 1830s, Caroline Clapp Briggs watched as
her family’s semirural life robbed her mother of “her health, her
strength, and her life. ... When old age came my mother was worn and
weary. She felt none of my father’s cheerfulness.’”
Such characterizations of housework would have taken many ante-
bellum northeasterners by surprise. Convinced that the economic and
social “progress” of the early nineteenth century had ensured for women
a life pleasantly devoid of all labor but the congenial duties of moth-
erhood, commentators like the Reverend Hubbard Winslow could only
imagine that women’s occupations were delightfully ‘delicate and re-
tired.’”” When William Alcott, the author of a popular advice manual
on the duties of married women, discovered that ‘“‘many a young lady
of mature years... honestly confessed that she should dread death far
less than confinement to a single house, and to the cares of a household,”
he fully attributed the sentiment to an excess of coddling and a want of
proper education. The problem, he assumed, was in the women, not in
the work.*
Historians, too, have tended to discount the possibility that antebel-
lum housework was cither time-consuming or particularly taxing. On
the one hand, most historical work on women in poor families has
focused on their wage-earning labor, either inside or outside the house-
hold. In their benign neglect of the unpaid work poor women performed
in their own households, historians of the working class have implied
both that housework was of little importance to working-class family
survival and that activities like cooking, cleaning, and mending occupied
little time in the daily lives of working-class women. On the other hand,
the secondary literature on antebellum America portrays a society in
which middle-class wives were amply supplied with help and spent their
own days entertaining guests and taking up the voluntary work of re-
form. As one scholar has rather succinctly put it, “{f]emale needle-
workers and domestic servants fashioned the clothes, stitched the
fancywork and tended the homes” that undergirded the lifestyles of
women of the antebellum middle class.“
Such delightful freedom from labor may, indeed, have been the happy
lot of that relatively small number of women whose families made up
the elite of antebellum northeastern society. And certainly there were
families among the laboring classes for whom the imperatives of wage-
earning overrode any sort of unpaid labor a wife might perform in her
own household. But for most women—women of the emerging middle
 ‘All the In-doors Work”’ 77
class, like Wright and Stowe and Browne and Briggs, and the often
more-anonymous women of the new working class—housework re-
mained the personal responsibility and defining labor of women. It also
remained hard work. The first step in understanding the economic and
social significance of housework in the early industrial world of the
antebellum Northeast is simply to reconstruct just what it was that wives
were doing.

To contend that both middle-class and working-class wives were hard

at work in the service of their families is not to say that they were all
doing precisely the same things in precisely the same ways. The com-
position of a woman’s domestic labor still depended on a number of
variables, including the make-up and size of her family, the size of the
family income, the extent of outside resources available to the house-
hold, the nature of her husband’s work, and whether her household was
located in the city or in the still-considerable farmlands of the Northeast.
Martha Coffin Wright's life was in many ways representative of the
experiences of women in the emerging middle class. Her husband, David
Wright, was a lawyer. They lived with their growing family in Auburn,
New York—not an urban center (the Wrights themselves owned some
farmland) but nevertheless a town enmeshed in the expanding market
networks of the western regions of that state. While David attended to
his practice (which often took him away from home) and earned most
of the family income, Martha assumed responsibility for the day-to-day
operation of the household.
Like many middle-class wives, Martha Coffin Wright had some paid
domestic help. The household regularly included a hired cook, who also
worked with Wright on the laundry. From time to time, Wright also
hired women to iron, to sew, or to help with special cleaning projects.
She was quite aware of what it meant to her own work life to be able
to employ other women. Even when she was dissatisfied with a hired
woman's work, Wright confided to her sister, “it was better to have her
and be mad than to have to work hard, and be mad... .’” But this did
not mean that having paid domestic help released Wright herself from
labor. She may have worked a good deal harder when there was no
help, but her letters and diaries from the 1840s suggest that, under the
best of circumstances, she worked very hard indeed—making starch and
starching the laundry, sorting clothes and hanging them out to dry,
ironing, sweeping and dusting the parlor, dining room, entryway and
bedrooms, cleaning carpets and windows, baking, preserving food, tend-
ing chickens, collecting eggs, selling berries to neighbors, making can-
78 HOME AND WORK
dies, and doing the family shopping—a list that does not include what
were apparently Wright’s most common, indeed ubiquitous, household
duties: sewing and child care.°
Although the hired cook occasionally helped with the children, in the
Wright household child-rearing was Martha’s work, and she assumed it
with both pleasure and good humor. Still, between 1830 and 1848, she
gave birth to six children. For two decades, then, she had the constant
care of at least one child under eight years of age (as well as numerous
older children). Good-humored or not, Wright was not immune to the
exhaustion that came with that responsibility. ‘‘[T]heir play makes me
almost as nervous as their crying, they are so vociferous and boisterous,”
she wrote in 1844. ‘‘In desperation I have done as they do at the Rail
Road ‘changed the hour.’ Fill them both up at 2 past 5, and at 6 stow
them in their downy nests and they go quite as willingly as they did at
7 and I breathe an hour earlier. To think of your presuming to doubt
my assertion that I should be glad to be 50.”’ For Wright, even social
visiting, which historians have sometimes taken as evidence of a leisured
middle-class female life, did not signify freedom from household re-
sponsibilities. If nothing else interfered, there were always the children.
After one especially trying visit, she wrote to her sister, “‘I came to the
conclusion that I did not want to see anybody else till Willy was 21.”
On another occasion she remarked of an acquaintance, almost fifty years
old, who was expecting her fifteenth child: “I should think she would
commit suicide... .’”’
For Wright, the supervision and rearing of children probably ac-
counted for more time than any other single responsibility. In that, she
was unremarkable among middle-class women of her period and region.
But immediately behind (and often interspersed with) child care was
that other haunting occupation of nineteenth-century women: sewing.
‘Considering there is only one day out of 7 that the baby sleeps long
enough for me to take a needle in my fingers,’’ she wrote her sister in
January of 1845, “I ought to be differently employed than in writing
now....’* Wright’s needlework was as various as it was ubiquitous.
She mended old pantaloons and made new ones, made and remade
dresses and baby clothes, fashioned purses, knit caps and socks, and
made most of the household linens. She did sometimes hire a seamstress,
but her diaries indicate that this was a rare expense. Usually, moreover,
the seamstress was employed to work alongside Wright on a particularly
difficult project, not to replace her.’
While no single woman can embody the diversity of household re-
sponsibilities borne by women across the broad middle ranges of an-
 ‘All the In-doors Work”’ 79
tebellum society, Wright’s experiences were not atypical. Like Wright,
middle-class women frequently employed some hired help, but both the
universality and the regularity of the practice can easily be overstated.
Census records from the period indicate that less than 20 percent of
northeastern households included live-in domestic servants—a figure
that would exclude most of the middle class as defined by Pessen’s
calculations."” Visitors to the United States testified to the relative scarci-
ity of servants, even in elite households. ‘‘We continue to hear many
ladies complain of the labours of house-keeping in this country,” George
Combe remarked during his tour tn the late 1830s. ‘‘“When one makes
a call in a forenoon, the lady of the house is rarely found sitting in her
drawing-room, as is the custom in England, but appears to be engaged
in some other part of the house."’ Touring the northeastern United States
in the 1840s, Fredrika Bremer also commented on the absence of paid
domestic help—in this case, among members of the professional class.
She described the cottage home and garden of a physician and his wife
in Worcester, Massachusetts, noting that “...here they lived without
a servant, the wife herself performing all the in-doors work. This is very
much the custom in the small homes of the New England States, partly
from economic causes, and partly from the difficulty there is in getting
good servants."”"'
Various observers commented on the comparative scarcity in the an-
tebellum Northeast of women willing to take jobs as servants, but the
decisive factor in whether or not a given woman had paid help appears
to have been her own family’s finances: the wealthier the household—
and the more stable its income—the likelier the wife was to have paid
domestic help some or all of the time. Among middle-class families, the
most common arrangement was to hire a cook or washerwoman (the
two jobs were sometimes combined) on a fairly regular basis, and to
employ additional help as needed (and as able) for special projects, such
as the much-dreaded spring cleaning (when women might be hired to
whitewash as well as to clean) and during the wife’s convalescence fol-
lowing childbirth.
As Wright’s experiences demonstrate, the presence of paid domestic
workers did not free the mistress of the household from labor. In the
first place, servants often had to be schooled—not necessarily in the
work per se, but in the particular routine, habits, and expectations of
the individual household. Such training was time-consuming at best; at
worst, it exposed all the class- and race-based pretensions to superiority
that might characterize a mistress’s attitude toward her employees. Eliz-
abeth Cabot, a woman whose family income of $6,000 placed her among
80 | HOME AND WORK
the elite, complained of the time and energy required to train hired
domestic workers. ‘‘I have been scolding all my servants,” she wrote to
her sister in February of 1860,
and endeavoring to make my mind content under the conviction that they
will not learn to do things up to a satisfactory standard, but will always
linger between the real excellence which is one’s own ideal, and the barely
tolerable which is theirs.

With patronizing generosity, she added: “‘At the same time they are an
uncommonly respectable set of servants, and I don’t wish to turn them
away and know I shall do no better.’’ Servants did not always share this
resignation; one of the recurring (if often deserved) frustrations of
household management was the departure of servants for more satis-
factory or remunerative employment elsewhere, again setting in motion
the cycle of searching out and training domestic help.’
But the presence of hired domestic workers seldom meant that the
mistress’s labor was limited to mere supervision and training. Although
housework had changed over time (with some tasks completely disap-
pearing in some households), women’s letters and diaries evince that it
had not been reduced to a one-woman job that could be entirely ac-
complished by a hired servant. Rather than freeing the mistress from
labor, antebellum servants appear to have absorbed the work (either
the tasks per se or the overall share of the household labor) that in an
earlier time would have been taken on by other females in the household:
adult female relatives, daughters, young girls hired from the neighbor-
hood, or bound servants. Laundry, housecleaning, and some cooking
were among the particular chores that had traditionally been performed
by younger females in the family, but from which the emerging middle
class was increasingly withdrawing its daughters in favor of education
and the development of more refined social skills. In this context, the
mistress was often simultaneously co-worker and supervisor. The ex-
perience of Caroline Clapp Briggs is instructive here. As a young couple,
the Briggses boarded with a minister’s family. Caroline and the servant
split the laundry chores; the servant washing while Caroline ironed.
Later, when she had two servants herself, Caroline continued to do part
of the housework—although now not literally alongside her hired work-
ers. While they cleaned, for example, she sewed and mended."
Servants also enabled wives to assume the new and enlarged respon-
sibilities industrialization gave rise to in middle-class families. Chief
among these was the expanded attention to child care, which absorbed
so much of Martha Coffin Wright’s energy. Writers warned mothers to
 “All the In-doors Work" 81
maintain constant vigilance against potential physical dangers to chil-
dren. Lest their readers miss the point, descriptions of accidents in-
volving children—burns, falls, injuries from runaway wagons and
carriages—frequently stressed that the mishap had occurred when the
mother was momentarily absent. The Providence-based Ladies Museum
carried an especially grisly example of the genre, reporting on the in-
juries to a child who was attacked by a stray hog in the streets of
Baltimore—an accident closer maternal supervision could presumably
have prevented.'* Meanwhile, prescriptive writers cautioned that chil-
dren required more, and more deliberate, preparation for adulthood
than had been necessary in an earlier, presumably simpler period. Lock-
ean philosophy had suggested that children began life without a pre-
disposition to either good or evil—a view that put great emphasis on
the self-discipline and control of the parent shaping the child’s character.
Increasingly throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies, this duty devolved upon mothers."
Women took this responsibility to heart. In his 1856 advice manual
for women, T. S. Arthur recommended that mothers should read ahead
of their children in their studies, becoming proficient in history, geog-
raphy, the classics, and modern literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe had
anticipated the counsel: in 1850, in order that she might be better pre-
pared to teach her children English history, she had launched on a
reading of all of Sir Walter Scott’s novels. Abigail Hyde, the wife of a
Connecticut minister, judged herself ‘‘so far... from meeting the high
responsibilities which devolve on me as a mother, that the conviction
of my deficiency which sometimes forces itself on me is sometimes over-
whelming.”’ Lucy Stone devoted herself to the struggle for a more egal-
itarian conception of marriage; nevertheless, she made an abrupt hiatus
in her career as lecturer to focus her attention on raising her first and
only child. Like thousands of other women, Sarah Ayer joined a ma-
ternal society ‘“‘soon after the birth of my little Sarah,” and recorded in
her diary her hope that “the meetings have been profitable.” At stake,
she considered, was the welfare, not only of little Sarah, but of ‘‘gen-
erations yet unborn.””°
With the exception of nurses employed for a week or two immediately
after childbirth, middle-class women appear, as a rule, not to have hired
workers to help with child-rearing. To the contrary, the ability to attend
personally to one’s children was one of the marks of a good mother.
Visiting the United States in the 1830s, Francis Grund observed the
general ill-health of married women. “As the principal cause of this
sudden decline, some allege the climate,’ he noted, ‘‘but I ascribe it
82 HOME AND WORK
more willingly to the great assiduity with which American ladies dis-
charge their duties as mothers. No sooner are they married than they
begin to lead a life of comparative seclusion; and once mothers, they
are actually buried to the world.”’ As it had for Martha Coffin Wright,
the attempt to meet the standards of middle-class motherhood often left
women with ambivalent feelings. The author of Six Hundred Dollars a
Year (a description of the household economy of a prosperous me-
chanic’s family in the early 1860s) purchased “‘a little coach”’ that allowed
her to keep her new baby with her at all times. It was what she should
have wished as a mother, but as an individual, she recognized in the
baby coach a symbol of the loss of her own freedom: “‘[I]ndeed, after
this I was seldom able to go out in the daytime without taking him with
me.””””
If child care was the central and most time-consuming family labor
for most middle-class women, needlework appears to have often ranked
a close second, as it did for Martha Coffin Wright. The amount of sewing
and mending a woman did varied both with the size of her family and
with the season: the crisp winds of autumn sent wives racing to make
caps and repair winter coats; in the spring, they set to work on light
dresses and shirts for the summer. But the litany of entries in letters
and diaries—‘‘Mended all day to day,” “I sewed all the afternoon,”’
“Finished my dress and did my week[’]s mending’”—reminds us that,
with children or without and throughout the year, sewing and mending
were always with middle-class wives. Needlework could sometimes be
a shared enterprise, as women either worked on a common project or
simply enjoyed the ‘“‘cosiness in being together & sewing uninterrupt-
edly.” But it could also be isolating work. After thoroughly scouring
the house in May of 1858, Sarah Smith Browne looked forward to
company and a more relaxed schedule; but it was time to begin on “the
Spring wardrobes,” and although she had several callers over the next
few days, she found herself forced to “leave them & sew away.”’”
Indeed, so commonplace a fixture was the sewing basket in a woman’s
life that its absence was often marked as a special triumph: “. . . com-
menced cleaning the children{’}s room and Willis’s room also finished
them both and got them in order before 4 o’clock . . . did not sew a stitch
today...”"!"°
The clothing that middle-class women made for their families was one
of the most visible products of their household labor in the antebellum
era, but it did not encompass the full extent either of their sewing or
of their more general household manufacturing. Certainly, over the
antebellum years a greater selection of goods became available for pur-
 ‘All the In-doors Work”’ 83
chase in shops and city markets. Yet this variety did not spell an im-
mediate end to household production. In 1864, Lydia Maria Child
recorded in her diary the manufacture of seventeen articles of furnishing
for her household, including an afghan, a case for glasses, a door mat,
towels, curtains, and pillowcases. In addition to her family’s clothing,
Sarah Browne sewed ‘‘{pot] Holders, Dish towels &,” as she put it, “‘all
kinds of paraphernalia’ for her household. At forty-one years of age
and married to a successful merchant, Lucy Stone ‘‘dried all the herbs
and put up all the fruits in their season. She made her own yeast, her
own bread, her own dried beef, even her own soap.”’ Martha Coffin
Wright made her own soap and manufactured the candles her family
used for lighting, as did Sarah Campbell in Schodack, New York, who
recorded that she had made “three hundred candles and boiled twelve
pailes [of] soap.” Indeed, domestic manufacture was taken for granted
as an aspect of even ‘‘genteel’’ housewives’ work. In The American
Woman’s Home, Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe as-
sumed that wives might be called upon to manufacture mattresses, pil-
lows, and curtains, to repair furniture and make picture frames, to bake
bread, to produce much of the family’s clothing and bed linens, as well
as to make candles.”
The items that women manufactured for their families’ use were
often made from materials purchased on the market. But, even in
comparatively urban areas, some middle-class wives still themselves
produced a portion of the raw materials that their families con-
sumed. Both Lucy Stone (just outside of Boston) and Martha Coffin
Wright (in Auburn, New York) kept chickens and worked a family
garden; Stone also tended a horse and a cow. Sarah Preston Hale
hired someone to prepare the ground for her garden plot, but she
planted and tended beans, peas, and strawberries for her family’s ta-
ble. Harriet Robinson grew lettuce, tomatoes, rhubarb, and grapes.
In New York City, artisans’ wives raised hogs, setting them free to
scavenge what food they could on the streets to compensate for not
having enough space to keep the animals on their own property.
The anonymous author of Six Hundred Dollars a Year shared the
care of the garden with her husband. They planted the patch to-
gether. He then hoed and weeded it each morning before leaving
for his work, while she picked the produce as it came ready, select-
ing some for immediate consumption and preserving the remainder
for later use.”
Even as they continued to produce directly for their family tables,
however, middle-class wives, especially in urban areas, found more and
84 HOME AND WORK
more of their time taken up with shopping. In many ways, there was
little that was new for women about this work. As we have seen, colonial
households had rarely approached self-sufficiency. Goodwives had
traded with neighbors, local merchants, and itinerant peddlers for goods
not produced in their own households. To be sure, by the nineteenth
century most of this trade was cash rather than barter-based. But the
basic patterns of women’s trade had changed remarkably little over the
course of a century and a half. All of the older networks—including
the reliance on peddlers—persisted into the antebellum period, as
women bought such items as fish, apples, eggs, and yarn from vendors
at the kitchen door.”
Also dating from an earlier period was the practice of calling on the
aid of out-of-town friends, in the hope that they might be able to find
some item not locally available. Living in New York City, John Pintard
had been particularly proud of his wife’s readiness to perform this service
for ‘‘her country friends,”’ noting that “...she is an excellent judge of
goods .. . [and] always takes a bill & receipt for every article she pur-
chases, w[hic]h she incloses with the parcel.’’ In the 1820s, Mary Kinsley
and her aunt, who resided in Boston, pursued the custom, trying to find
a leghorn hat for Mary’s friend Eliza, who lived in New Haven. Even
the trips to retail stores to purchase combs, ribbons, fabrics, hats,
and other family necessities were hardly new to women’s work
schedules.”
As the considerable amount of manufacturing still occurring even in
middle-class homes suggests, these shopping trips seldom signified a
household entirely dependent on the marketplace for supplying its
needs. They did indicate a decline both in the overall amount of house-
hold production and in the overall number of household producers.”
But much of the increased purchasing corresponded simply to the grow-
ing importance of possessions in middle-class households, where the
ability to display variety—in foods and furnishings, in clothing and table
settings—was a sign of class security. Rather than replacing women’s
household manufacturing, trips to the shops and markets of the urban
centers supplemented it.
Along with the sewing and mending, the soap-making and quilting,
the gardening and shopping, there remained to middle-class women
those most quotidian of household labors: cooking, cleaning, and doing
the laundry. Few events disrupted the smooth operation of family life—
or the best-laid plans of a wife and mother—like laundry day. ‘I have
been trying to catch time enough together ever since the reception of
 ‘‘All the In-doors Work” 85
your letter to answer it,’’ Luella Case explained in a letter to Sarah
Edgarton:
but of all flying things, these hours and days are the most alert—at least
I would sooner undertake to put salt on the tail of the wildest rover of
the woods, than to stop one of them when its wings are spread long enough
to say ‘how dye do”... .Shall I tell you what prevented? Well, it was ,
washing-day....
In fact, even with hired help, “‘washing-day” was often several days,
and sometimes threatened to take over the entire week. ‘“([Wjhen we
first came,” Louisa Meigs of Rouse’s Point, New York, wrote to her
mother, ‘“‘washing and ironing lasted from Monday—till the ensuing
week—I have now reduced it within three days—and hope to bring it
down to two....” Soap was made in advance, but the clothes had to
be sorted, presoaked, washed, hung to dry, starched, ironed, and put
away. Catharine Beecher recommended that a wife plan on spending
two full days and part of a third getting it all done: Tuesday to wash,
Wednesday to iron, and Thursday to finish ironing and fold and put
away the clothes. (The remainder of Thursday was to be reserved for
mending. )”°
With luck and help, laundry was a weekly undertaking. Cooking and
cleaning, however, recurred with dreary, daily regularity, a point that
Lydia Maria Child underscored grimly in her summary of activities for
1864:
Cooked 360 dinners.
Cooked 362 breakfasts.
Swept and dusted sitting-room & kitchen 350 times.
Filled lamps 362 times.
Swept and dusted chamber & stairs 40 times.
There is no doubt that women sometimes enjoyed aspects of this work.
Cooking especially could be the source of both great pride and great
pleasure—particularly on holidays and during celebrations, when a
woman might display her special skills at making a pudding, bread, or
pastries. But those occasions were comparatively few and far between,
and they were often times of such hard labor for women that the feelings
of satisfaction were lost in a fog of weariness. For the most part, cooking
was simply the business of preparing the family’s daily food—if anything,
the least flexible of the responsibilities that a woman had to fit into her
regular routine. William Alcott had been distressed to discover how
many wives “regard home—the kitchen, especially—as the grave of all
86 HOME AND WORK
true freedom... .’’ Perhaps he had talked with women like Sarah Smith
Browne: “‘On my soul,”’ she confided to her diary, “‘I hate the drudgery
of a kitchen.’””°
Equally demoralizing were the annual and semiannual house cleanings
that represented middle-class women’s efforts to cope with the dirt of
daily life in the antebellum period—the grime created by open-flame
lighting, the soot of wood- and coal-burning stoves, and the mud carried
into the house from unpaved streets and walking paths. Sarah Smith
Browne described the time-consuming and laborious process with heavy ,
irony in her diary for 1858:
[April 19]...1... begin to turn my thoughts towards the “‘spring clean-
ing’’....
{April 21]... I have commenced operations in regard to Spring Cleaning.
In the upper chamber I overhaul all bags, boxes & bundles, in pursuit of
Moths. I find a few & am answerable for their extermination. ...
[April 22}... Mrs Cody, my pillar in the Spring overturn comes. We take
up six carpets in one day....
[April 23] The Panorama of the Spring Cleaning reaches the Closet scene.

year.... |
Amid Crockery & Glass the tangible overpowers. At night the shining
inmates give a grand triumph to the tableau of table furniture.
[April 24] Chilly, discouraging! the marble ornaments & engravings ac-
companied by multitudinous books are to shake off the soil of the past

{April 25] I am tired & sick with headache....

[April 26]... 1 am too feeble to arrange the prodigious quantity of disar-
rangement....
{April 27]...Today I am better & the panorama will move on to the
Furniture cleaning! Chairs [,] Tables, Desks, bureaus &c to be varnished
& waxed....
[April 30]...1 set up my pictures. Napoleon’s face is well washed, but
there are stains on his character. Walter Scott’s ideality stands out glo-
riously free from dust... .
[May 3]... Mrs Cody cleaning tins. They shine like the Pleides. You see
my thoughts can soar, even in the midst of kitchen closets. ...
Even with Mrs. Cody’s help, the work took two full weeks. Harriet
Robinson, who also hired women to help her with the spring cleaning,
devoted two or three days to the scrubbing of each room and used the
annual event as the occasion for repairing and remaking carpets worn
 ‘All the In-doors Work”’ 87
down over the course of the year. For Robinson, the entire process
often took up to a month to complete.”
One final point should be made about the work of middle-class wives:
for many women of this group, “‘domesticity’’ included at least some
direct cash-earning responsibilities. In the second year of her marriage,
the author of Six Hundred Dollars a Year earned over $100 manufac-
turing and selling artificial flowers. During the subsequent years she
earned an additional $350 from the flowers and from sewing. Other
women made money by saving bottles, rags, and paper for resale; by
selling kitchen fat, eggs, and berries; by sewing or doing copying work
for pay; and by taking in boarders.”
For many middle-class women, some form of income earning was an
ongoing aspect of their household responsibilities. Lydia Maria Child
listed among her employments for 1864 the articles she wrote and the
time she spent correcting page proofs and keeping up with published
material, activities necessary to her career as an editor and author of
advice literature and children’s stories. In a letter to her husband in the
winter of 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe described the hardship created
for wives who were required to perform both paid and unpaid labor for
the household economy:
There is no doubt in my mind that our expenses this year will come to
two hundred dollars, if not three, beyond our salary. We shall be able to
come through notwithstanding; but I don’t want to feel obliged to work
as hard every year as I have this. I can earn four hundred dollars a year
by writing, but I don't want to feel that I must, when weary with teaching
the children, and tending the baby, and buying provisions, and mending
dresses, and darning stockings, sit down and write a piece for some paper.

At this period of their lives, the Stowes were earning ‘‘seventeen

hundred dollars in all.”
Middle-class women contributed to their families’ finances in other,
less visible ways. Common among these was their work in providing
services aS a part of the wages of workers hired by their husbands.
Visiting in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the 1830s, E. S. Abdy noted
that in some places journeymen stil] received “‘board, lodging, washing,
and mending” as part of their pay. He did not mention whose labor
supplied these compensations, but it was certainly that of either the wife
or a daughter. When Sarah and Samuel Campbell, who operated a store
in Schodack, New York, expanded their business, the four carpenters
they hired received their meals as part of their pay, ‘‘which,’’ Sarah
noted in her diary, ‘““makes my family quite large[.] I do not visit at all.”
88 HOME AND WORK
As they had in earlier periods, middle-class women also often spent
time working in the businesses their husbands owned, saving the business
the profits that would otherwise had been paid out in wages to a clerk.
‘“‘Attend[ing] the store’’ was a common, if somewhat erratic, intrusion
into Sarah Campbell’s other responsibilities, which included the care of
six children. Similarly, her husband’s absence often required that Anna
Jackson Lowell, who had children, housework, and a school to attend
to, also mind the family store.”

The cash-earning responsibilities that often remained periodic and un-

seen among middle-class wives were frequently the most visible aspect
of working-class women’s labor responsibilities to their families. Any
woman might well be called on in an emergency to set aside her other
household duties in favor of assuming part of the burden of wage-
earning, and for some middle-class women this was a continuing re-
sponsibility. For many more working-class women, however, in whose
families the cash requirements of survival could rarely be stabilized in
the efforts of one person, cash-earning was the domestic work around
which all other tasks constantly had to be organized.
Poor and working-class mothers and wives were ever-present and
resourceful agents in the petty commerce of the streets. From the early
hours of dawn, they could be seen going about their labors. First came
the ragpickers—women in the most destitute of families—armed with
their hooks and baskets, ‘“‘poking into the gutters after rags before the
stars go to bed.’”’ Close behind them came the swelling ranks of street
vendors, some of them country women carrying their farm produce to
town, but many of them city women hawking roots and herbs they had
dug themselves, or berries and apples bought from a country woman
on the edge of town, acquired from a wholesaler, or purchased cheap
at the end of the previous day’s market, breaking the morning peace
with the cries of their wares:
Fine matches! good Matches!
Will you please to have any,
In pity do take some,—
Three bunches a penny.
When they were able to afford the fee, women rented their own stalls
in the city markets, but many hucksters roamed among the markets’
customers, offering candy, baked goods, and coffee for refreshment.
Still other women ran taverns and groceries in their own dwellings.”
The hucksters’ wares were often products traditionally associated with
 ‘‘All the In-doors Work” 89
women’s work, now being vended on the cash market. Many working-
class women—married as well as unmarried—found even more direct
ways of converting their household skills into money. Long before the
transition to early industrial capitalism, married women had plied their
domestic skills for the benefit of other people’s families—either in work-
swapping arrangements with other wives or as paid household workers.
Poor women, both immigrant and native-born, now drew on this tra-
dition as one of their most likely means of earning money for their
families. In an attempt to avoid “‘live-in’’ work in an employer’s house,
married women concentrated on strategies of selling their domestic labor
within their own homes—working at home as outwork needlewomen,
for example; or, like one street vendor’s wife, “occasionally perform[ing]
house-labor”’ on a per diem basis. Relying on another long-standing and
widespread ‘‘domestic” tradition, other working-class women took in
boarders, articulating the cash value of their housework entirely within
the membership, physical confines, and daily patterns of their own
homes. For many married women, marketing domestic skills necessarily
meant leaving home. The immigrant women who worked as cooks and
laundresses for railroad construction crews often travelled a considerable
distance to get paid for their housework. Married black women, who
were excluded from most forms of employment, sometimes had little
choice but to accept positions as live-in maids and cooks, jobs that kept
them from their families and often required that they place their children
with relatives or friends for much of the week. Equally important, even
when done entirely within a woman’s own home, the exchange of do-
mestic labor for cash created a double shift that was debilitating to the
woman and disruptive to family life. When he visited New York, Eng-
lishman E. S. Abdy met Susannah Peterson, a black woman whose
husband was temporarily unemployed because of illness. Susannah’s
strategy of taking in washing permitted her to earn money while staying
home, where she could care for her six children and nurse her husband,
but only at a considerable cost: “her business sometimes keeping her
up nearly all night.”
Like some middle-class wives, many working-class women appear to
have bolstered their families’ incomes by working in shops that their
husbands presumedly owned and operated. William Bell, a police officer
in New York City in the 1850s whose duties included citing small busi-
nesses for operating without a license, discovered that the economically
marginal junk and secondhand shops he visited were often in fact staffed
by women. When he “‘Called at Wm. P. Bennett[’s] Second Hand Cloth-
ing Store” on James Street, for example, Bell found Bennett’s wife
90 HOME AND WORK
running the shop—and apparently functioning as its full proprietor, since
she claimed that she had stocked the store, buying “her goods exclusively
at Auction.”
At the same time, working-class wives remained responsible for per-
forming most of the unpaid labor that went into the household econ-
omy—and for organizing other family members’ contributions. Like
wives in more prosperous households, they provided the bulk of the
work that transformed the goods brought into the household into family
consumables: they washed and sewed and mended clothing; they
chopped and boiled and roasted food; they laid fires; they carried water
and fuel into the house and lugged it back out—or (far more convenient
if one was living in a second- or third-floor apartment) simply dumped
it out the window into the streets.”
As it had in earlier periods, in some respects poverty simplified these
most mundane household labors. Most working-class households lacked
the cash to buy food ahead or in large quantities, with the result that
(especially in poor urban families) there was less need for wives to spend
time preserving food. In any event, the crowded apartments of the urban
working poor afforded little space for the maintenance of extensive
larders—or, for that matter, for complex cooking and baking operations
(assuming the household could afford more than a skeletal selection of
cooking utensils). Food was from the street or the market to the table,
with minimal intermediate processing. Since working-class families had
less money to spend on clothing, washloads were smaller. Similarly,
households with fewer possessions did not need the extensive cleaning
required by multiple rooms and a more elaborate array of furnishings.
In poor families, moreover, immediate issues of providing warmth, food,
and clothing took precedence over providing a cleansed and polished
environment.
But poverty also increased the core labor of housework, particularly
in urban areas. In New York City, where the poor lived largely in
tenements, water for laundry (or for drinking or cooking—indeed, the
food itself) had to be carried up as many as three or four flights of
stairs—that, or the laundry must be carried down. From Lynn, Mas-
sachusetts, Mary Paul Guild, a former mill operative whose household
was on the margin between the working and the middle class, com-
plained to her father of the difficulties of living on an upper floor: *‘We
live up Stairs as usual. I wish we could afford to live in a lower tenement,
it is so hard for me to do my work up stairs though I manage not to go
over the stairs more than once or twice a day... . ’’ She was five months
pregnant at the time, and needed, as she recognized, ‘“‘to be saving of
 ‘All the In-doors Work”’ 91
my strength.’ Even where the laboring classes lived in separate ‘‘cot-
tages’”’ or hastily constructed “‘barracks,’’ housing conditions exacer-
bated the problems of domestic labor. Quarters were often cramped—
filled, not only with people, but also perhaps with the tools and materials
of outworkers. The oily soot of cheap coal stoves and charcoal burners
collected on floors and walls, their fumes lingering in the air. Wives
living with their families in the sod-insulated shacks of Lawrence con-
stantly fought silt and sludge. In the cellar apartments of larger cities,
rainwater and sewage seeped in with every downpour. However sim-
plified the domestic routine, under these conditions even the most basic
of household labors—scrubbing a floor, arranging bedding, or preparing
a meal—required a herculean effort.
Finally, the constant and pressing need for money meant that fewer
household members other than the wife were present to help with the
domestic labor of working-class families. Only under unusual circum-
stances did working-class households contain hired domestic workers—
although they sometimes did when the household was also a boarding-
house or in the event of the wife’s being seriously ill. Mary Paul Guild
was in poor health during the autumn of 1861 and anticipated that she
might ‘‘have to keep a girl all winter.’’ But Guild’s husband was out of
work and she worried how ‘“‘we can manage to pay her.”’”
Central to working-class housework were the wife’s efforts in organ-
izing, Overseeing, and leading an intricate battery of activities aimed at
avoiding cash expenditures. Among the most common forms of pur-
chase-substitution labor in poorer families was scavenging: for food, for
discarded clothing, for household implements, and for fuel. The line
between finding and stealing was necessarily a fine one—and one often
most honored in the breach. As urbanization diminished the possibilities
for providing one’s own raw materials and implements and poverty
precluded their purchase, wives in poor families appear to have crossed
that line more and more frequently. When Mary Brennan stole a $3
pair of shoes in 1841, for example, “[s]he assigned her great destitution
as the sole cause of the theft.”” Brennan was not unusual. Throughout
the antebellum period, women appeared in published crime reports on
charges of the theft of common and basic household implements: wash-
tubs, frying pans, dish kettles, clothing, and other items that seemed
destined, not for resale, but for immediate use.”’
Equally important to the laboring-class household was the wife’s skill
and diligence in maintaining friendly contacts with her neighbors. Social
relations with a strong economic base, these female networks provided
families with additional avenues of access to goods and services necessary
92 HOME AND WORK
to survival. New to a building, neighborhood, or community, a woman
depended on her peers for information on the cheapest places to buy,
the best places to scavenge, and the most favorable times to evade the
police, should the requirements of her household conflict with the re-
quirements of the law. Amicable relations with one’s neighbors could
yield someone to sit with a sick child or a friend from whom to borrow
a pot or a few pieces of coal. One woman “‘went herself to Whitehall
after a load [of wood from municipal authorities], and came up to see
it delivered’ when her neighbor was in danger of going without heat.
In the event of fire, women often found that it was female neighbors
who “‘exerted themselves in removing goods and furniture, and also in
passing water’ through the bucket brigade. In the direst of emergencies,
a friendly netghbor could become a temporary mother for a child whose
family could no longer support it.”
On the other hand, conflict with one’s neighbors could create material
hardship. Mary Pepper, of Boston, complained that a neighbor had had
her arrested as a drunkard for no other reason than to get her evicted:
‘An its all along of your wanting my little place becaise ye cant pay the
rent for your own...,” she charged. Stronger neighborly ties might
have shielded Pepper from the authorities, protecting her apartment,
her freedom, and her family.”
In the midst of all this, in the laboring poor and working classes, as —
in the middle class, women were primarily responsible for child care.
Rarely were they able to accomplish this to the satisfaction of middle-
class reformers—or perhaps to their own satisfaction. Many working-
class families simply did not have the option of withdrawing their
children from the paid work force or of providing them with the edu-
cation that might have prepared them for an economically secure future.
Sending their children into the streets to scavenge or sell newspapers
or roasted corn or potatoes, working-class mothers knew that they were
teaching skills that might well lead to injury or arrest. Particularly given
the circumstances they faced, what is striking about antebellum working-
class mothers is not their failure, but their remarkable success in finding
ways to care for their children. A group of Italian immigrant women in
New York left their children together to take care of each other while
the mothers went out to beg. Other women took their children with
them as they wandered through the streets looking for bits of food
or clothing. One woman, a vendor who lived with her shoemaker
husband in a cellar apartment, took in an orphan “and fed him gratis”’
for weeks.“
 ‘All the In-doors Work” 93
Rural women performed virtually all of the core labor of housework
undertaken by women in more urban areas: they swept and washed
floors, did laundry, hung clothes to dry, ironed, cooked, baked, bound
up cuts and scrapes, made and mended clothing, and took responsibility
for virtually all of the child care—at least until sons were old enough
to be helpful to their fathers in the barn and the fields. But country
women, far more often than women in urban areas, also produced the
raw materials necessary to their household labors.
Farm life had not remained unchanged in the midst of the economic
revolution of the antebellum period. Families bought and sold regularly
in local stores, carried their products to city markets, and supplied
hundreds of outworkers for the new industries of the Northeast. Never-
theless, particularly for wives, day-to-day life on the farm continued to
look much as it had in the colonial period. Women did sometimes buy
commodities that they might have manufactured in an earlier period.
One woman included among her purchases such items as soap, thread,
pins, dishes, tea, and several types of cloth. The soap, thread, and cloth
she might, in another time, have made herself.*'
And yet a vast amount of household manufacturing remained common
on farms. More prosperous country women not only sewed, but also
frequently manufactured the fabric that they used. They “carded, spun,
and wove the wool and flax, making the blankets, fulled cloth, and linen
of the family,” purchasing only the fabrics they could not provide for
themselves. Living outside of Burlington, Vermont, in the 1820s, Han-
nah Matthews Stone, who was the mother of seven children, “wove all
the cloth for the family’s wearing.”’ In February of 1845, Sarah Smith
added a quick note to her husband’s letter to his family, explaining that
she was then busy with “spinning weaving sewing and so on to prepare
for our anticipated journey” to Michigan. Spending the winter of 1851
with her family in Albion, New York, Philena Thorp, a former hired
housekeeper, soon found herself re-immersed in the traditional work
of cloth-making: ‘“‘Sarah and Myself have finished spinning last week
and mother has got one peece of mine half out[.] Sarah is going to weave
the next peas next week....°’ The considerable extent of this labor in
the antebellum period was suggested in censuses of home manufactures;
although the amounts were falling, as late as 1855, New York State
households produced almost a million yards of textile goods.”
Spinning and weaving were only the prelude to knitting and sewing,
of course; once produced, yarns and fabric still required hours of labor
before they became usable in the form of clothing or household linens.
94 HOME AND WORK
Recovering from illness in 1822, Mary Ann Archbald suggested the full
scope of the household textile manufacturing system: “I was able to sew
& knit which is a good thing as there was much of both kinds to do—
first 14 woolen check shirts for winter & then 12 of coarse linning [lin-
en?] for summer[. T]he girles has all the spinning to do & were very
busy....°”
Farm wives were also far more likely to produce the food they cooked
than were city women. Women from more urban areas, where meats
and produce could be more readily purchased in the market, often found
themselves utterly unprepared for this work, should necessity require
that they undertake it. Recently married and moved to the country, one
young wife wrote home to her friend, ‘“...we butchered [S]aturday,
and yesterday, we tried out the lard and made some sausages; wouldn't
you like to see me diving into all these sorts of things{?] I imagine you
would laugh heartily.”
Butchering animals and preserving meats were only a few of the ways
country women directly provided the food for their families’ tables. Sally
Brown, of Plymouth Notch, Vermont, dried fruit and made her own
cheese, cider, applesauce, and molasses; she put her daughters to work
catching partridges, gathering berries, making turkey cages, and milking
the cows. Living on a farm in northern New York, Phebe Eastman grew
her own vegetables, foraged for wild berries, salted down her own pork,
and boiled her own lard. Journalist Thomas Nichols remembered farm
wives hard at work making “plenty of butter and cheese”’ for their
families.“
Not all of the household manufacturing of farm wives was for their
own families’ consumption. Like their counterparts of an earlier era,
they also produced a variety of goods for sale: yarn and cloth from their
spinning wheels; eggs and milk products from their barnyards; fruits
and vegetables from their gardens and orchards. The father of the family
sometimes transported these goods to market. Thomas Nichols recalled
wagons loaded not only with “hogs, frozen stiff,”” but also with “tallow,
butter, cheese, dried apples, apple-sauce, honey, home-made cloth,
woollen socks and mittens. .. .”’ Sometimes women and children carried
the produce to town themselves, paying the fee to sell it in the market;
New York City’s Washington Market, for example, was frequently
crowded with farm women who “‘came in great numbers with their
butter, pot-cheese, curds and buttermilk.”” Other women left their goods
on the doorsteps of regular customers. Still others sold their produce
to local vendors for resale to households; one mechanic’s wife, lacking
either the inclination, the time, or the means to raise chickens herself,
 ‘All the In-doors Work” 95
complained that she had to deal with a woman “who bought eggs at
two shillings a dozen and supplied them to me at double that price.”
In urban and suburban areas, the character of housework was sharply
circumscribed by class—and so it was, as well, in the countryside of the
rural Northeast. Indeed, class definition may well have overridden rural-
or-urban distinctions. Like poor urban households, poor farming house-
holds were unlikely to have the equipment for elaborate food processing
and preservation, or the space for extensive kitchen gardens. If, in the
poorest of city families, food often went directly from the street to the
table, in poor rural households it went from the woods to the table.
Rural foraging replicated urban scavenging. Also like women of the
urban working classes, the poor women of the countryside were more
likely than their more prosperous neighbors to engage in wage work—
either hiring themselves out as field workers or becoming outworkers
in regional manufacturing enterprises.*’
Because their husbands’ place of business coincided so closely with
their own, farm wives assumed hidden responsibilities for the general
operation of the farm. As a matter of course, for example, they were
expected to cook for hired workers and to provide medical aid when
anyone in the household, relative or hired worker, fell sick. Although
women appear not to have worked in the fields (as distinct from the
kitchen garden, the chicken coop, and the dairy) on a regular basis,
when need arose they plowed, planted, and harvested, and raked and
stacked the crop side-by-side with the men—leaving that work only long
enough to prepare the meals for the full work crew.
Commonly, wives in more prosperous farming households were aided
by the presence of both hired women and daughters. Caroline Clapp
Briggs, who observed the price in happiness and health that farm life
exacted from her mother, often helped with the household labor. In
addition, she recalled, her family employed two women, whose regular
household duties were sometimes supplemented with work in the fields.
Mary Ann Archbald and Sally Brown both put their daughters to work
spinning. When Brown’s daughters could not keep up with the load,
she hired Mary Thompson to help out. Phebe Eastman hired a succession
of girls and young women to spin the yarn she wove. Occasionally, she
also hired workers to help with her cleaning and child care.“
Hired domestic servants and unpaid daughters only supplemented the
labor of rural wives, however. A woman who identified herself as ‘‘An-
niss’’ wrote to newspaper columnist Jane Swisshelm complaining about
“rich” farmers who expected their wives to ‘“‘cook, milk and churn”
even during those times when the men “lounge around and rest.” Car-
96 HOME AND WORK
oline Clapp Briggs remembered of the 1820s and 1830s that ‘‘[m]erriment
was an unusual gift in women of those days, who were generally over-
worked and anxious."’ Echoing that sentiment, woman’s rights advocate
Lucy Stone recalled, as among the sharpest memories of her childhood,
watching her ‘mother’s health give way under the hard work” of the
family farm.”
Indeed, their remoteness from the bustle and “‘progress”’ of the city
was a mixed blessing for farm women. If their farms prospered, they
saw their families comparatively well fed and well clothed and their
children protected from the health and safety dangers of more urban
areas. But they also worked with tools and under conditions that had
changed very little since the late eighteenth century. At a time when
some city families were discovering gas lighting, farm women still spun
and sewed by candles they had made themselves. Although the spinning
jenny had originally been intended for domestic use, most rural house-
hold spinning was still done at single-spindle hand wheels. Apparently
with rural women chiefly in mind, Caroline Gilman suggested in 1838
that what wives needed most in the way of new technology was an
improved churn: “The churn is an unwieldy article,’’ she observed, ‘“‘and
something should be devised to save the labor which is called into req-
uisition to ‘making butter come.’ ”’ In 1838, unfortunately for farm
women, most of the energy of American inventiveness was being chan-
neled toward capitalized manufacturing.” |
Ironically, the snail’s pace at which the industrial revolution came to
the farmhouse reflected in part the growing commercial orientation of
agriculture. By the mid-nineteenth century, farming was a business in
the Northeast—albeit often a precarious one, with stiff competition from
the West. Focused on profit and loss, farm families were far more likely
to invest hard-earned dollars in the clearly commercial enterprises of
the farm—the cash crops and stock—than in the family labor that did
not lead to a cash nexus. Much of their labor unremunerated, farm
women’s work appeared to have little to do with the world of agricultural
profit and loss and was able to make but a weak claim to the deployment
of cash resources.*' George S. Boutwell, later to become governor of
Massachusetts, congressman, senator, and Secretary of the United
States Treasury, remembered that in his own parents’ household this
pattern of decision-making reigned. The family lived in a house of un-
painted white pine; cooking was done at an open-hearth fireplace; and
the rooms were “destitute of furniture, except of the plainest sort.”
Boutwell’s father, however, was the first farmer in the neighborhood to
own a cast-iron plow.”
 ‘‘All the In-doors Work”’ 97
But it was in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s ‘‘The Revolt of ‘Mother’ ”’ (a
story based on Freeman’s own memories of farm life in pre—Civil War
Randolph, Massachusetts) that the simmering resentments of such fam-
ily dynamics found their classic expression. For years, Mrs. Penn had
worked on in silent resignation—washing the family’s clothes, cleaning
the family’s house, making the family’s meals, raising the children—
while all of the family’s earnings had been poured into her husband’s
work. When Mr. Penn decided once again to improve his workplace
(by building a new barn), rather than hers (by spending money on the
house), the accumulated anger of decades exploded: ‘‘You see this room,
here, father, you look at it well. You see there ain’t no carpet on the
floor an’ you see the paper is all dirty, an’ droppin’ off the walls. . ..
You see this room, father; it’s all the one I’ve had to work in an’ eat
in and sit in sence we was married.”
Freeman gave her story a happy turn: Mrs. Penn simply moved the
family into the barn. Few wives would have dared such rebellion. Per-
haps few would even have considered it. In her study of household
service, Faye E. Dudden has speculated that wives may have shared
their husbands’ tendency to denigrate the importance of their unpaid
labor. Dudden argues that rural women were far more reluctant to hire
workers to help them with cooking, cleaning, and child care than to
assist in the labor they performed for the market: keeping chickens for
an egg business, making cloth to be sold, milking, and the like. Ap-
parently they felt they could justify the expenditure only when the labor
could be immediately reconverted into cash.”

Few wives in antebellum America enjoyed a life free from labor. Family
life depended on the smooth performance of an extensive array of unpaid
occupations in the household, and on the presence in the household of
someone to provide that work—to supervise the children through the
vicissitudes of a changing social and economic order; to make and mend
clothes, quilts, pillows, and other household furnishings; to shop for
items the household could afford to buy, and scavenge or forage for
those it could not; to clean, cook, and bake; and, whenever necessary,
to move from unpaid to paid labor to bolster the household income.
The growth of manufacturing and of the cash markets of the Northeast
had not rendered this labor superfluous. Nor had it reduced housework
to unskilled labor. Whether a family lived in a cottage in a town in
western New York State or a tenement in Boston, housekeeping re-
mained a vocation of, as Catharine Beecher put it in 1841, “‘almost
incalculable anxieties, vexations, perplexities, and even hard labor.”’”
98 HOME AND WORK
It was also a vocation that was changing. As the antebellum period
wore on, housewives discovered what historians have sometimes failed
to see: that, in many ways, women’s ‘traditional’ domestic labor was
no longer traditional.
 Chapter V
“The True Economy of
Housekeeping”

Although much divided the laboring classes from the new middle class
in antebellum America, the two groups shared a growing alarm about
the impact of early industrialization on family life. Working-class men
decried an economy in which their wives and children were forced into
wage-work. Cherishing a vision of homes fully sanctified against the
incursions of the marketplace, they demanded a ‘“‘family” wage large
enough to provide the entire support of the household. Only then, as
William English claimed in 1835, would ‘‘our wives, no longer doomed
to servile labor, . . . be the companions of our fireside and the instructors
of our children.”’ It was an ideal shared by members of the new middle
class, who confidently celebrated what they supposed to be the complete
and successful withdrawal of wives and daughters to “‘that paradise... .
that bright and central orb,” the middle-class home, where neither
“strife” nor ‘‘selfishness” could enter. '
Working-class households had comparatively little power to effect
what they so ardently desired; the uncertainty of wages and the climbing
costs of housing, food, and clothing all limited their options for shaping
the home as a refuge from industrialization. But middle-class families
went to great lengths to attempt to make their homes refuges from the
rest of society: they divided their residences from their places of busi-
ness, expelled journeymen and apprentices from their families, and fled
farther and farther from the mercantile centers of cities, founding new
99
100 HOME AND WORK
neighborhoods where prosperity and poverty, family and factory, home
and work need never meet.’
It was a futile effort, even by the middle class. At almost every point,
lived experience bore down hard on the rhetoric. Unless a women was
literally to confine herself within doors—scarcely a feasible alternative,
given her various responsibilities to her family—she simply could not
avoid contact with the larger society she was presumably to be protected
from. The layout of antebellum communities, in which widely disparate
economic groups still resided on adjacent streets and alleys and mingled
in the open-air markets and commercial districts, made such tsolation
virtually impossible. Living in New York City in the early 1840s, Lydia
Maria Child vowed not to allow the “‘bloated disease, and black gutters”’
of the city to “constitute the foreground of my picture,’’ but to fo-
cus instead on “‘the pretty parks, dotted about here and there; with
the shaded alcoves of the various public gardens, with blooming nooks,
and ‘sunny spots of greenery.’”’ Yet her best efforts soon crumbled
under the oppressive reality she constantly encountered, a world where
‘*[l]ife is a reckless game, and death is a business transaction,” and where
even the most optimistic observer was overwhelmed with ‘an appall-
ing night-mare sensation of vanishing identity; as if I were but an
unknown, unnoticed, and unseparated drop in the great ocean of
human existence... .’’ Women of the laboring poor and working classes,
meanwhile, lived their lives almost as much on the streets as in their
homes.”
But industrialization, in all of its social, cultural, and economic
manifestations, was not merely a specter that waited around the corner
for women and men who ventured from their homes. Equally, it
was a process of the family. As much as in Samuel Slater’s mill, American
industrialization had been born in American homes—in the material
aspirations of European colonists, in the poor soil of New England
farms, in family fertility patterns and inheritance strategies, and in
countless individual household decisions to purchase rather than
produce goods and services. And as it had in part originated in fam-
ilies, so industrialization continued to be a process of family (as well
as community) life in the antebellum years—a process that was reshap-
ing how much money households had and how they spent it, how men
understood their family roles, and how children perceived their
futures.
The industrialization of the household involved much more than
changes in family purchasing habits and interpersonal dynamics, how-
ever. At its core, industrialization was a reorganization of labor, and
 “The True Economy of Housekeeping”’ 101
that was its chief characteristic in the household as well as in the paid
workplace. Over the first half of the nineteenth century, as new tech-
nologies replaced older ones and new household needs dictated new
labor priorities, both the content and the structure of women’s daily
work was steadily transformed. As we shall see, the historic relations
of gender would give that transformation a distinctive cultural spin,
leading contemporary observers to conclude that the central effect of
industrialization on housework was to isolate it from the changes in the
paid labor market. A century and a half later, that conclusion has been
deeply inscribed in our own cultural assumptions. But if we set those
assumptions aside for a moment, what is most striking about the early
industrial period is, not how different housework was becoming from
paid labor, but rather how closely the reorganization of the two forms
of work were replicating each other.“

To some extent, the changes taking place in households were the direct
result of changes occurring outside of them. The reorganization of paid
labor and the precariousness of family incomes as a result of that re-
organization inevitably sent shock waves reverberating through family
life and often necessitated major adjustments in the labor of wives. In
the mid—1840s, following the worst financial collapse in the history of
the young nation, Lydia Maria Child (whose own marriage suffered
from recurrent financial difficulties) cautioned middle-class mothers to
raise their children with an eye to the possibility that they would one
day be poor, since even “[t]hose who have wealth, have recently had
many and bitter lessons to prove how suddenly riches may take to
themselves wings... .’””
The most dramatic illustration of the way changes in the larger com-
munity reshaped individual households was the impact of early indus-
trialization and urbanization on the homes of the urban laboring classes,
and therefore particularly on the work environment of urban laboring-
class women. In The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population,
John Griscom vividly rendered the settings in which many laboring-class
wives spent much of each day. “A short time ago,” he wrote in one
passage,
I met with the case of a woman, the wife of a tailor living in a noted court
in Walker-street, and occupying partly a basement, in which she was
compelled to pass much of her time. She has lived there six months, four
of which she has been sick with rheumatism, and, on that account, unable
to work. Otherwise, she would be able to earn considerable by assisting
her husband. They have four children depending upon them, and are
102 HOME AND WORK
obliged to seek assistance from the public, in consequence of this sickness.
She attributes her disease to the water in the cellar, which runs in, and
obliges her to bale out, and wipe up, at every storm.
Griscom was keenly aware of the additional work created for women
by ‘‘[t]he almost entire absence of household conveniences. ...” Only
a page earlier he had commented on “(t]he deficiency of water, and the
want of a convenient place for washing, with no other place for drying
clothes than the common sitting and bed room. ...”’ But he was more
particularly concerned about the health conditions surrounding that la-
bor. Noting the lack of ventilation in most tenement housing, Griscom
observed that husbands and sons at least escaped during the hours of
their paid employment; while women, who bore a greater responsibility
for labor within the home, “both night and day, inhale the polluted
atmosphere of the dwellings, and are more continually under all the
other bad influences of their unfortunate situations.’
Many husbands left the conditions of their dwellings only to encounter
the equally pernicious conditions of the paid workplace, of course. If
their absence from the household did not allow them to avoid the dangers
of early industrialization, however, it did significantly affect the orga-
nization and scope of their wives’ labor. As husbands spent more of
their time working away from the household, their ability (and perhaps
their willingness) to perform unpaid labor within their families dimin-
ished. Certainly, family members other than adult women continued to
do part of the household work. Poor men often built the shanties that
their families lived in to avoid rents. Husbands sometimes laid morning
fires and prepared their own breakfasts. Especially during periods of
unemployment, adult males may have participated more regularly in
household chores, freeing their wives to earn cash. Depending on the
economic status of their families, children ran errands, scavenged,
looked after younger siblings, and helped in other ways as their ages
permitted. For varying reasons, however, the family’s unpaid labor force
was shrinking. Middle-class children spent more time in school. Work-
ing-class and poor children spent more time at paying jobs. Fewer and
fewer husbands earned their incomes where they lived. Increasingly over
the antebellum years, the household labor of these various family mem-
bers gradually devolved upon married women.
This appears to be the explanation for women’s growing responsibility
for shopping. As we have noted, the mere presence of purchasing ac-
tivities among a wife’s responsibilities was not new. But the extent and
frequency of those activities, as recorded in the running entries in an-
tebellum women’s letters and diaries, was. ‘‘In the afternoon out shop-
 “The True Economy of Housekeeping”’ 103
ping... ,” ‘went out and bought materials for another comfort[er] . . . ,””
‘went down street this morning bought some muslin... ,”° “‘Went out
in the afternoon.—bought a pair of flat irons for which I paid 75
cts...,’° “went out a little after dinner to see about Some purchases
that I made at Tufts which in all amounted to $11 96 cts....” In the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the husband often had done at
least a part of the family’s purchasing, taking a portion of the payment
for his work in goods, or (a pattern that persisted among some country
people) buying various needed items when he took the farm produce
to market. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, middle-
class husbands frequently purchased the family food, perhaps because
the open-air markets seemed too rowdy and unclean for their wives. At
mid-century, however, as men came to think of wage-earning as their
primary contribution to family maintenance—and as they found shop-
ping less and less compatible with their own work routines outside of
the household—shopping seems to have fallen mainly to women. In the
1850s, according to one observer, shopping was men’s work only in
urban families that took in boarders, and even in those cases the shop-
ping in question was apparently confined to the purchase of groceries.’
At the same time, shopping had become a more complicated task.
Particularly in the cities, a woman was less likely to know the person
she made her purchases from than her mother would have been, and
she was less likely to know the quality of the goods she purchased. In
warning homemakers against the perils of bargain hunting, Elizabeth
Ellet suggested some of the pitfalls that awaited every woman who went
to the market: ‘‘Cheap tea, coffee, sugar, &c., are all adulterated; cheap
vegetables and fruits are generally stale; cheap meat is that which has
been sent ready killed to the market, and therefore is by no means as
fresh as might be wished; cheap poultry and fish are to be regarded with
very great suspicion.”’ Indeed, wives did well to regard the whole market
‘with very great suspicion.’
This devolution onto women of labor that had been either wholly
men’s or shared by the husband and wife, a process fostered by the
growth of wage labor during early industrialization, was also one of the
dynamics involved in the growing special association of women with
child-rearing. In the colonial period, the responsibility for forming a
child’s character had been understood to belong primarily to the father
in his role as the moral instructor of the family. But, as T. S. Arthur
pointed out in his advice to young mothers, many fathers in the pre-
Civil War era found it impossible to become deeply involved in the
rearing of their children. When called on to share in the burdens of
 104 HOME AND WORK
child care, they simply shrugged and asked rhetorically, ‘““Am I not at
my work all day?’”—a response that not only underscored their as-
sumption that the raising of children to adulthood was properly women’s
work, but also illuminated the growing ideological separation of cash-
earning labor from the household.”
Other writers also noticed that husbands were contributing less to the
general household labor. Acknowledging that cleaning up yards and
unclogging drains was really ‘“‘man’s” work, William Alcott nevertheless
was forced to concede that husbands seemed to take a less active role
in the physical upkeep of family dwellings than they should have. Con-
sequently, he included that subject in his advice to the young wife,
concluding that “it can do no harm to remind the housewife of it, that
she may remind him.” We can only speculate on whether an occasional
reminder was enough to take care of the problem.
Husbands who spent their days in detached work settings—whether
they worked in shops or offices in a separate neighborhood, or were
lawyers whose business took them out of town, or laborers on travelling
construction teams—surely had trouble finding the time to clean yards
and clear drains. But at least some women saw the problem of men’s
withdrawal from household labor as a question of attitude rather than
time. ‘Cleo Dora”’ addressed this subject in a letter to the editor of the
Anti-Slavery Bugle in 1846. What husbands needed to be reminded of,
she thought, was that the meaning of the female ‘‘helpmeet” was to
help, not to perform all of the family labor, and certainly not to be kept
hard at work long after her husband had come home to relax: “I pray
you,’ she concluded, “be more just and now and then exhort husbands
to do their parts.””"'
The organization of the ‘‘outer” world impinged upon the work of
the household in other ways as well. As husbands and children increas-
ingly answered the call of factory bells and office schedules, wives nec-
essarily found their own work reorganized to conform to the timetables
of early industrialization. Women’s work had always been influenced by
the comings and goings of the rest of the household, of course, but the
prescriptive literature of the antebellum period suggests a new time
consciousness, one directly tied to the discipline of the paid workplace.
Reflecting this change, William Alcott complained that in some families,
| ‘instead of having breakfast upon the table at eight, it does not arrive
until three, five, ten, and sometimes nearly fifteen minutes afterward.”
Alcott was a man who did not believe that wives should see themselves
as participants in the economics of family accumulation. Nevertheless,
his own comments betrayed just how inseparable the two worlds of
 ‘The True Economy of Housekeeping"’ 105
‘‘work”’ and “‘home’”’ remained, for he used the example of women’s
cooking for their husbands’ employees to make his point: ‘‘Do you know
how much is the value of the time of ten men, who are compelled by
your tardiness to wait ten minutes for their dinner?”’ he demanded of
his readers. ‘‘Here are a hundred minutes of valuable time lost to them;
how much is that a month?—how much a year? I say nothing of the
vexation, but only the pecuniary loss.””'”
As we shall see, working at an open fireplace or on an early nineteenth-
century cast-iron stove, wives themselves had a good deal to say “of the
vexation.’’ Yet they appear to have taken the admonitions to heart, and
they certainly felt the pressure of the new time-discipline in their work.
Racing to meet her husband’s precise schedule was one of the complaints
‘Cleo Dora”’ included in her description of the burdens of the latter-
day “helpmeet.” In her 1839 Lady’s Annual Register, Caroline Gilman
emphasized the role of the clock in a wife’s daily life, recommending
that any woman who felt inclined to idleness should ‘‘{c]ount the tickings
of a clock; do this for an hour....’’ Harriet Beecher Stowe also rec-
ognized the new pace of women’s work, declaring that in the nineteenth
century the wife had become the very embodiment of time in the
family.'°

All of these changes affected housework—increasing its labor, decreas-

ing its work force, and altering its rhythms. But the antebellum reor-
ganization of housework was not merely reactive, not merely a response
to external conditions. In a very real sense, housework itself was being
industrialized—and industrialized in ways that often bore strong resem-
blances to the transformations in paid work.
Over the course of the antebellum period, and particularly in the
emerging middle classes, new household technologies continuously re-
shaped the work of wives. As historian Faye E. Dudden has pointed
out, an 1871 list of essential equipment for every woman’s kitchen—
which included ‘‘a raisin-seeder, egg beater, syllabub churn, apple-corer,
potato-peeler, and farina kettle’ —would appear to bespeak “the limi-
tations rather than . . . the power of mechanical aids” in the performance
of a woman’s daily work."* If the comparison is with Lowell’s clamorous
mills, the observation is probably accurate enough. Antebellum house-
holds contained nothing to compare with the power spindles and looms
of the New England textile industry. But Lowell was not the standard
of early American industrialization. The shop of the shoemaker or the
garment worker offered far more representative examples. Compared
with the needle, last, and awl of the shoemaker or the needle and thread
106 HOME AND WORK
of the tailor, the implements of the kitchen look neither meager nor
particularly primitive. On the contrary, they look rather like the basic
tools of early industrialization.'°
To focus only on the hand tools of antebellum housework, however,
is to miss the considerable extent to which new technologies of the
antebellum period reorganized the labor process itself. From outside the
household, of course, several new technologies had already significantly
affected housework: the development of the power spindle and loom
had removed most textile production from urban homes. Making cloth
more easily accessible, they had raised expectations about the amount
of clothing that a family should have and, in so doing, had acted as
catalysts to increase the time and labor women spent in sewing. Simi-
larly, the canal boats, steamships, and railroads that brought new goods
to city markets had contributed to the increased time women spent
shopping. But technological changes occurred within the household, as
well as outside it. Central furnaces, new heating stoves, indoor pumps,
iceboxes, oil lamps, and, perhaps most important, cast-iron cooking
stoves and sewing machines were permanently and fundamentally re-
shaping the conditions and nature of wives’ work.
Like those of the paid workplace, the new technologies of the middle-
class household were promoted chiefly for their low cost and ‘“‘labor-
saving” capacities. This view was propounded itn an 1821 article in the
Ladies’ Literary Cabinet, which claimed that “‘{t]he female sex”’ had
been among the great beneficiaries of the “‘labour-saving machines”’ of
modern civilization; and it was echoed in the comments of various ob-
servers of antebellum American society. James Dawson Burn com-
mended the virtues of the cast-iron cooking stove, which would, he was
confident, ‘‘enable the housewife to wash, stew, boil, bake and heat her
irons at the same time, and, if necessary, she may cook for a dozen of
people without inconvenience.”’'®
Women did not find the new stoves so entirely satisfactory. Whether
one used wood or coal, the cast-iron stove had to be filled, lighted, and
fed; the draft had to be regulated, and the ashes removed. To prevent
unpleasant odors from accumulated grease and spillage, the stove had
to be cleaned daily. To prevent rusting, it had to be blackened period-
ically. The blackening and the regulating of the fire meant that the
woman who tried both to cook a meal and to present herself in a rea-
sonable condition to eat it was doomed to failure. As often as not, she
appeared at the table covered with smudges of soot and ash. More
unpleasant, cast-iron stoves burned hot; often, as one woman put it,
producing ‘roasted lady” along with the roasted meat.'’ It is perhaps
 “The True Economy of Housekeeping”’ 107
no wonder that middle-class wives shared a special dread of kitchen
work, or that, if they could afford it, they so often hired a cook.
The introduction of the cooking stove had several other important
ramifications for middle-class housework. As cooking and eating uten-
sils had become more plentiful and varieties of food more available,
eighteenth-century ‘“‘middling’” households had gradually abandoned
single-dish meals in favor of more complex preparations. By the end of
the century, the transition to multiple-dish dinners had been enshrined
in cookbooks, which included directions for dressing meats and making
both dinner and dessert pies.'* With its specialized compartments for
baking and its multiple cooking forms, the cast-iron cookstove, which
became increasingly common in middle-class homes after about 1830,
reinforced the new standards. Far from “‘labor-saving,” the new stove
may well have served precisely the end that Burn suggested: to in-
crease productivity, both by increasing the number of people a woman
might be expected to cook for and by diversifying the products of
cooking.
The new sewing machines that began to appear in middle-class homes
near the end of the antebellum period had a similar effect on women’s
work. Sarah Smith Browne, who once noted that ‘‘(t]he sewing machine
monopolizes our time,”’ was less than sanguine about the common as-
sumption that the new technology would relieve wives of one of their
most constant burdens: “I was once told, if I owned a sewing machine
I should have ‘nothing to do,’ for a great part of the time,” Browne
observed. ‘‘Had I been poetical enough to have imagined such a reality,
I should have been wofully disappointed. But I am too much of a diver
down to the base of assertions, to cr{e]dit, without being convinced—
so I am not discomposed. ...’’’’
The intrepid Martha Coffin Wright discovered, much to her annoy-
ance, that heating stoves, too, were a mixed blessing to the housewife,
providing a warmer working environment only at the price of a string
of problems: ‘‘As I was looking over my letter,’’ Wright wrote to her
sister in November of 1841,
whack! went the stove equal to a cannon and now both windows are open
to let out the smoke. . .. Bang! goes the blamed stove again. I had got all
the smoke out and closed the windows, and then raised the door to get
the stove hot again—before it was too hot I shut it nearly down and it
chosed to puff. ...
As Harriet Beecher Stowe put it at the conclusion of the Civil War, it
was still ‘intelligent women, who are brought up to do the work of their
108 HOME AND WORK
own families’ who were the real “‘labor-saving institutions’ of the
household.”

Equally important, if perhaps less immediately apparent, was the impact

of the changes in housework in severing women from their traditional
knowledge of housewifery. In her study of poor and working-class
women in antebellum New York City, City of Women, Christine Stansell
has pointed to the ways the new poverty of the industrialized metropolis
made anything like eighteenth-century “‘notable’’ housewifery impos-
sible for laboring-class women. In the context of the wage dependency
of the urban poor, Stansell observes, the skills of gardening, of manu-
facturing their own household goods, and of keeping the family’s pigs
and chickens were virtually irrelevant, since poor familtes lacked both
the raw materials and the space for these activities. Under these con-
ditions, housekeeping became a “makeshift’’ enterprise—as Stansell
puts it, ‘‘the catch-as-catch-can” routine of the destitute.”
One might want to qualify Stansell’s characterization slightly. Many
of the skills of the new “‘makeshift’’ housekeeping of the urban laboring
classes were, in fact, traditional skills of the poor: as we have seen, for
example, scavenging (whether in the form of foraging in the forests or
swiping the fruit of unguarded trees) was an old and honored domestic
art among the poor. Moreover, throughout the colonial period, few
households among the urban poor had been able to acquire and keep
pigs, chickens, and gardens. In a sense, then, the housekeeping of the
antebellum poor was less a ‘‘makeshift’’ variant of a middle-class theme
than a separate and distinct tradition.
Yet Stansell is correct that that tradition was changing. In part, the
changes were simply quantitative, as more and more of the rural dis-
possessed (both native-born and immigrant) made their way to ante-
bellum cities. Women brought up in the countryside—whether it be the
countryside of New England or old England or Ireland—could not im-
mediately transfer their skills as rural foragers to the city. In Boston or
Hartford or New York, it was of little use to a woman to know how to
cut pine knots for lighting or where to find the best berry patch or peat
bog. Far more telling for the survival of her family would be her clev-
erness in knowing where to find odd bags of coffee or flour or how to
blend into a crowd during a fire as she “‘profit[ted] by stealing goods
during the conflagration.”
In part, the transformation of working-class housewifery was directly
related to the new wage-dependency and to the problems of maneu-
vering, with very little cash, through an increasingly cash-defined mar-
 ‘The True Economy of Housekeeping” 109
ket. Women in all but the wealthiest families had to apportion their
cash budgets carefully, but among the urban poor this conserving was
a particularly developed skill. A woman must know, for example, when
the market vendors slashed their prices at the end of a day’s trade, so
that more could be purchased with less; and what pawnbroker was likely
to give the most on account for clothing, to be held over until the next
payday; and how long a bill, along with a landlord’s or grocer’s patience,

poor. )
could be stretched before the credit was exhausted and the family thrown
out on the street or reduced to scavenging for food. These were the fine
calculations of cost the welfare of the family depended on—the art forms
as well as the survival strategies of the housewives of the new urban

While it was the new urban poverty that most fundamentally reshaped
the labor of urban laboring-class wives, it was the new prosperity of
industrialization that precipitated the severest disruptions in the work
of middle-class women—in particular, the new domestic technologies
that gradually interrupted the practical transmission of traditional bodies
of knowledge from one generation of women to the next. Coal- and
wood-burning stoves burned differently and required different tending
than had the old open-hearth wood fireplaces. The new cast-iron con-
struction affected cooking temperatures and heat intensity, and the de-
sign of the stoves—their new baking compartments and the new
arrangement of pans over the fire—required new techniques for con-
trolling cooking speed and temperatures. Some designs were so difficult
to operate that households reverted to earlier versions in search of the
tastes and textures they had become accustomed to. In 1840, Samuel
Rodman of New Bedford, Massachusetts, noted in his diary: ‘“‘Had a
new grate put into our kitchen stove this m[ornin]g, probably the last
as the verdict of the family is decidedly against a continuance of the
‘Rotary’, the defect or failure in baking being the most important ob-
jection.” Catharine Beecher agreed that making decent baked goods
was one of the great challenges of the new stoves. ‘‘We cannot but
regret,’ she lamented in her 1869 American Woman’s Home, ‘‘for the
sake of bread, that our old steady brick ovens have been almost uni-
versally superceded by those of ranges and cooking-stoves, which are
infinite in their caprices....””*
Sewing machines had a comparable impact on the traditional crafts
of women’s domestic labor. Although women could and did still use
hand-stitching for much of their sewing, the increased speed of the new
machines made it desirable that any woman who could get access to one
should use it as much as possible. Alas, sewing at a machine was not a
110 HOME AND WORK
skill that was latent in the female chromosome: it had to be learned—
virtually from scratch. While some earlier domestic employments (spin-
ning, for example) might have honed some of the same motor skills as
operating the treadle of a sewing machine, from the turn of the century
onward, fewer and fewer American women had had cause to practice
those older crafts. In any event, developing the even rhythm of an expert
spinner would not have prepared a woman for the mysteries of the actual
sewing mechanism, which seemed to have a malicious will of its own:
‘The machine behaves like an imp sometimes,” Elizabeth Cabot com-
plained to her sister in 1860, ‘‘will break the needle and then the thread,
and do all manner of odious things with no apparent cause. . . . ’’ Cabot
nevertheless concluded that all women should learn to operate the unruly
contraptions. Her reasons for that decision demonstrate the capacity of
the gender ideology to absorb and embody even the sharpest contra-
dictions: sewing at a machine, Cabot believed, “would be excellent
training . . . because it so insists on having everything perfectly adjusted,
your mind calm, and your foot and hand steady and quiet and regular
in their motions.’’’* The new work discipline of early industrialization,
it seems, was the perfect regime for developing the placid and demure
qualities required by the domestic female ideal.
Understanding domestic labor as a collection of technological systems,
each of which was based on a shared body of knowledge and skills and
many of which were undergoing profound change, may help to explain
a widely discussed phenomenon of the antebellum era: the apparent
failure of many mothers to pass along domestic skills to their daughters.
The problem was recognized widely enough to provide one of the central
themes for the most popular novel of the antebellum period, Susan
Warner’s The Wide, Wide World. First published in 1850, The Wide,
Wide World is something of a female-centered Pilgrim’s Progress, re-
counting the long and arduous journey of little Ellen Montgomery to-
ward Christian womanhood. Much of that journey ts chronicled through
the symbols of women’s domestic labor, as Ellen undergoes a slow and
painful education in the mysteries of housewifery.
Ellen is raised in the city. We learn little of her mother other than
that she is ill and unable to adequately prepare her daughter for adult-
hood—a point that is underscored by Mrs. Montgomery’s inability to
accompany the child on her harrowing expeditions to the city’s stores.
When her parents travel abroad in a vain attempt to restore her mother’s
health, Ellen is sent to the country, where she will receive at the hands
of her Aunt Fortune the domestic education her mother could not
provide.
 “The True Economy of Housekeeping” 111
Housework is not the only aspect of Ellen’s education that must be
completed in the countryside, and Aunt Fortune is not her only mentor.
Sympathetic though her situation is, Ellen is an annoyingly self-centered
child, painfully deficient in self-discipline and benevolence, qualities she
eventually learns through the model of her beloved Alice Humphreys.
But in the course of the story, it is often in her ignorance of, and
disrespect for, housework that the abysmal state of Ellen’s soul is most
concretely rendered, particularly in contrast with the domestic expertise
of her aunt. Dividing her attention between skillet, pan, and coffeepot,
dashing now to the pantry for cream, and now again for flour, turning
the pork, stirring the potatoes, bubbling the hot fat ‘‘as if by magic, to
a thick, stiff, white froth,”** Aunt Fortune—while not the emblem of
ideal womanhood in the novel—is the very embodiment of accomplished
housewifery. It is a tradition Ellen must come to value and must ac-
knowledge a bond with if she is to continue toward her goal: a necessary
reunion with a female domestic experience disrupted by the process of
urbanization. Casting Ellen as Everywoman, Warner transforms her
domestic education into a parable of the condition of young women in
general in the antebellum era.”
It was an allegory Warner could count on her readers to understand.
Indeed, the problem of educating daughters in the skills of housewifery
was noted by a variety of observers, both men and women, and was
generally diagnosed as acutest among middle-class and wealthy urban
women. Englishman James Dawson Burn (always a jaundiced observer
of women’s work) complained bitterly about the problem, claiming that
while “‘[i]n the country, young women are instructed in all the household
duties...in the towns it is difficult to find a girl who can...do the
duties of a domestic establishment.’’ To Burn’s mind, access to markets
and to the new “‘labor-saving” technologies had so simplified the labor
of housework that urban mothers no longer practiced the skills of house-
wifery themselves. Much less could they teach their daughters.”
Females who published advice on the proper running of a household
seldom assumed that urban women of even fairly prosperous households
lacked work to do. But some of them did agree with Burn that the lack
of domestic training in the daughter spoke primarily of the misguided
values of the mother. Novelist Louisa Tuthill suggested that many
women were too involved in voluntary charitable work to pay proper
attention to their domestic responsibilities, especially to the rearing of
their children. Caroline Gilman contended that mothers preferred to
see their daughters spend their time in “intellectual” pursuits. Elizabeth
Filet thought that ‘“‘Americans in general have little attachment to
112 HOME AND WORK
home” and that daughters in particular were encouraged to learn “‘to
shine in society” rather than “to perform the homely duties... .”’”*
Catharine Beecher, who returned to this theme again and again in
her writings, agreed with many of her contemporaries that Americans
in general, and specifically mothers in prosperous families, tended to
denigrate the manual labor of housework. But in tandem with this inter-
pretation, Beecher suggested another: that unpaid housewives were ex-
periencing an abrupt reorganization of their labor, one that rendered
some aspects of their traditional knowledge obsolete while requiring
new skills as yet imperfectly learned. Housework was especially difficult
in the United States, Beecher contended, since in America the volatility
of a democratic society constantly conspired with the fluctuations of an
expanding economy to disrupt the old, known routines. In this state of
constant transition, mothers themselves had never been adequately
trained for their domestic responsibilities, and therefore made poor
teachers for their daughters. Devoting page after page of The American
Woman’s Home to the new technologies of the household—chimneys,
ranges and cooking stoves, illuminants, furnaces, earth-closets—
Beecher provided her reader with a step-by-step education in the new
arts of housewifery. As she acknowledged, developing the new skills
could be difficult and frustrating. In some areas, like baking in the ovens
of the new cast-iron stoves, even she could offer only a few general
suggestions and a wish of good luck. ‘“The problem in baking, then,”
she concluded, “‘is the quick application of heat rather below than above
the loaf, and its steady continuance. ... Every housewife must watch
her own oven to know how this can best be accomplished.” The anon-
ymous author of Women’s Influence and Woman’s Mission agreed with
Beecher’s diagnosis of the general problem. Taking to task the nine-

work.” |
teenth-century housewives who “‘smile with condescending piety at the
blinded state of our respected grandmothers,” she observed caustically
that at least eighteenth-century women had been educated to their

Women sought to adapt to the new skills of housework in a variety

of ways. As Elizabeth Cabot’s experience using her mother-in-law’s
sewing machine suggests, women readily pooled information and skills
with their relatives and neighbors. Sarah Smith Browne, too, recorded
this form of skill- and equipment-sharing, noting in her diary that
‘““M. A. [?] P. comes and practices on the sewing machine....”’ But
they also avidly consumed the flood of women’s journals, treatises, and
household manuals that promised to disclose the new mysteries of shop-
ping, recipes for foods that had not been widely available in the eigh-
 “The True Economy of Housekeeping” 113
teenth century, new cooking methods and kitchen designs, and
information on the most efficient overall organization of household la-
bor. Furthermore, as the antebellum period wore on, these reference
works grew more and more detailed—a process which may be seen as
culminating in Beecher and Stowe’s 1869 American Woman’s Home.”
As well as adding work and raising standards of performance, the
domestic inventions of the first half of the nineteenth century frequently
created their own health and safety hazards in the home, especially for
the women who cared for them. Lamp fuels were highly flammable.
Cleaning and lighting the lamps was skilled and painstaking work, labor
that the mistress of a household usually reserved for herself even when
help was available. In 1869, Harriet Beecher Stowe echoed Martha
Coffin Wright’s frustrations with the heating stove, adding a warning
that, in a closed room, a stove
burns away the vital portion of the air quite as fast as the occupants breathe
it away. The sealing-up of fireplaces and introduction of air-tight stoves
may, doubtless, be a saving of fuel: it saves, too, more than that; in
thousands and thousands of cases it has saved people from all further
human wants, and put an end forever to any needs short of the six feet
of narrow earth which are man’s only inalienable property.
Visiting in the northeastern United States, Fredrika Bremer complained
of the ‘dry, close, unwholesome heat”’ of furnaces, ‘“‘which always gives
me a sensation of pain as well as drowsiness in the head,” and of the
‘heat of the gas-lights.’’ She thought that such conditions helped explain
‘why women [in the United States]. ..should be delicate and out of
health...”
Although the work performed there by wives was largely unpaid, the
transformations going on in middle-class homes did not differ as dra-
matically from the paid work of their husbands as sentimental contem-
porary descriptions of the ‘“home”’ generally implied. There are two
points to be made here. First, as we have seen, the transformations of
paid work in the antebellum period were both slow and uneven. Most
artisans still worked in small-scale shops where their labor, if increasingly
specialized, was far from fully mechanized. Similarly, business methods
remained distinctly ‘‘pre-modern,” and office procedures were far from
either routinized or fully rationalized. If much of women’s work re-
mained comparatively casualized, this did not, in and of itself, distinguish
its organization from that of paid work in the antebellum period.
At the same time, many women expressed the feeling that the tra-
114 HOME AND WORK
ditional rhythms of housekeeping were being supplanted by a new time-
and task-discipline, one they associated with the world of paid business.
The parallel was most clearly developed in the various household advice
manuals that achieved such great popularity among middle-class women
in the antebellum years—another characteristic that may help explain
precisely why these manuals were bought and read so widely. In her
1841 Treatise on Domestic Economy, Catharine Beecher argued that
the economy of housework required the ‘‘wisdom, firmness, tact, dis-
crimination, prudence, and versatility” of a politician, an economy of
time and expenses “bound by the same rules as relate to the use of
property,” characterized by the “‘system and order” of a business, and,
like an office routine, intended ‘‘to promote systematic and habitual
industry.”’ Beecher qualified the comparison only to the extent of noting
that, where accounting procedures were concerned, businessmen
seemed rather too ‘‘desultory.’’ She may not have been far wrong on
this point. Less than a decade earlier, when Secretary of the Treasury
McLane had attempted to survey the manufactures of the United States,
his field reporters complained that entrepreneurs were unable “‘to state,
with accuracy,” the capital investments and operating costs of their
businesses.”
Women acknowledged the similarities between housework and paid
work in the very way they went about their daily lives. It was not unusual,
for example, for a woman to refer to her domestic responsibilities as
her ‘“‘business.”’ ‘‘Linus says I must wright a few lines,”’ Sarah Smith
began her letter. “‘I commence with giveing you some account of my
business which is spinning[,] weaving[,] sewing and so on....”’ She
meant, of course, not work done at home and destined for the market,
but work done within the family and entirely for the family’s use.»
In her study of domestic service in nineteenth-century America, Faye
FE. Dudden has commented perceptively on the changing relationships
of servants and mistresses over the course of the early nineteenth cen-
tury, noting that the work of supervising servants offered growing “‘par-
allels to the work of entrepreneurial or managerial men.’ But it was
not only in this paid work relationship that wives saw housework as
similar to business. Their understanding of the household and its re-
sources aS an ongoing economic enterprise was reflected also in the
assiduity with which middle-class wives kept household records, reduc-
ing even that most hallowed of woman’s missions, child-rearing, to an
exact rendering of accounts. When Ann Garfield sent her son Nathaniel
to a wet nurse for weaning, she kept a detailed list of the clothing and
supplies she sent with him: ‘‘5 diapers[,] night gown[,] night Cap[,] 2
 ‘The True Economy of Housekeeping’’ 115
check aprons[,] white jane apron... , 7 plain squares[,] day Cap[,] Yel-
low blanket [for] cradle[,] small Pillow, pillow case[,] small rose blanket
..., and on and on. She expected every item to be accounted for upon
his return.”
Although wives often complained that their husbands did not ade-
quately inform them of the full range of family finances and debts,
women apparently often kept the household accounts. Sarah Smith
Browne spent large parts of at least three days in January of 1858
engaged in this activity, which was routine enough in her experience to
warrant the simple entry: “‘[S]Jet down as usual, accounts.”’”®
Women also established economic networks that resembled the family
networks that supported their husbands’ businesses. As we have seen,
through these networks, women were able to stretch the family re-
sources—to obtain items unavailable in their own communities, or to
get better prices, or both. The exchanges of service were based on
friendship, but they retained a degree of formality that recognized the
time and work involved. ‘‘[T]he lady for whom I wished the hat pur-
chased has changed her mind,” one New Haven woman wrote her friend
in Boston: “I am very sorry to have put your Aunt to so much trouble
...in shoping. .. . | hope I shall never trouble you again in this way.”””’
Here, too, however, women were careful to keep exact accounts.
‘‘{T]here was a little defficiency in your purse,”” a New Haven woman
wrote her Guilford friend. ‘“‘{Y]ou said there was 7$ and a half[.] I
counted it...and found there was but $7.32[.] Were you aware of
it... ?’°* Sometimes, the woman requesting the service indicated the
value she attached to it by suggesting that her correspondent keep the
‘‘money that was left, to compensate in part for your trouble, time,
&e.””?
Individually in their private correspondence and journals, and perhaps
in response to the swelling tide of expert household advice manuals,
women articulated their own understanding of the role of housework in
the economy. Not infrequently, wives expressed an awareness that hus-
bands’ wages did not fully cover the cash needs of the family. They
assumed that some income-producing responsibilities might well be in-
cluded in a woman’s ‘“‘housework.”’ In The American Frugal Housewife,
Lydia Maria Child discussed a variety of ways wives could add to the
cash resources of the family, including selling vials and bottles (“*Apoth-
acaries and grocers will give something for them’’), rags (‘‘the white
ones... bring a higher price’’), ashes, and grease. Growing up in Nor-
thampton, Massachusetts, Caroline Clapp Briggs described her house-
hold work in a way that defied easy division into paid and unpaid labor:
116 HOME AND WORK
‘“‘We were a very busy family,” she remembered, “having only one ser-
vant [and three boarders]; a good deal of housework was done by my sis-
ter and myself, and after that there was always sewing and sometimes
copying ,—anything we could find to do to eke out a living.”’ Clapp did not
distinguish between the work she did for her family’s three boarders
(which brought necessary cash into the family) and the unpaid work she
did for her own family: both were “housework.’’ At the same time, both
forms of labor, as well as the sewing and copying that she did for pay,
were included in the general category of ‘‘ek{ing] out a living.’
Women recognized the economic value of housework in a second
way. Implicitly or explicitly, many wives in the antebellum period de-
fined housework as the labor required to bridge the gap between a cash
income and the actual labor value of household maintenance, and thus
as labor of essential economic worth, necessary to the structure and
prosperity of industrial society. Women frequently noted the importance
of their work in avoiding cash outlays. As prices rose in Massachusetts
in 1836, Lydia D. Pierce recorded the efforts of wives to stretch out
their family budgets:
Flour is very high[.] [P]eople begin tc use potatoes with their flour... .I
put six boiled potatoes into a batch of nutcakes today and they were
certainly very good[.] [T]ry it if you please[.] [T]hey put potatoes into
bread, pie crust, biscuit[,] nutcakes and I don({’}t know what else[.]
She closed with evident self-satisfaction: ‘“‘[N]ecessity is the mother of
invention you know.’”*'
‘The true economy of housekeeping,’’ Lydia Maria Child explained,
‘is simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be
lost. ... Nothing should be thrown away so long as it is possible to make
use of it... .”’ Harriet Beecher Stowe considered that it was the function
of wives to be “‘the care-taking and saving part of creation—the authors
and conservators of economy.’ Caroline Gilman was even more pointed
in her contention that families ‘‘owed their prosperity full as much to
the propriety of female management as to the knowledge and activity
of the father.”
At issue here were two competing conceptions of how the nineteenth-
century economy operated. Against the notion that early industriali-
zation had created a fully cash-based economy to which both women
and women’s work were peripheral, women posed their own experience:
that antebellum life continued to rely upon a combination of labors,
some paid and some unpaid, and that ‘‘economy”’ was still a process
that required the saving and conserving, as well as the getting, of re-
 “The True Economy of Housekeeping”’ 117
sources. In this, housewives of the antebellum period reflected the con-
tinuing importance of the colonial concept of stewardship to material
life. As Stowe noted, “tas a general rule, man earns and woman saves
and applies.”’ That the economic value of saving and applying went
largely unrecognized sometimes elicited a sharp response from women.
When Martha Coffin Wright’s husband, David, claimed that women’s
chief economic contribution to their families was to drive their husbands
into bankruptcy through extravagance, Martha responded:
Women are very apt to look on with apprehension and endeavor to avert
by such arguments as they can use, the mania of speculation, the reckless
endorsing for others and the thousand unprofitable schemes that are hur-
rying [men] to ruin, but those arguments are not spoken through a trum-
pet, nor on the house top....
Her conclusion was particularly telling, however: ‘‘[T]he innumerable
acts of self denial that [women] practice with the hope of keeping back
the crisis,” she observed, ‘“‘are untold. ...””
Occasionally, women formulated their understanding of the economic
value of housework in more concrete terms. In 1836, in her Recollections
of a Housekeeper, Caroline Gilman noted that some aspects of household
labor had already achieved a wage form and wondered why the wife’s
housework should not be similarly de-privatized: ‘““We have a partial
system, which it appears to me might easily be carried through the whole
order of social life. We have our chimney-sweeps, our wood-sawyers,
our bakeries; why not have our grand cooking establishments, our scour-
ers, our window-cleaners, &c?’’ From this proposed wholesale com-
mercialization of housework Gilman excepted only child-rearing, which
she believed should remain in the hands of individual mothers.“
In 1848, Jane Sophia Appleton published a story entitled, “‘Sequel to
the ‘Vision of Bangor in the Twentieth Century.’ ” A response to a
utopian sketch that denigrated women’s abilities to function outside of
the home, the “Sequel” describes the experiences of a man who dreams
he has been transported forward to the year 1978. Among the advances
of the twentieth century, according to Appleton—and the single change
most essential to the promotion of women’s civil and political rights—
is the de-privatization of housework and the conversion of cooking,
child care, laundry, sewing, and cleaning into collective and socially
valued labor ‘“‘command{ing] as high remuneration as any.”
Appleton’s sketch drew deliberately on the ideas of Charles Fourier,
whose utopian model of a collectivized community aroused considerable
interest among antebellum social reformers. Indeed, the reorganization
118 HOME AND WORK
of domestic labor was an aspect of several of the utopian and religious
movements of the period. Of particular interest among these was Shak-
erism, which had actually been founded much earlier in Europe but
thrived in America during these years. By the mid-nineteenth century,
a majority of the Shakers were women—a fact at least some observers,
Mary Antoinette Doolittle among them, attributed to the visible im-
portance that Shaker communities attached to women’s domestic labor.
Doolittle, an elderess in the Shaker community at Mount Lebanon, New
York, contended that this was because the Shakers recognized ‘‘woman’s
rights, and her capabilities as a counselor and co-worker with man in
all that pertains to physical and spiritual life.”
The Shaker community preserved the division of labor by sex, and
domestic labor remained the work of women. Indeed, individual women
continued to perform domestic labor for individual men, with a partic-
ular woman assigned to do the mending and sewing of a particular man.
Yet several principles distinguished the Shaker community from the
wider society. First, Shakers believed in celibacy. Women’s work was
not performed in the relation of marriage. Indeed, women, like men,
did much of their labor in same-sex groups. Equally important, the
Shakers disavowed the private ownership of property; wealth was shared
in the community. Finally, not only labor, but decision-making, was
divided by sex; Shaker women maintained their own hierarchy of au-
thority through a council of elderesses parallel in structure to the council
of elders. While the elders may well have had greater decision-making
power in the overall affairs of the community, the elderesses oversaw
the organization of women’s separate lives.
Doolittle argued that these principles were of decisive importance to
the organization and quality of life among the Shakers. With the found-
ing of the Shaker church, she argued:
Woman was no longer a slave in bonds, forced as it were to bear down
the name of some man to posterity and bend over the cradle and sing
lullaby as her only right, and the highest aim of her existence; but she
became a co-worker with her brother man in every department of life.
Hence they stood shoulder to shoulder, each occupying their own sphere,
yet working in harmonious relations together.

This structuring of labor, property ownership, and social relations may

well have served to underscore the equal importance of women’s do-
mestic work. Unable to subsume individual women’s labor under their
own, Shaker men evidently attributed a greater value to housework than
was the case in antebellum society generally. ‘“‘Brethren and sisters [are]
 ‘The True Economy of Housekeeping”’ 119
mutually interested in each other’s labor and prosperity,” Doolittle
noted. The historical record indicates that Shaker men demonstrated
this interest concretely, through the invention and/or improvement of
various mechanisms to simplify household labor: a washing machine, a
stove-cover lifter, a pea-sheller, a butter-worker, a self-acting cheese
press, the common clothes pin, an apple parer, and the flat broom.*’

Although women occasionally objected in private to attempts to discount

the value of their household contribution, in their published writings
they more often counseled each other to silence and forebearance. Ca-
tharine Beecher advised women to expect to have their schedules dis-
rupted by ‘“‘a heedless husband, and young children. ...”’ At such times,
a woman did well to check her frustration: “In many cases... it is
impossible not to feel some irritation. But it is always possible to refrain
from angry tones.’’ Elizabeth Ellet agreed, adding that a wife should
not anticipate recognition of either the difficulties or the accomplish-
ments of her labor:
Neither would we have domestic economy and home duties vaunted, or
made the constant theme of conversation; they are the private employ-
ments of a woman. ... When a man returns to his home... , fatigued and
perhaps disappointed by the business of the day, he does not want to be
annoyed by the details of domestic accidents... .
Ellet was candid about the basis for her advice: ‘‘Men,”’ she reminded
her readers, ‘“‘are free to come and go as they list, they have so much
liberty of action, so many out-door resources if wearied with in-doors,
that it is good policy, if nothing else, to make home attractive as well
as comfortable.’
Ellet’s less-than-subtle reminder that women were economically de-
pendent on marriage for their survival probably did not need proof for
her female readers. Most women knew all too well that, for them, the
presumably free contract of marriage was often the only contract avail-
able. Although some women (for example, Catharine Sedgwick in Mar-
ried or Single?) tried to make the argument than an unmarried life could
be satisfying both materially and emotionally, contemporary studies of
the low wages and unhealthful working conditions of wage-earning
women demonstrated all too clearly that survival was tenuous for the
woman alone. The political economy of antebellum life offered few
vocations other than housework for most women.
 Chapter VI
The Political Economy of Housework

Health reformer John Griscom was a man of nineteenth-century sen-

sibilities. When he appealed for improvement in the housing conditions
of the laboring classes of New York City, he sought reform, not only
as ‘‘a measure of humanity, of justice to the poor, [and] of safety to the
whole people,’’ but also, and most earnestly, in the interest of ‘economy
to the public treasury.”’ That interest was affected in several ways, the
most obvious of which was the direct cost of charity. What Griscom was
more concerned with, however, in invoking ‘‘the public treasury,”’ was
the lost economic potential of people who lived—and died—in the miser-
able conditions of the antebellum urban working classes: “* ‘Labor 1s
wealth,’ ” he reminded his readers, not only a commodity to be bought
and sold, but also a resource to be ‘‘protected, improved, and facilitated
.... To the extent that the productive potential of labor was dissipated,
the wealth of the society was diminished. '
Living in a period of substantial (though uneven) economic expansion,
Griscom could assume that his readers would grasp this last point
quickly, and would share his sense of its gravity. His goal was a more
specific one: to underscore the connection between the productive ca-
pacity of labor and the living conditions of the laboring classes. In doing
so, he hoped to prompt among the more prosperous classes a conviction
that it was in their own interest to raise the living standards of the poor.
‘‘Sound vigorous health is an essential pre-requisite to the proper per-
120
 The Political Economy of Housework 121
formance of all labor,” he insisted—and that was a function of the
home.’ The ‘private’ sphere of laboring-class life redounded directly
upon the profit-and-loss ledgers of the employing classes. The mechanic,
manufacturer, or construction boss who thought to multiply his gain by
pushing laboring-class families into an ever-worsening material envi-
ronment was simply losing value on his investment.
In attempting to delineate this linkage between the profits of the paid
workplace and the conditions of the household, John Griscom came as
close as anyone in the antebellum period to developing a theory of the
economic value of unpaid domestic work. He did not finally offer such
a theory. Rather, he ended his analysis as he had begun it, with the
bleak prediction that the laboring classes—their ‘“‘whitened and cadav-
erous countenance[s]”’ peering out from the ‘dark and damp”’ caves
that passed for homes—must inevitably die out altogether if employers
did not ensure some improvement in the material conditions of working-
class homes.”
Although Griscom himself did not develop all the implications of his
argument, his analysis does provide a window through which to begin
to explore the general economic functions of antebellum housework,
especially the role of household labor systems in structuring and sup-
porting the emergence of industrial capitalism in the Northeast. This is
a question that goes beyond the simple matter of whether or not house-
wives were ‘“‘working.” It also goes beyond the matter of whether
changes in the organization of domestic labor were similar to the changes
historians have associated with the advent of industrialization in paid
work. At issue is whether the labor that women were performing within
and for their families was in some way integral to the process of indus-
trialization itself—not only to the fact that industrialization occurred,
but to the particular shape it assumed in the antebellum Northeast.
By and large, historians of the economic transition of late eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century America have assumed that “‘industrialization”
was, by definition, a phenomenon of the paid workplace, exterior to
family life. The comparatively few studies that have looked beyond the
shops and factories to the households of the Northeast have done so
primarily by way of examining the effect of industrialization on the
presumably distinct systems of the family; focusing, for example, on
paid outwork and other cash relations in the household.* According to
this model, households were altered by industrialization, but the pur-
poses, structures, and labor patterns of family life were not themselves
instrumental in the transition.
This is a model with a number of limitations. Perhaps most glaringly,
122 HOME AND WORK
identifying the process of industrialization with the reorganization of
paid work severely circumscribes our ability to observe and understand
the role of gender in the structuring of an emerging industrial economy.
Although women have been involved in cash-based labor throughout
the history of the United States, much of that work has been compar-
atively unorganized and erratic, interwoven with their unpaid labor.
Consequently, the history of paid work, especially when “‘paid work”
is analyzed as an experience separable from other aspects of social life,
is most visibly a history of men’s experiences. The result is a construction
of industrialization as a largely genderless process—genderless both be-
cause men are treated as un-gendered creatures, and because the trans-
formation is assumed to have raised gender issues only peripherally.
Only women have gender, in this analysis, and women appear in the
story only when they, too, enter regular wage work. Any possible larger
role of gender in the transformation is reduced to the matter of dis-
crimination against women in hiring, firing, promotion, and on-the-job
treatment.
But this is surely too narrow a formulation of the reach and depth of
gender as a central category of experience in American society, partic-
ularly given the preeminence of gender as the organizing principle of
both labor and authority in the preindustrial era. Left unexamined is
the larger importance of gender, not only in the disposition of paid labor
in industrial society (that is, in who takes what paid job and how they
are treated there), but in defining the very concept of labor on which
industrial capitalism was based. The ways unpaid labor within the family
may have contributed to the transition to an industrial society, and
particularly the specific ways the very unpaid character of housework
may have played a constitutive economic role in the larger processes of
industrialization, remain at best ancillary to the discussion. The ques-
tions, then, are two: What was the material relation between unpaid
housework and the emergence of an industrial economy; and was it
significant to this relation that unpaid housework was almost exclusively
the province of women?

In the colonial period, family survival had been based on two types of
resources: the skills of the wife in housewifery, and the skills and prop-
erty of the husband tn agriculture. Both sets of skills involved the pro-
duction of tangible goods for the family—such items as furnishings, food,
and fabrics. Both were likely to involve some market exchange, as
husbands sold grain and wives sold eggs or cheese, for example. And
both involved services given directly to the household. By the early
 The Political Economy of Housework 123
nineteenth century, however, husbands’ contributions to their house-
holds were focused disproportionately on market exchange—on the cash
they brought into the family—while their direct activities in producing
both goods and services for the family had vastly decreased.
The meaning of this shift has often been misread, interpreted as an
indication that households were no longer dependent on goods and
services provided from within but had instead become reliant upon the
market for their survival. As we have seen, there is certainly some basis
for such a conclusion: by the antebellum period, many families did not
have access to the raw materials and resources necessary to produce the
array of goods once characteristic of households throughout the North-
east. At the same time, the ‘market dependency” of antebellum house-
holds can be overstated. Outside of the elite, few antebellum families
had access to enough cash to be literally market-dependent, even had
the market been fully and plentifully enough developed to provide all
of the goods and services required for family survival, which it was not.
One could certainly purchase a variety of clothes, for example; but, as
we have seen, even urban women were often unable to find the particular
items they sought in local stores. Similarly, in the cities one could pur-
chase an array of prepared foods: bread, pies, coffee, roasted corn,
meals to be eaten on the premises, and even hot meals to go. But most
Americans would have found themselves going hungry had they tried
to depend upon these services, which were largely limited to urban areas
and restricted even there.
More important, few families could afford to purchase all of the goods
and services they required for ‘“‘maintenance.”’ This lesson is perhaps
most graphically drawn in the cycles of pawning and redeeming that
underlay the household economies of the laboring poor. There just was
not enough cash to cover even the most fundamental of needs: food,
clothing, and shelter. But even in less-marginal households, consum-
erism was sharply curtailed by the amount of available cash. Choices
constantly had to be made: to purchase a new cloak or try to refurbish
the old one for another season, to hire a woman to help with the wash
or lay aside some money to buy a2 house. In these patterns of mundane
decisions lay the essential economic character of antebellum households:
they were in fact “‘mixed economies’”—economic systems that func-
tioned on the bases of both paid and unpaid labor and were dependent
on both. They required paid labor for the cash to purchase some goods
and services. Equally, they depended on unpaid labor in the household
to process those commodities into consumable form and to produce
other goods and services directly, without recourse to the cash market.
 124 HOME AND WORK
On the simplest level, housework was the labor of the second sort—
the labor provided directly to the family. In that sense, domestic work
retained its ‘traditional’ character and seemed to belong to a world in
which household maintenance had depended largely on labor exchanges
within the family. But the growing complexity of household economies
in the early nineteenth century—that is, their increasingly ‘“‘mixed”’ char-
acter—had imparted to domestic labor a second, more “‘modern”’ func-
tion: that of mediating between the demands of the cash market and
the often-quite-different imperatives of family survival.
Women’s expanded labor as shoppers, discussed above, exemplifies
the new economic function of housework. In the context of her family’s
increased dependence on the market for both raw materials and finished
goods, a woman’s proficiency as a shopper could have direct and grave
_ implications for her household’s ability to survive and prosper. A knowl-
edge of both prices and materials was essential, with the best bargain
being struck, often, only by purchasing in bulk and adding one’s own
(unpaid) labor to the product once it was carried home. The wife of a
machinist explained with pride the strategies through which she at-
tempted to manipulate the market to her family’s greatest advantage:
‘I know I saved at least a quarter pound of soap each week by my plan
of always cutting up a large quantity of it into pieces of conventional
size, and spreading them out in the attic to harden well. A piece of soap
thus hardened will not melt away as rapidly as a fresh one....” She
also found that a knowledge of fabrics enabled her to stretch the house-
hold clothing budget: “I have always found it the cheapest way to buy
good material, even if at first the cost is greater, than to get a coarse
or thin article,” she advised.” Perhaps with the model of shopping in
mind, Harriet Beecher Stowe defined housework as ‘“‘the science of
comparative values.” It was a science she had studied carefully. Her
own purchasing activities included buying furnishings, clothing, fabrics,
and food, as well as the constant array of little items (ribbons, combs,
etc.) that constantly intrude upon the graver matters of daily life.°
Housewives found that the new ‘‘comparative”’ function of housework
(its importance in mediating between the cash market and family sur-
vival) effectively redefined the entire domestic system, reshaping the
economic relations of even women’s most traditional labors. This was
clearly the case with household manufacturing and women’s horticul-
tural work. As we have seen, both persisted at surprisingly high levels
in many families, and both supplied essential products. But they per-
sisted less as independently valuable forms of labor than as expressions
of—and in exquisite tension with—the extent of the family’s cash re-
 The Political Economy of Housework 125
sources. As Catharine Beecher observed, ‘“‘[E]very woman must accom-
modate herself to the peculiarities of her situation. If she has a large
family, and a small income, she must devote far more time to the simple
duty of providing food and raiment, than would be right were she in
affluence, and with a small family.’”’ As Beecher suggested, these de-
cisions were based largely on market factors: first and foremost, the size
of the household income, but also the size of the family and its access
to markets. Most middle-class women abandoned spinning and weaving
simply because they could obtain fabric cheaply enough on the market
to make it not worth their labor time to manufacture the cloth them-
selves; they did not give up sewing, both because ready-made goods
were not widely available and because their cost was not low enough to
prompt a redirection of household labor. In 1847, Martha Coffin Wright
decided to quit keeping her own chickens for essentially the same set
of reasons: ‘‘they are so troublesome in the gardens and it costs as much
to feed them as to buy eggs.”’’ In the overall consideration of the value
of her labor, it made sense simply to purchase the eggs and to spend
her time elsewhere in the family economy. In few households, however,
was the family so small, the market so abundant and cheap, or cash so
plentiful, as to permit wives to give up household production altogether.
Indeed, as we have seen, in a number of households the family-to-
cash relationship was sufficiently out of balance to require wives to
produce, not only for their families, but also directly for the market
itself. Sometimes this labor was quite visible—for example, when a wife
took in wash, sold strawberries, or did outwork in the needle industry.
But when a woman’s labor supplied a part of the wage contract between
her husband and a hired worker, or when her presence in the family
store obviated the need to hire an additional clerk, her contribution was
likely to remain largely invisible, since no separate accounts indicated
the money she saved her husband by doing so. Seldom was the cash
that these women supplied to their families inessential, even in the
emerging middle class. The author of Six Hundred Dollars a Year, for
example, recorded that the first $100 of her earnings from sewing and
making artificial flowers bought the clothing, blankets, and furnishings
necessary for her first child. Her second $100 of earnings purchased the
family a government bond. That bond and the additional $250 that she
earned over the course of the following several years were the basis of
a family savings program."
In an important sense, then, the product of the labor of housework
was the household itself, conceived as an evolving array of requirements,
some stable and long-term, some arising from the contingencies of the
126 HOME AND WORK
moment, founded on the material and psychosocial needs of its mem-
bers. The departure of men from the household to sell their labor power
as a commodity on the market had made this the specialized work of
women; industrialization had made it essential.
Much of the work of producing the household was indirect and focused
on creating the general conditions necessary for individual members to
go about their daily work. In both working-class and middle-class house-
holds, food had to be cooked,’ clothes had to be laundered, and floors
had to be scrubbed. Mattresses and pallets had to be aired, dishes had
to be washed, candles and lamps had to be tended, and fires had to be
built and regulated.
But much of the labor of housework involved the direct maintenance
of family members—for example, by nursing them back to health when
they were ill. While some households had recourse to a physician or a
midwife, most of the daily health care of children, husbands, and ser-
vants was provided by wives. When Sarah Munro’s son Josiah fell ill
with the measles, the family called in a doctor, but it was Sarah who
tended him through the crisis. In March of 1826, Sarah Connell Ayer
recorded in her diary that it had been a particularly difficult month for
her: ‘‘...I have had a very sick family. Our hired girl, boy, and the
children have all been confined at once with the meazles. I have had
no time to write, my time being fully occupied in attending the sick.”
The illness of household members could pose problems beyond simply
augmenting women’s regular work. It could also create gaps in the family
labor system—gaps the wife usually had to fill. Hattie Bardwell’s illness
in November of 1858 meant not only that her mother had responsibility
for her care, but that Hattie’s share of the housework devolved upon
her mother. The author of Six Hundred Dollars a Year described the
difficulties of a neighbor whose husband was in poor health. The woman
not only nursed her husband herself, but also took over operation of
the family store and “toiled constantly with her needle to supply the
deficiency” of income created by the medical bills."
Child-rearing also illustrated the complicated ways housework “‘pro-
duced”’ the household, both in the present and into the future. As we
have seen, particularly in nineteenth-century cities, where the dangers
to children were legion, a mother’s ability to supervise her children
could literally mean the difference between life and death. Especially
in laboring-class households, moreover, child-rearing also involved pro-
ducing new contributors to the family economy. Although children in
poor families sometimes left the household early to participate in paid
work, they could also be taught skills within the household to benefit
 The Political Economy of Housework 127
the family. As Lydia Maria Child pointed out, there were many ways,
both directly remunerative and not, even ‘‘[a] child of six years old can
be made useful”:
Children can very early be taught to take all the care of their own
clothes.
They can knit garters, suspenders, and stockings; they can make patch-
work and braid straw; they can make mats for the table, and mats for the
floor; they can weed the garden, and pick cranberries from the meadow,
to be carried to market....
I once visited a family where the most exact economy was observed.
... In this family, when the father brought home a package, the older
children would, of their own accord, put away the paper and twine neatly,
instead of throwing them tn the fire, or tearing them to pieces. ...
Child concluded with a story intended to underscore the ultimate eco-
nomic value of this training:
The other day I heard a mechanic say, “I have a wife and two little
children; we live in a very small house; but, to save my life, I cannot
spend less than twelve hundred a year.”” Another replied, ““You are not
economical; I spent but eight hundred.”’. . . A third one, who was present,
was Silent; but after they were gone, he said, “‘] keep house, and com-
fortably, too, with a wife and children, for six hundred a year; but I
suppose they would have thought me mean, if I had told them so.” I did
not think him mean; it merely occurred to me that his wife and children
were in the habit of picking up paper and twine.''
Child’s story may have been pure fiction and her style sentimental, but
her point was well taken: the working-class household remained a system
of economic interdependencies in which even children played key roles.
Training children for those roles was primarily the responsibility of the
wife.
The aims of education for middle-class children were often contra-
dictory. On the one hand, many moderate households needed children
to assume roles of economic usefulness; for example, working in the
family garden or shop. As a child, Caroline Clapp Briggs earned a penny
for each bushel basket of wood chips she collected. Equally important,
it was clear that children would, in the future, have to make their way
in a world characterized by an increasingly complex market structure—
a reality that made it mandatory that they begin to learn early about
money. At the same time, middle-class mothers were expected to protect
children from the corruptions of the marketplace—from greed, over-
riding ambition, and selfishness—and to imbue them instead with the
 128 HOME AND WORK
values of charity and benevolence. Perhaps nowhere was the resulting
paradox more evident than in Child’s American Frugal Housewife, which
instructed mothers to teach children simultaneously to care and not to
care about individual accumulation: “In early childhood, you lay the
foundation of poverty or riches, in the habits you give your children,”
she cautioned. ““Teach them to save everything. ...”’ In the next breath
she added, ‘‘not for their own use, for that would make them selfish—
but for some use.”
Much of the work performed by wives in their own households had
roots in the distant past. As we have seen, however, the conditions of
urbanization and early industrialization had reorganized those services,
rendering them more complex to perform or shifting a greater proportion
Of responsibility to the wife. The general management of the house-
hold—a responsibility women had borne since the original European
settlement of North America—had also grown more difficult over the
course of the early nineteenth century. Laboring-class women oversaw
families whose viability depended on a complex balance of purchasing,
wage-earning, borrowing, scavenging, and stealing—and whose intricate
labor systems involved children as well as adults. Women of most eco-
nomic strata expressed dismay at what Catharine Beecher called the
“multiplied cares and perplexities” of housework."

Against the backdrop of uncertainty that was the constant companion

of much working-class life in the antebellum years, the economic value
of the work that poor women did—whether paid or unpaid—is plain
enough. The issue may be less clear in the case of middle-class wives,
however, since much of their work was overlaid with a class significance
that easily obscures its character as labor. The full meaning of this labor
for women can be understood, then, only by distinguishing the wife’s
role as a member and symbol of the middle-class family (in itself an
icon of enormous social power) from her position as unpaid laborer in
the household. Baking, an important aspect of a woman’s traditional
responsibility to supply her family with good, substantial meals, offers
a case in point. By the antebellum period, home baking had assumed
powerful class-trappings. On the one hand, poor women often lacked
the facilities to bake at all for their own families. On the other hand,
as Ruth Schwartz Cowan has pointed out, the availability of fine wheat
flour had installed white bread as “‘one of the first symbols of status in
the industrial period” in urban middle-class homes—with the effect of
adding to (not diminishing) the work of women there. Not only was
white bread more energy- and time-consuming to prepare than the quick-
 The Political Economy of Housework 129
breads it replaced, but the presence of fine flour on the market (for
those who could afford it) created an expectation that genteel wives
should produce elaborate pastries, cakes, and confections as a part of
caring for their families. “
Perhaps the most ambiguous of women’s new “status” work was clean-
ing, however. Indeed, one can easily come away from the primary
sources convinced that, for middle-class women at least, house-cleaning
had become an obsession rather than a necessity. Much of the evidence
for this conclusion comes to us indirectly, in the form of criticism of
“the blessed followers of Saint Martha”'’ (who was too preoccupied
with the cares of her household to listen to the teachings of Jesus). In
the prescriptive literature of the antebellum period, these were women
whose fastidiousness as housekeepers drove all congeniality from their
homes—women like Miss Ophelia in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. Setting it down as a rule that “there is a medium... in
all things,” popular household-advice writer Elizabeth Ellet declared:
A woman who worries all within her reach by her ultra-housewifery, who
damps one down with soap and water, poisons one with furniture polish,
takes away one’s appetite by the trouble there is about cooking the simplest
thing, and fidgets one by over-done tidiness and cleanliness, is almost as
much to be avoided as a downright slut... ; she exercises a pernicious
influence on all, and is a misery to herself and others.‘

Here was tidiness with a vengeance—and, indeed, a vengeful appraisal

of over-tidiness!
No doubt Ellet had known such women and seen such households.
And yet this image of the middle-class wife, hell-bent on ‘‘ultra-
- housewifery,’’ requires both modification and comment. In the first
place, as the frequency of epidemic diseases suggests, antebellum cities
were not very healthful places. Concerns about cleanliness, while they
may have functioned as class shibboleths, were also quite reasonable.
Moreover, although over the course of the antebellum years cities began
to provide some basic municipal services, erecting safeguards against
the environment was still assumed to be the business of the individual
household—and particularly of the individual wife. For poorer women,
this was an almost impossible task—a failure middle-class and elite re-
formers relentlessly noted.'’ But protecting their families from the dan-
gers of the environment challenged the best efforts of middle-class
women as well. And lest wives relax their vigilance, health reformers
like William Alcott stood ever ready to remind them of the hazards yet
unseen: “‘I have seen families accounted perfectly neat... ,”’ he warned
 130 HOME AND WORK
his readers, “but were they truly so? Look at the cellars, the kitchens,
the drains, and the yards! See the putrefied vegetables and the fluids,
the half spoiled meat, the offal matter, the heaps of manure, the
vaults!’’'® Female prescriptive writers reinforced the point. In books like
The American Woman's Home, in which thirteen of the thirty-eight
chapters were devoted to matters of family health, housewives learned
that only an aggressive assault on the domestic sources of disease would
ensure their families’ safety.
Whatever they might have wished, none of the women whose letters
or diaries form the basis of this study even approached the model sug-
gested by Ellet. Quite simply, they did not have enough time—or enough
energy. Like most contemporary housewives, they were too busy racing
to keep up with the small catastrophes wreaked by small children, or
the larger catastrophes wreaked by stoves and furnaces. The perfectly
_ ordered household was, for most middle-class women, simply beyond
the realm of the possible.

The most troublesome difficulty in conceptualizing the economic value

of antebellum housework lies less in accounting for any individual ac-
tivity, however, than in finding some way to measure the whole. In a
society that calibrates economic activity almost exclusively in cash terms
| (whether we mean the society of the antebellum Northeast or that of
the late twentieth century), the very unwaged character of housework
seems to set it outside of the realm of the economy. How do we measure
something that is largely defined by its alienation from the standard
measures? The difficulties are compounded by the fact that antebel-
lum housework created no single item in which the value of the wife’s
labor power was embodied and through which that value could be
converted into cash or new capital—in short, no single item to count.
Looking for widgets and ratchets, we find instead unspoiled food,
swept floors, and mended vests—a frustratingly amorphous founda-
tion to build an economic evaluation on. Indeed, we cannot easily even
standardize the food, floors, or vests, since women’s unpaid labor
differed from household to household, place to place, and season toseason.
Although certain allotments of time appear to have been fair-
ly standard (especially among middle-class wives), there was no single
routine.
But the problems that plague attempts to calculate a concrete value
for housework are not unique to that work, certainly not for the ante-
bellum period and, arguably, not for the years since. Most paid work
in the early nineteenth century—as now—was imperfectly standardized
 The Political Economy of Housework 131
at best. Even in the most routinized occupations (in the new central
shops of the shoemaking industry, for example, and in the textile mills),
workers found ways to leave the imprints of their own rhythms, pref-
erences, and work customs on the patterns of their labor. Moreover,
seldom, if ever, does a wage packet represent the full market value of
the labor embedded in it. If it did, there would be no profits to be
converted into new capital. Wages, as Marx observed long ago, reflect
the social relations of workers and bosses, and the cash constraints on
the worker for survival. It is a continuum of economic interdependencies
that defies easy distinctions between paid and unpaid work.
Equally important in terms of attempting to fix a concrete economic
value for women’s unpaid domestic labor, under some conditions an-
tebellum housework did achieve a cash value—a market-based calcu-
lation of what it would have cost women’s families in cash to replace
their labor. This occurred in two types of circumstances: when women’s
domestic work was transferred outside of their own household and per-
formed for pay, and when it was performed at home but for someone
to whom that were not bound by ties of kinship. As we have seen, in
women’s own lives, this movement back and forth between cash-earning
and non-cash-earning identities was extremely casual. Not only did
many women produce items directly for sale, but, during the antebellum
years, many women also did (or had in their lifetimes) offer their skills
at cleaning, cooking, child care, and sewing on the market. Indeed, the
antebellum era was the last period during which most adult women
shared the experience of having been at some point in their lives paid
household workers. To an extent never later repeated, even middle-
class wives were likely to have worked as “hired help” in their youth.
Moreover, the work that women performed as paid household workers
closely corresponded in kind and organization to the work that they
performed for their own families. In both personal and material terms,
the two experiences were far more comparable than they would be later,
when the market forms of household labor would themselves often be
highly capitalized industries. In the half century before the Civil War,
then, there still existed a correspondence between paid and unpaid
domestic labor that can provide at least one measure of the market
worth of housework: the cost to a family to replace the unpaid labor of
the wife by purchasing it on the market.’”
Such a calculation ts necessarily rough and somewhat arbitrary. The
contingency-based character of housework meant that no two women
divided their time among various tasks in exactly the same way. Unob-
served by efficiency experts, moreover, women did not leave minute-
132 HOME AND WORK
by-minute records of their workdays. In attempting to convert the wage
levels of paid domestic servants into a wage value for housework, then,
one can only estimate a “‘typical’’ allocation of tasks.
As was the case with other wage-earners, the wages of domestic ser-
vants varied somewhat from place to place. In northeastern cities in
1860, a woman hired both to cook and to do the laundry earned between
three and four dollars a week. Seamstresses and maids averaged two-
and-a-half dollars a week. On the market, caring for children was at the
lower end of the pay scale, seldom commanding more than $2.00 a
week. If we assume that a woman did the full work of a hired cook and
child’s nurse, and also spent even an hour a day each sewing and cleaning
(valued at about three cents an hour apiece), the weekly price of her
basic housework would approximate $4.70. Even if we reduce this almost
by half to $3.00 a week (to allow for variations in her work schedule
and for the presence of assistance of some sort), taken at an average,
this puts the price of a wife’s basic housework at about $150 a year—
over and above the value of her own maintenance (which would have
been figured into the wages of a live-in cook or maid).””
To this should be added the value of goods a wife might make available
to the family for free or at a reduced cost. Among poorer households,
this was the labor of scavenging. A rag rug found among the refuse was
worth half a dollar in money saved; an old coat, several dollars. Flour
for a week, scooped from a broken barrel on the docks, could save the
household almost a dollar in cash outlay.”' In these ways, a wife with a
good eye and a quick hand might easily save her family a dollar a week—
or fifty dollars or so over the course of the year. In households with
more cash, wives found other ways to avoid expenditures. By shopping
carefully, buying in bulk, and drying or salting extra food, a wife could
save ten to fifty percent of the family food budget. Calculated on the
basis of the weekly family budget published in the New York Tribune
in 1851 (in which $4.26 was allowed for food), this could mean a savings
of from 40 cents to over $2.00 a week. Wives who kept kitchen gardens
or chickens or made their own cheese could (again, judging from the
Tribune budget) produce food worth a quarter a week (the price of one
fourth of a bushel of potatoes in New York in 1851).”
But there was also the cash that working-class wives added to the
household, by their needlework or vending, or by taking in boarders,
running a grocery or a tavern from their kitchen, or working unpaid in
their husbands’ trade. A boarder might pay $4.00 a week. Subtracting
a dollar and a half for food and rent, the wife’s labor-time represented
$2.50 of that amount, or $130 a year.”*> Outwork needlewomen av-
 The Political Economy of Housework 133
eraged about $2.00 a week, or a hundred dollars a year.“ Calculated
on the basis of the pay for a “helper” in a trade, the wife’s time working
in her husband’s occupation for the equivalent of a day a week was
worth some $20 a year.”
The particular labor performed by a given woman depended on the
size and resources of her household. In this way, housework remained
entirely embedded in the family. Yet we can estimate a general market
price of housework by combining the values of the individual activities
that made it up: perhaps $150 for cooking, cleaning, laundry, and child-
rearing; another $50 or so saved through scavenging or careful shopping;
another $50 or so in cash brought directly into the household. This would
set the price of a wife’s labor-time among the laboring poor at roughly
$250 a year beyond maintenance, or in the neighborhood of $400 a year
when the price of a single woman’s maintenance purchased on the mar-
ket (about $170 a year) is included. In working-class households with
more income, where the wife could focus her labor on money-saving
and on taking in a full-time boarder, that price might reach over $500
annually, or between $600 and $700 including maintenance. These shifts
in the nature of a wife’s work, and in the value of that work, as a
husband’s income increased seem not to have been entirely lost on
males, who advised young men that if they meant to get ahead, they
should “get married.”
Calculated at the replacement cost, the work of middle-class wives
supplied comparable value to the economies of their households. Their
diaries suggest that most middle-class women spent, conservatively, sev-
eral hours a day in sewing and mending, including the periods during
which they devoted whole days and weeks to these activities. Most were
involved in almost constant child care. Even with hired servants, middle-
class wives also spent hours each week cooking, baking, working with
hired help on the laundry, and doing the housecleaning required by their
families. If we estimate this work at two hours a day each for cleaning
and sewing, or about seventy cents a week, another two dollars a week
for cooking, washing, ironing, sorting, and putting away the clothing,
and two dollars a week for child care, we get a figure of roughly $250
a year for just these portions of the cash value of middle-class house-
work. If the wife engaged in the extensive household manufacturing
described by such women as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria
Child, then the value of her labor—in direct purchase avoidance—might
easily increase by $50 to $100 a year. The purchase of a single feather
bed could cost $25 to $30, and pillows and bolsters could cost several
dollars apiece.”’ If, like the author of Six Hundred Dollars a Year or
 134 | HOME AND WORK
Martha Coffin Wright, the wife added some cash earnings to her family’s
economy, then the value of her labor rose commensurately. If the family
took in a boarder, the value of the wife’s labor might increase the family
budget by $156 a year. By her careful shopping, she might save the
family another $60 to $70 a year on groceries alone.” The exact value
varied from woman to woman, but it would seem judicious to conclude
that the labor of a middle-class wife might easily be worth upwards of
$700 a year to her household.
Few women, either working-class or middle-class, could realize the
cash value of their household contribution outside of marriage. The
Harriet Beecher Stowes were the exceptions. Even middle-class women
who became teachers seldom earned more than $1.50 a week plus board,
and were paid only during the school term.” The full-time seamstress
who earned $2.50 a week would make only $130 annually—assuming
she was employed year-round. Many needlewomen earned far less. A
full-time cook and washerwoman would do better, since she would cus-
tomarily receive meals and lodging with her wages, but she seldom
earned more than $156 a year. Thus, the maintenance value of wives’
housework was not directly transferable into paid labor. It existed only
within, and was inseparable from, the institution of the family.
There is a second sense in which the cash value of housework was
embedded in the collectivity of the family. In large part, the wife’s labor
could not be extracted from the ongoing processes of household life or
indeed from the labor of other household members. Even the child who
earned a few pennies a week selling roasted corn could point to those
coins as evidence of his or her work. The mother who retrieved meat
scraps to make a broth to feed that same child could claim part of the
value of those pennies only indirectly and after the fact. This gave
| housework a peculiarly diffuse character, even in the context of the
household.
Because of her need for access to cash, the wife’s dependence on a
wage-earner in the family was particularly acute. She was not the only
member benefiting from the amalgamation of labors that the household
represented, however. A single adult male, living in New York City in
1860, could scarcely hope to get by on less than $250 a year: $4.00 a week
for room and board ($208 a year) and perhaps $15 a year for minimal
clothing meant an outlay of almost $225 before laundry, medicines, and
other occasional expenses.” Many working-class men did not earn $225 a
year, and for them access to the domestic labor of a wife might be the crit-
ical variable in achieving a maintenance. Even men who did earn this
amount might find a clear advantage in marrying, for a wife saved
 The Political Economy of Housework 135
money considerably over and above the cost she added for her own
maintenance. By supplying for free the cooking, cleaning, and laundry
services that must otherwise have been purchased with cash, a wife
stretched a man’s income and improved his security against the market.
The marital exchange was not an even one. A single adult female
paid two thirds to three quarters of the price paid by men for room and
board.*' Since she made much of it herself, her clothing was likely to
cost half of what a man’s cost. Most women did their own laundry. On
this basis, the cost of an adult female’s maintenance ran well under $200
a year—probably in the neighborhood of $170, even if she bought all
of her clothing. By these rough estimates, in exchange for access to
cash, a working-class wife contributed to the family a cash value worth
twice her maintenance. It was this surplus that combined with her hus-
band’s income to raise the household resources to the level of a main-
tenance. In short, this surplus allowed families to survive on $300 or
$400 annually at a time when observers calculated $600 as the minimal
threshold of subsistence.”
Historians have frequently analyzed the working-class family as a
collectivity, run according to a communal ethic. But by law and custom
the family was not an egalitarian society. The husband owned, not only
the value of his own labor time, but the value of his wife’s as well. And
this was a prerogative of manhood that working-class males were ill-
prepared to give up. Indeed, the rhetoric of the family wage suggests
that working-class males were engaged in a historical process of strength-
ening their claims to those prerogatives.”
Perhaps it would seem absurd to quibble over who owned the poverty
Or near poverty that so often characterized working-class households.
There were things to be owned, however, and ownership could make
the difference between subsistence or destitution if the household broke
up. First, the husband possessed his own maintenance, and any im-
provements in it that became possible as a result of the labor of his wife
and children. He also owned whatever furnishings the family had ac-
cumulated. Although a table, a chair, clothing, bedding, and a few dishes
seem (and were) scant enough property, they were the stuff life-and-
death transactions were made of in the laboring classes; pawned over-
night, for example, clothes were important “‘currency” to cover the rent
until payday. The husband also owned the children his wife raised, whose
wages (when they reached their mid-teens) might amount to several
hundred dollars a year—almost as much as his own.
To be sure, wives commonly benefited from some or all of these
sources of value, and both personal and community norms tended to
136 HOME AND WORK
restrain husbands from taking full advantage of their position. Not only
the affectional bonds of the family, but the expanding cultural emphasis
on the husband as the “protector” and “provider” may have helped
emotionally mediate the structural inequities of the household.
At the same time, community norms did not prevent the expres-
sion of individual self-interest in marriage, and the stresses of material
hardship were as likely to rend as to create mutual concern. The fre-
quency of incidents in which a wife had her husband arrested for bat-
tery and then “discharged at her request” suggest a complex and
less-than-romantic dynamic of dependence in antebellum families. The
continuing development of cash-exchange networks throughout the an-
tebellum period and the relegation of barter largely to domestic trans-
actions heightened that dynamic. A man could look for cheaper
accommodations or eat less to reduce his cash outlay, even if these
choices might prove destructive in the long run. But wives remained
dependent—both structurally and, in most cases, in actual fact. Ezra
Stiles Ely recorded an episode that underscored the inequity of the
relation. An Irishwoman, the deserted wife of a mariner, had fallen ill
and been sent with her children to the New York Almshouse. When
she recovered, she was determined “to obtain of [her husband] half his
pay, that she might leave the almshouse, and support her children.”
Her power to accomplish this was severely limited, however. When Ely
last saw her, she had taken her children to the Battery, where the ship
her husband served on was anchored. ‘“‘[S]he had sent a request to see
him,’’ Ely noted, and waited “in expectation.’’ But her husband pre-
ferred to stay on board ship—with his wages. “In this situation,’ Ely
concluded, “‘she remained for nearly half the day... .””
The unpaid labor of middle-class wives also produced value necessary
to the middle-class household economy. Unlike laboring-class men, mid-
die-class husbands enjoyed high enough incomes to have purchased a
comfortable maintenance on the cash market. Many earned enough
money to purchase room, board, clothing, and medical care for an entire
family. Averaging perhaps $1,000 a year, however, middle-class hus-
bands’ incomes were seldom sufficient both to cover the costs of present
maintenance and to provide the kinds of savings and investments that
might hedge against future markets. Here was the value of the labor of
the wife. Overseeing patterns of both purchase and consumption, sub-
stituting her own labor in home manufacturing for the labor value con-
tained in the prices of commodities, allowing the household to avoid
altogether or to decrease payment for cooking, laundry, child care, and
 The Political Economy of Housework 137
cleaning, and often also adding outright to the family’s cash income,
the wife’s labor created the surplus that could be translated into home
ownership, an expanded business operation, savings, or investment.
Indeed, this was precisely the fate of $350 of the $450 earned by the
author of Six Hundred Dollars a Year, whose income provided the basis
of a savings plan that eventually enabled the family to purchase its home.
The “‘status” work of middle-class wives also added to this value. The
labor that women expended in cleaning and decorating homes ultimately
accrued in the market value of the property. Both the status value and
the market value created by the wife’s labor redounded to her only
indirectly, however, for nineteenth-century observers tended to assess
the degree of a household’s “gentility” as a measure of the husband’s
income—as Child’s anecdote of the three mechanics suggested; it would
have been the mechanic who would have been deemed “mean” if his
companions had known the size of his household budget. That his wife
was a skilled housekeeper would not have occurred to them. Indeed,
as households became involved in market purchases, their material en-
vironment was assumed to reflect the husband’s earning power, rather
than the wife’s labor. Because of this way of seeing, status production—
a responsibility that wives assumed not instead of, but in addition to
their other work—became an invisible component of most of the unpaid
domestic labor that women performed.
The right of married women to hold and negotiate property in their
own names was not clearly established in law until the third quarter of
the nineteenth century. Prior to that time, the value created by middle-
class wives (and made tangible in cash earned or saved and in property)
belonged to their husbands. Even after the passage of married women’s
property acts, moreover, wives’ rights extended only to property held
in their names. Unless they were specifically conveyed to the wife,
investments, savings, and properties acquired during marriage and rep-
resenting, in part or in whole, the labor of the wife, were the possession
of the husband.”
But husbands were not the sole beneficiaries of the economic value
of housework, or of its unique invisibility. Employers were enabled by
the presence of this sizeable but uncounted labor in the home to pay
both men and women wages that were, in fact, below the level of sub-
sistence. The difference was critical to the development of industriali-
zation in the antebellum Northeast.”
The growth of capitalized manufacturing in the antebellum era was
in many ways stunning. For example, as early as 1826, the Boston
138 HOME AND WORK
Manufacturing Company was showing profits of almost 20 percent, and
some mills were doing even better than that.”’ To remain competitive
with imports and still maintain these profit levels, however, manufac-
turers constantly had to reduce the costs of production, either directly
through wage cuts or indirectly through further mechanization. The
latter required massive capital investment. But capital accumulation
remained low in the Northeast. In each of the crises of 1815 to 1820,
1837 to 1840, and the late 1850s, currency contracted, slowing investment
overall and creating erratic, short-term fluctuations. There was little
stability for shop and factory owners in the antebellum economy. In
New York City’s “metropolitan industrialization,’’ where a tenth of all
manufacturers controlled roughly 30 percent of all capital, small shop-
keepers found access to capital increasingly constricted. As late as 1860,
most mills in the region did not last ten years.”
At a time when the level of capital accumulation in the Northeast
remained precariously low, then, the margin of profit available from
‘‘sub-subsistence’’ wages was crucial. Occasionally mill owners acknowl-
edged that the wages they paid did not cover maintenance. One agent
admitted: “‘So long as they can do my work for what I choose to pay
them, I keep them, getting out of them all I can....{H]Jow they fare
outside my walls I don’t know, nor do I consider it my business to know.
They must look out for themselves. ...”””
More often, however, both capitalists and the political economists
who rose to their defense maintained that they did indeed care about
their workers, and that the wages they paid represented the true value
of the labor they received, including the value of producing that labor.
John McVickar thought well enough of the Encyclopedia Britannica's
discussion of political economy to have it reprinted in the United States.
It asserted coolly that ‘‘the cost of producing artificers, or labourers,
regulates the wages they obtain. ...’” In Public and Private Economy,
Theodore Sedgwick carried this optimism about the relationship of
wages to subsistence one step further—at the same time revealing the
dangerous uses the belief that wages represented subsistence could be
put to. Since “a little, a very little only’’ was required to maintain
laborers, Sedgwick argued, even at current levels of payment ‘‘in the
factories of New England, very large numbers [of workers} may annually
lay up half their wages; many much more....’”' Presumably, then,
wages not only covered, but exceeded, the value of maintenance. The
other shoe would fall, again and again, as employers used the fact of
working-class survival to justify further cuts in wages. The value of
unpaid housework in mediating those cuts would remain invisible.
 The Political Economy of Housework 139
The value created by middle-class housework also accrued both to
individual employers and to the expanding regional and national econ-
omies. Even when employers paid high enough salaries to provide pres-
ent security for a family, they seldom provided either the income or the
job security to ensure a household’s well-being against the erratic boom-
and-bust cycles of business and the unemployment consequent upon
those cycles. To have done so would have been to restrict vastly the
growth and flexibility of their own operations. Women’s unremunerated
labor in the household provided the needed “safety net,”” enabling mid-
dle-class families to maintain some degree of both material stability and
healthiness in a volatile economic environment and in an often deteri-
orating physical environment. In addition to its direct financial impli-
cations for business, middle-class housework provided a second, more
amorphous, but nonetheless important value for the developing indus-
trial economy. It supported the continued existence of a comparatively
prosperous sector of society—one that, because of its comparative well-
being, understood the expansion of financial institutions and capitalized
manufacturing to be generally congenial to its interests. In this sense,
wives’ unpaid domestic labor played a key role in the emergence of the
middle class, both as a coherent economic group and as a symbol of the
security presumably available to all families in the new republic.
Finally, like laboring-class wives, middle-class wives found themselves
at a growing disadvantage as workers. Regardless of the value they
created for their homes and for the larger economy, by and large they
owned neither property nor cash, and they were specialized for a type
of labor that could be exchanged for maintenance only in a single con-
text: marriage.

In putting the history of housework in the context of early industriali-

zation, it is important to underscore the role of unpaid domestic labor
in the creation, definition, and workings of class in antebellum America.
‘‘Class”’ is both a useful and a slippery term in American history—useful
in delineating real distinctions of material well-being and opportunity
as well as of world-view, aspirations, and identity among different social
groups, but slippery, because it is so amorphous, and because defining
class clearly involves more than simple calculations of cash income. The
newly minted physician may have an enormous debt burden and a very
low income, but compared to most Americans his or her prospects for
the future are bright indeed. Thus, present income levels offer a poor
way to comprehend the long-term meaning of class in American society.
The history of housework in the antebellum years offers further cau-
 140 HOME AND WORK
tion against narrow, cash-based formulations of class. Households may
have been increasingly likely to define themselves against the cash mar-
ketplace, in terms of wages and salaries, but their actual position in the
economic order of early industrialization was a function of a combination
of cash and other types of resources. Critical among these additional
resources was the unpaid labor of the wife.
Housework affected the class position of families in several ways.
Some of these were dramatically visible and symbolically quite powerful.
In her ability to furnish and maintain a comfortable dwelling, for ex-
ample, a woman represented her family to the world as “‘respectable”’
and prosperous. But housework also supported and helped define the
class position of households in other, often less apparent, respects. By
clever buying or scavenging, a wife could save cash that might cover
emergency medical expenses or accumulate toward investment. By
skimping, she might keep her family out of the almshouse, or, as Martha
Coffin Wright contended, enable the family to survive bad financial
decisions by the husband. Through her networks of friends and family,
she might build barriers against periods of need. A family’s ability to
rise to middle-class prosperity—or its inability to forestall decline into
economic marginality—might well depend first and foremost on the skills
and resourcefulness of the wife.
In turn, the class position of a household—understood as its composite
relationship to the vagaries of the cash marketplace—also defined the
nature and function of housework. This was not merely a case of the
_ precise tasks undertaken by a given woman, although, as we have seen,
this varied to some extent depending on whether her household was
more or less precariously situated. But the overall economic condition
of the household also determined the form in which the material value
of housework would accrue to family members—especially to the hus-
band. For working-class men, the value of women’s unpaid domestic
labor registered primarily in the present, in enabling the household (and
the husband himself) to realize a maintenance from day to day. House-
work had the same function in middle-class households, but there it
provided the additional bonus of enabling capital accumulation into the
future. Put simply, a wife was a good investment for a man who wanted
to get ahead.

Much had changed—and little had changed—in the household labor of

women over the course of the antebellum years. Like their colonial
counterparts, antebellum women worked hard in their families, main-
taining the basic operations of the household, seeing to it that children
 The Political Economy of Housework 141
survived to adulthood, that adults survived from one day of work to the
next, producing many of the goods required by their families, and ma-
neuvering in the marketplace to obtain what could not be produced
internally. In the midst of all this, they grappled with the clever and
cantankerous new machines and the heart-sinking dangers, the new
prosperity and the new poverty of an increasingly industrial society.
As we have seen, twice during the first two hundred years of European
settlement—first during the early years of colonization and then again
during the Revolutionary War—Amernicans had publicly recognized and
valued the economic importance of that labor. But those were periods
of exceptional circumstances, circumstances that ran against the overall
grain of economic development in the United States. Over the course
of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and as an aspect of the
process of industrialization, antebellum Americans would embrace a
growing conviction that housework was not really labor at all, but rather
merely a new form of leisure reserved to married women as the last
preserve of a way of life antecedent to and apart from industrialization.
Occasionally, to be sure, a husband would acknowledge the value of his
wife’s labor. In his autobiography, Thurlow Weed attributed largely to
his marriage “‘whatever of personal success and pecuniary prosperity I
have since enjoyed.” His wife, he wrote, “more than divided our labors,
cares, and responsibilities. But for her industry, frugality, and good
management, I must have been shipwrecked during the first fifteen years
of trial.”’*” In at least one court case, moreover, a judge went so far as
to award a husband damages for the value of services lost when his
wife’s arm was injured.** These recognitions were dwarfed, however,
by the growing cultural perception that housework, and perhaps par-
ticularly middle-class housework, stood outside of the economy and was
not a part of it. The ‘ideology of spheres,’’ as historians have identified
that way of seeing social life, would represent the final phase in the
industrialization of housework—the denial that it produced any eco-
nomic value at all.
 Chapter VII
The Pastoralization of Housework

The culture of the antebellum Northeast recognized the role of wives

in the making of contented and healthy families. Indeed, the years
between the War of 1812 and the Civil War were a period of almost
unabated celebration of women’s special and saving domestic mission.
‘Grant that others besides woman have responsibilities at home... ,”
wrote the Reverend Jesse Peck in 1857, “‘[s]till we fully accord the
supremacy of domestic bliss to the wife and mother... .””
As recent historians have recognized, this glorification of wife- and
motherhood was at the heart of one of the most compelling and widely
shared belief systems of the early nineteenth century: the ideology of
gender spheres. An elaborate set of intellectual and behavioral conven-
tions, the doctrine of gender spheres expressed a worldview in which
both the orderliness of daily social relations and the larger organization
of society derived from and depended on the preservation of an all-
encompassing gender division of labor. Consequently, in the conceptual
and emotional universe of the doctrine of spheres, males and females
existed as creatures of naturally and essentially different capacities. As
the Providence-based Ladies Museum explained in 1825:
Man is strong—woman is beautiful. Man is daring and confident—woman
is diffident and unassuming. Man is great in action—woman i(n] suffering.
Man shines abroad—woman at home. Man talks to convince—woman to

142
 The Pastoralization of Housework 143
persuade and please. Man has a rugged heart—woman a soft and tender
one. Man prevents misery—woman relieves it. Man has science—woman
taste. Man has judgment—woman sensibility. Man is a being of justice—
woman of mercy.
These ‘‘natural”’ differences of temperament and ability were presumed
to translate into different social roles and responsibilities for men and
women. Clearly intended by the order of nature to “shine at home,”
Woman was deemed especially ill-equipped to venture into the world
of nineteenth-century business, where ‘‘cunning, intrigue, falsehood,
slander, [and] vituperative violence” reigned and where ‘“‘mercy, pity,
and sympathy, are vagrant fowls.’
Particularly in the antebellum Northeast, the ideology of gender
spheres was partly a response to the chaos of a changing society—an
intellectually and emotionally comforting way of setting limits to the
uncertainties of early industrialization. Historian Ann Douglas, who has
been among the chief proponents of this view, has argued that the
sentimentalization of the home and of womanhood allowed the white,
Protestant, upper middle class to resolve profound contradictions in its
own behavior—to seem to cherish the very values its own activities so
clearly denied. ‘“‘Sentimentalism,” Douglas asserts, ‘‘provides a way to
protest a power to which one has already in part capitulated”’—in this
case, “economic expansion, urbanization, and industrialization.’”
While it helps to illuminate the complex patterns of internal stress
that characterized the culture of the emerging middle class in the an-
tebellum Northeast, this view of the functioning of the ideology of gen-
der spheres poses a number of conceptual difficulties. Most problematic
is its tendency to divorce the genesis of belief from action and to frame
ideology almost as an afterthought to behavior—a rationalization for
choices already made and actions already taken in the arena of social
experience. As a number of historians have demonstrated, however,
the ideology of gender spheres was far more integrally joined to social
behavior in the antebellum Northeast than this would suggest—not
merely describing conduct, but shaping it; not only justifying behavior,
but infusing it. The ideology of spheres was an evolving reservoir of
meaning through which antebellum Americans conceived both their
choices and the significance of those choices. It is this far more dynamic
view of antebellum culture, and of the role of gender within it, that
allows us to understand the importance of the ideology of gender spheres
for the history of women’s unpaid domestic labor in the period of early
industrialization.
144 HOME AND WORK
The traits that presumably rendered Woman so defenseless against the
guile and machinations of the business world not only served to confine
her to the home as her proper sphere, but made her presence there
crucial for her family, especially for her husband. Even the most en-
thusiastic boosters of economic expansion agreed that the explosive
opportunism of antebellum society created an atmosphere too heady
with competition and greed to foster either social or personal stability.
However great his wisdom or strong his determination, to each man
must come a time
{w]hen body, mind, and heart are overtaxed with exhausting labor; when
the heavens are overcast, and the angry clouds portend the fearful storm;
when business schemes are antagonized, thwarted by stubborn matter,
capricious man, Or an inauspicious providence; when coldness, jealousy,
or slander chills his heart, misrepresents his motives, or attacks his rep-
utation; when he looks with suspicion on all he sees, and shrinks from
the frauds and corruptions of men with instinctive dread... .
It was what Melville called the ‘‘damp, drizzly November” of the soul,
and he recommended that at such times men take to the whaling ship.
Most writers sought a different solution, however. What was needed
was not a voyage, but an anchor, a balance both social and psychological,
a refuge: ‘‘one place of sweet repose . . .of calm and sunshine amid the
lowering storm... ; one heart which is true. ...” In the standard rhet-
oric of the ideology of the spheres, that place was Home, and that one
true heart, the heart of Woman.‘ }
Whatever the proclivities or ambitions of individual women, the pre-
sumed contrasts between the sexes permitted Woman-in-the-abstract to
be defined as the embodiment of all that was contrary to the values and
behaviors of men in the marketplace, and thus, to the marketplace itself.
Against its callousness, she offered nurturance. Against its ambition,
she pitted her self-effacement and the modesty of her needs. Against
its materialism, she held up the twin shields of morality and spiritual
solace. If business was a world into which only men traveled and where
they daily risked losing their souls, then wherever Woman was, was
sanctuary. And Woman was in the Home.

The contrast between Man and Woman melted easily into a contrast
between “workplace” and “home” and between ‘‘work” as Man en-
gaged in it and the “‘occupations’’ of Woman in the home. Most writers
of prescriptive literature did acknowledge that women were involved in
activities of some sort in their households. For example, T. S. Arthur
 The Pastoralization of Housework 145
worried that a woman would be unable to keep the constant vigilance
required to be a good mother if she also had to attend to “ ‘the oper-
ations of the needle, the mysteries of culinary science, and all the com-
plicated duties of housekeeping.’ ’’ His language is revealing, however:
housework consisted of “mysteries” and “‘duties’’; it was a different
order of activity from the labor that men performed. Indeed, some
observers cautioned that the wife and mother should deliberately stay
clear of employments that might involve her in the economy. As we
have observed, William Alcott was among this group. Noting that a
woman ‘...has duties to perform to the sick and to the well—to the
young and to the aged; duties even to domestic animals,” Alcott never-
theless cautioned that ‘“‘[vjery few of these duties are favorable to the
laying up of much property, and some are opposed to it. So that while
we commend industry—of the most untiring kind, too—we would nei-
ther commend nor recommend strong efforts to lay up property.” The
advice was not only consistent with, but reflected a critical aspect of,
the ideology of spheres: to the extent that workers in the household
identified themselves with the labor of the marketplace, the function of
the home as a place of psychological refuge would be undermined.”
Thus, the responsibilities of wives in their households were generally
described in the prescriptive literature less as purposeful activities re-
quired and ordered by the welfare of their individual families than as
emanations of an abstract but shared Womanhood. As Daniel C. Eddy
explained:

Home is woman’s throne, where she maintains her royal court, and sways
her queenly authority. It is there that man learns to appreciate her worth,
and to realize the sweet and tender influences which she casts around her;
there she exhibits the excellences of character which God had in view in
her creation.

Underscoring the essentially passive nature of Woman’s functions, Eddy

concluded: ‘Her life should be a calm, holy, beautiful walk. ...’”
Men sometimes recognized exceptions to this definition of women’s
work as a way of being rather than as a conscious form of labor. In his
concern that women should be freed from other demands in order to
have time to spend with their children, for example, T. S. Arthur in-
dicated a general understanding that attending to children was an oner-
ous responsibility. William Alcott went somewhat farther, admitting that
not all women took easily to motherhood and that some women might
well have to cultivate the art of loving and rearing children. But most
146 HOME AND WORK
writers simply assumed that skilled mothering came to women as a part
of their very femaleness. ’
Deeply embedded in the gender culture of antebellum Americans,
the images and language of the ideology of spheres did not remain distant
and distinct from daily life. To the contrary, the imperatives of the
ideology—most notably the conviction that Woman resided in a universe
utterly separated from the turbulence of commerce and industry—inex-
orably provided the framework within which the experiences of indi-
vidual women were comprehended. Indeed, especially in the
prescriptive literature, idealized images of Woman and of the Home
were evoked with a directness that in effect offered them up, not as
constructs in a system of intellectual conventions, but as simulations of
living people and tangible locations in the geography of daily social
intercourse. Thus, for example, Jesse Peck couched his exposition of
domestic ideals in the rather mundane setting of a husband’s return
home from his day’s work:
With what fond longings does he turn toward that bright paradise, his
home, and gaze upon that bright and central orb, whose genial light kindles
with soft and heavenly radiance upon the scene of loveliness which invites
him to rest. With what refreshing gladness does he retire from the noise,
and strife, and selfishness of the gentile court, into this sanctum sanctorum
of the world’s vast temple. As he settles into his easy chair, and hears
sweet voices call him father, feels the soft press of affection’s hand upon
his fevered brow, and love’s charming kiss upon his lips, and his heart
receives the endearing caresses of her who calls him husband, what de-
licious, holy pleasure melts and fills his soul!
The metaphors of ideology were transformed into the data of behavior.
With no loss of prescriptive power—indeed, with the enhancement that
arises from the immediacy of lived experience—the symbolic assumed
the garb of daily experience."
The consequence of this conflation of ideology and behavior was to
obscure both the nature and the economic importance of women’s do-
mestic labor. It was not only Woman-in-the-abstract who did not labor
in the economy, but also, by extension, individual women. It was not
only Woman-in-the-abstract, but presumably, real women who guided
the ongoing functions of the home through the effortless emanations of
their very being, providing for the needs of their families without labor,
through their simple presence in the household. As romantic narrative
played against lived experience, the labor and economic value of hou-
sework ceased to exist in the culture of the antebellum Northeast. It
became work’s opposite: a new form of leisure.
 The Pastoralization of Housework 147
The heart of this dialectic of selection and symbolic reconstruction
was a cultural process Raymond Williams has identified with the struc-
ture of feeling characteristic of pastoral literature—a rendering of the
present in the image of a nostalgically conceived past ‘‘in which all things
come naturally to man, for his use and enjoyment and without his
effort....” In seventeenth-century English literature, Williams found,
the pastoral myth functioned to obscure the ravages to the rural peas-
antry attendant upon the formation of a landed gentry. By conceiving
of the land as an Eden, the pastoral poets, many of whom depended
on the munificence of the new gentry, were able to celebrate the en-
closure of the countryside into a series of elaborate private estates with-
out acknowledging the social cost of that transformation. Williams points
out that what is missing in the pastoral poems is any evidence of the
labor required to create and maintain these latter-day Edens:
What is really happening [in the poetry]... is... a magical recreation of
what can be seen as a natural bounty and then a willing charity: both
serving to ratify and bless the country landowner. ... Yet this magical
extraction of the curse of labour is in fact achieved by a simple extraction
of the existence of labourers. The actual men and women who rear the
animals and drive them to the house and kill them and prepare them for
meat; who trap the pheasants and partridges and catch the fish; who plant
and manure and prune and harvest the fruit trees: these are not present;
their work is all done for them by a natural order. When they do at last
appear, it is merely as the “rout of rurall folks’’ or, more simply, as ‘‘much
poore,”’ and what we are then shown is the charity and lack of conde-
scension with which they are given what, now and somehow, not they but
the natural order has given for food, into the lord’s hands."
Williams’ interest centered on the significance of pastoralization as a
process through which the emerging rural bourgeoisie justified dislo-
cating the peasantry from their customary lands and rights and appro-
priating the value of their labor as a wage-dependent class. But the
history of housework suggests that pastoralization was also a gendered
process. The counterparts to the seventeenth-century English pastoral
poets in antebellum America were the writers of prescriptive domestic
literature. Under their pens was gradually fashioned a powerful evoca-
tion of the Home as a new Eden—a paradise delivered up to husband
and children from a benevolent and bountiful nature, without the curse
of labor.
William Alcott’s description of the wife’s labors in The Young Wife
provides a striking illustration of the pastoralization of housework in
descriptions of the antebellum home:
148 HOME AND WORK
Where is it that the eye brightens, the smile lights up, the tongue becomes
flippant, the form erect, and every motion cheerful and graceful? Is it at
home? Is it in doing the work of the kitchen? Is it at the wash-tub—at
the oven—darning a stocking—mending a coat—making a pudding? Is it
in preparing a neat table and table cloth, with a few plain but neat dishes?
Is it in covering it with some of nature’s simple but choice viands? Is it
in preparing the room for the reception of an absent companion? Is it in
warming and lighting the apartments at evening, and waiting, with female
patience, for his return from his appointed labor? Is it in greeting him
with all her heart on his arrival?"

Clearly, Alcott was quite familiar with the types of work performed by
women in their own families, and his description is all the more inter-
esting on this account: cooking, baking, washing clothes, mending and
darning, serving meals, building fires, attending to lamps—it is a sur-
prisingly accurate catalogue. It is also incomplete, of course. Missing
from this picture is the making of the soap that the wash might be done,
the lugging and heating of the water, the tiresome process of heating
and lifting cast-iron irons, the dusting and sweeping of rooms, the clean-

need of repair. |
ing of the stove, and the making of the stocking and the coat now in

Even the domestic tasks Alcott acknowledges, however, are not to

be contemplated as true work, a point made explicit in his identification
of only the husband’s employments as “labor.”’ With “labor,” indeed,
the wife’s activities have no truck, for there ts no “labor’’ here to per-
form. A little washing, a touch of the needle, and a moment’s stop in
the kitchen are all that are required; the food appears virtually as a gift
of nature, and the compliant fires and lamps seem to light and tend
themselves. In Alcott’s ideal home, children do not knock over the solar
lamp (as they did in Sarah Munro’s parlor) and stray sheep do not require
emergency resuscitation (as one did in Mary Ann Archbald’s kitchen). "7
On the contrary, all is ordered, and the ordering of it is not only not
burdensome or tiring, but the certain vehicle of good health and a
cheerful disposition. Far from laborious, housework is positively regen-
erating.
As Alcott’s depiction of the home suggested, prescriptive writers
sometimes undercut the existence of household labor even as they
seemed to acknowledge it. In an article entitled ‘“Woman’s Offices and
Influence,” J. H. Agnew granted that women might find themselves
caught up in “‘the busy drudgery of hard housekeeping,” but that one
comment was his only mention of women’s domestic labor in a four-
page article devoted to women’s role in the family. The chief functions
 The Pastoralization of Housework 149
of the wife and mother, according to Agnew, were: “To make home
happy,” “‘to check the utilitarianism, the money-loving spirit of the day,”’
“to soften political asperities in the other sex, and themselves to shun
publicity,” ‘“‘to regulate the forms and control the habits of social life,”’
and “‘the exemplification and diffusion of Christianity” —all of which was
to be accomplished in “the quiet retirement of the home.’’”
The pastoralization of housework, with its emphasis on the sanctified
home as an emanation of Woman’s nature, required the articulation of
a new way of seeing (or, more exactly, of not seeing) women as actors,
capable of physical exertion. Most specifically, this applied to women
as laborers; but the “magical extraction” of physical activity from the
concept of Womanhood in fact proceeded in much larger terms and was
most apparent in the recurring celebrations of female “‘influence.”’ Typ-
ically invoked as the female counterpart to the presumably male formal
political power,'* the concept of indirect womanly “influence” sup-
planted notions of women as direct agents, and thus as laborers. As
Agnew’s discussion of women illustrated, the contrast between presum-
ably male “‘power”’ (physical as well as moral) and female “influence”
could be drawn quite explicitly:
We may stand in awe, indeed, before the exhibition of power, whether
physical or moral, but we are not won by them to the love of truth and
goodness, while influence steals in upon our hearts, gets hold of the springs
of action, and leads us into its own ways. It is the inflowing upon others
from the nameless traits of character which constitute woman’s idiosyn-
cracy. Her heart is a great reservoir of love, the water-works of moral
influence, from which go out ten thousand tubes, conveying the ethereal
essences of her nature, and diffusing them quietly over the secret chambers
of man’s inner being.
Woman does not herself act. Rather, she “gets hold of the springs of
action.”” An idiosyncracy in the human order, she is not so much a
physical as an ethereal being. Agnew concluded: ‘‘Let man, then, ex-
ercise power; woman exercise influence. By this she will best perform
her offices, discharge her duties.” It is the crowning touch of the pas-
toralization of housework: the home is the setting not of labor, but of
“offices” and “duties.” Therefore, what is required for the happy home
is not a worker but rather ‘a great reservoir of love.”’'”
The pastoralization of household labor became a common feature of
antebellum literature, both private and published. It was a pastoral
perspective that framed Horace Bushnell’s memory of his childhood.
His mother, he recalled, bore a heavy load of responsibilities, ‘training
her six children, clothing her whole family in linens and woolens, spun
150 HOME AND WORK
every thread, and made up in the house also to a great extent by herself.
She had a farm-and-dairy charge to administer, also the farm workmen
to board, and for five or six months in a year the workers, besides, of
a homespun cloth-dressing shop. All this routine she kept moving in
exact order and time, steady and clear as the astronomic year....”’
Bushnell wondered, ‘‘What mortal endurance could bear such a stress
of burden!’ But the question was rhetorical, for he already had his
answer: the mortal endurance of Woman. His mother, he testified,
managed all of this work with “scarcely ...a look of damage.”” Under
the spell of true womanhood, it seemed, even the most exhausting labor
lost its power to debilitate.'°
The pastoralization of housework also shaped much of the fiction of
the period. In a piece entitled ‘“The Wife’ (published in the Ladies’
Literary Cabinet in July of 1819 and included in The Sketch Book the
following year), Washington Irving described the plight of a young cou-
ple forced by the husband’s disastrous speculations to give up their
fashionable life in the city and move to a modest country cottage. One
might anticipate that such a move would entail numerous headaches
and a good deal of hard work, especially for the woman. But such was
not the case for Irving’s ““Wife.’’ Mary goes out to the cottage to spend
the day ‘“‘superintending its arrangement,’’ but the substance of that
process remains a mystery; for the packing and unpacking, cleaning,
hanging of curtains, arranging of furniture, putting away of dishes, sort-
ing of clothes, and adjusting of new domestic equipment one might
expect to be required under such circumstances remain undisclosed in
the text. Indeed, all we learn is that when next encountered by the
narrator, Mary ‘‘ ‘seems in better spirits than I have ever known.’ ”
Transformed into a creature who ts far more sylvan nymph than human
female, Mary greets her husband and the narrator “singing, in a style
of the most touching simplicity. ... Mary came tripping forth to meet
us; she was in a pretty rural dress of white, a few wild flowers were
twisted in her fine hair, a fresh bloom was on her cheek, her whole
countenance beamed with smile—I have never seen her look so lovely.”’
To complete the pastoral scene, nature has obligingly provided “‘ ‘a
beautiful tree behind the cottage’ ’’ where the threesome picnic on a
feast of wild strawberries and thick sweet cream."’
The pastoralization of housework was often accomplished without the
rendering of entire scenes, fictional or not. So essential a part of the
worldview of antebellum northeasterners did it become that mere
phrases (‘‘the link of maternal affection,” “the sphere illumed by her
smile’’) evoked the image of repose and refuge from labor presumed to
 The Pastoralization of Housework 151
reside in Woman’s very being. As Daniel Eddy observed of a verse from
Judges, ‘“There is a world of domestic meaning treasured up in these
few words.”
In both its briefer and its more extended forms, in fiction and in
exposition, in prescription and in proscription, the pastoralization
of housework permeated the culture of the antebellum Northeast.
Often, it was expressed simply as a truism, as when the Reverend
Hubbard Winslow reminded his Boston congregation that “‘{t]he more
severe manual labors, the toils of the fields, the mechanics, the cares
and burdens of mercantile business, the exposures and perils of absence
from home, the duties of the learned professions devolve upon man. ,
...” As we have seen, he considered women’s occupations to be of a
‘more delicate and retired nature.’’ That same year, the shocked and
angered Congregational clergy of Massachusetts drew upon the same
assumptions and the same imagery of Womanhood to denounce the
abolitionist activities of Sarah and Angelina Grimké. Reminding their
female congregants that ‘‘the power of woman is in her dependence,”’
the clergy spoke of the ‘‘unobtrusive and private” nature of women’s
‘appropriate duties’ and directed them to devote their energies to
‘those departments of life that form the character of individuals” and
to embodying ‘‘that modesty and delicacy which is the charm of domestic
life....”"
Throughout the middle and wealthy classes, male family members
were inclined to accept the conventions of pastoralization as accurate
representations of how their wives and the women they observed spent
their time. When George Templeton Strong listed in 1842 the qualities
he considered essential in a wife, he included piety, obedience, good
humor, beauty, intellect, and wealth—but failed to mention skills in
domestic work or household management. Even after marriage, his
closest approach to recognizing his wife’s contribution to the functioning
of the household was to praise her for having “‘the sound practical sense”’
to eschew ‘‘fashionable extravagance.”’ Calvin Stowe exhibited a similar
blindness to the demands of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s family responsi-
bilities. Encouraging her in 1842 to “‘make all your calculations to spend
the rest of your life with your pen,” he failed to address the matter of
who would take care of the cooking, cleaning, mending, and child-
rearing, and turned his attention instead to what apparently seemed to
him the more serious obstacle to her publishing career: how she should
sign her name.”
The pastoralization of housework was often expressed during the
antebellum period in the romanticization of Womanhood. But the pro-
152 HOME AND WORK
cess also had an underside. A creature who did not contribute to the
material welfare of those around her, after all, could as easily be
represented as a leech as she could as an angel. Reminiscent of the
eighteenth-century wags, antebellum writers often depicted women as
silly and irresponsible—not quite grasping the full measure of their
dependence on men or of the difficulty of maintaining a household. The
following sketch in the ‘‘Editor’s Drawer” of Harper's in January of
1854 illustrated the possibilities for satire even as it demonstrated the
narrowed definition of “support”:
“Do you support General Pierce?”
“No.”
“Do you support General Cass?”’
“No.”
‘‘What! do you support Van Buren?”
“No, sirrr!—I support my wife Betsy and the children; and I tell you
it’s mighty hard... .°””
Presumably Harper’s readers would all share in the humor of the
situation.

As we have seen, working-class husbands appear to have embraced the

view that paid labor was economically superior to unpaid labor. They
shared, too, a tendency to pastoralize the labor of their wives. The
speeches of early labor activists, for example, frequently invoked both
the rhetoric of the ideology of spheres and specifically pastoral images
of the household, implying a sharp contrast between ‘“‘the odious, cruel,
unjust and tyrannical system’”’ of the factory, which “‘compels the op-
erative Mechanic to exhaust his physical and mental powers,”’ and the
presumably rejuvenating powers of the home. Discouraging women
from carrying their labor “beyond the home,” working men called upon
women to devote themselves to improving the quality of life within their
families. When the men described that undertaking, however, they fo-
cused, not on the myriad ways wives contributed daily to the material
welfare of their households, but on a mission of passive benevolence.
The Maine Washingtonian Journal, a working-class temperance journal,
declared that “‘[i]t is in the calm and quiet retreat of domestic life that
relaxation from toil is obtained. ...”’’ And there, as William Sylvis put
it, it was the proper work of woman “‘to guide the tottering footsteps
of tender infancy in the paths of rectitude and virtue, to smooth down
the wrinkles of our perverse nature, to weep over our shortcomings,
and make us glad in the days of our adversity, to counsel, comfort, and
console us in our declining years.”
 The Pastoralization of Housework 153
African-American newspapers of the antebellum Northeast also re-
flected and reaffirmed the pastoral conventions of women’s domestic
labor. The Rights of All compared women to ornamental creatures of
nature, ‘‘as various in decorations as the insects, the birds, and the
shells....” In 1842, The Northern Star and Freeman's Advocate ap-
provingly reprinted an article from the Philadelphia Temperance Ad-
vocate in which wives were described as deities ‘who preside over the
sanctities of domestic life, and administer its sacred rights. ...’’ That
this perception ill fit the experiences of those female readers whose
homes were also their unpaid workplaces, as well as those women who
worked for money in someone else’s home, appears not to have dis-
turbed the paper’s editors. Rather than as a worker, Woman was rep-
resented as a force of nature—and one presumably intended for man’s
special benefit: ‘“Fhe morning star of our youth—the day star of our
manhood—the evening star of our age.”””

For both middle-class and working-class men, the insecurities of income-

earning during the antebellum period struck at the very heart of their
traditional roles as husbands and fathers. Particularly since the late
eighteenth century, manhood had been identified with wage-earning—
with the provision of the cash to make the necessary purchases of the
household. In the context of the reorganization of paid work in the
antebellum Northeast, the growing dependence of households on cash,
and the roller-coaster business cycles during which few families could
feel safe, that identification faced almost constant challenge. And as it
was challenged, it intensified.
By the antebellum period, the late—eighteenth-century association of
manhood with wage-earning had flowered into the cult of the male
“breadwinner.” A direct response to the unstable economic conditions
of early industrialization, this association crossed the lines of the emerg-
ing classes, characterizing the self-perceptions and social claims of both
laboring and middle-class men.
Among laboring men, the identification of manhood with wage-
earning melded easily with the traditional emphasis on the ‘‘manliness”’
of the crafts. Indeed, it was precisely as an attack on their ‘manli-
ness” that antebellum workers responded to the demise of the old
artisan system. Decrying the loss of what he perceived as the ‘‘equal-
ity of condition among the people” that had characterized the pre-
Revolutionary era, Seth Luther focused on the effects of the economy
in preventing working men from fulfilling their traditional roles: ‘‘It is
much more difficult now, for a man to become possessed of a house to
 154 HOME AND WORK
shelter his family than it was at that earlier period.’”” An anonymous
“mechanic” assumed that it was the work of the husband to “‘maintain
himself and a wife, together with... [their] children” and complained
that low wages made this virtually impossible. General Trades’ Union
leader Ely Moore warned that the unchecked industrial avarice of em-
ployers would create a class of “‘breadless and impotent”’ workers. When
they struck for higher wages in 1860, the shoemakers of Massachusetts
linked the encroachments of capital with an attack on their manhood;
in the ‘““Cordwainers’ Song,” they called on each other to “stand for
your rights like men” and “‘Resolve by your fathers’ graves” to emerge
victorious and “‘like men” to “hold onto the last!’’* Gender also pro-
vided the language for belittling the oppressor, for working men often
expressed their rage, and reaffirmed their own manhood, by impugning
the masculinity of their employers. The ‘‘Mechanic” sneered at ‘‘[t]he
employers and those who hang on their skirts.”””
In the midst of the upheavals of the antebellum economy, however,
it was not only employers who threatened the old artisan definitions of
manhood. Because an entire way of life was being undermined, the
dangers seemed to arise from everywhere in the new social order, in-
cluding from wage-earning women themselves. In fact, women seldom
directly imperiled men’s jobs. The young women who went to Lowell
were entering an essentially new industry. Moreover, in their families
and hired out on an individual basis, carding, spinning, fulling, and
even, to some extent, weaving had long been a part of women’s work.
Similarly, in the shoe and garment industries, where they comprised a
sizeable segment of the new outworkers, it is more accurate to describe
the women as performing traditional work in a new relationship than
as taking men’s positions. Women had long worked as seamstresses—
again, either for pay (hired out to an individual customer) or without
pay (in their own families). Prior to the coming of the central shop,
wives found time in between their other household duties to stitch the
shoes sold by their husband ‘‘shoemakers.”’
But if wage-earning women did not directly challenge men’s jobs,
their very presence in the new paid labor force may have underscored
the precariousness of men’s position as wage-earners. Particularly given
the post-Revolutionary emphasis on the importance of women’s re-
- maining in the home to cultivate the private virtues, females who were
visible as outworkers and operatives may have seemed to bespeak an
“unnaturalness”’ in society—an inability of wage-earning men to estab-
lish proper households. Like the witches of the seventeenth century,
wage-earning women became symbols of the threats posed to a particular
 The Pastoralization of Housework 155
concept of manhood—in this instance, a concept that identified male
claims to authority and power with the status of sole wage-earner. As
they grappled with the precariousness of their own positions, laboring-
class men focused their anxieties on the women who were their wives,
daughters, and sisters, as well as on the men who were their employers.
They expressed these anxieties in two forms. First, wage-earning men
complained that women were taking jobs, and thus the proper masculine
role, away from men. An 1836 report of the National Trades’ Union
charged that because women’s wages were so low, a woman’s “efforts
to sustain herself and family are actually the same as tying a stone around
the neck of her natural protector, Man, and destroying him with the
weight she has brought to his assistance.’’ Not uncommonly, working
men suggested that women did not really need to work for money and
castigated “‘the girl, or the woman, as the case may be, who being in a
condition to live comfortably at home by proper economy” selfishly
took work from the truly needy. In 1831, the Working Man’s Advocate
called upon “those females who...are not dependent on their labor
for a living” to withdraw from paid work so that men might have the
jobs.”°
At the same time, as we have seen, working men organized to call
for “‘the family wage,’’ a wage packet for the male ‘breadwinner’ high
enough to permit his wife and children to withdraw from paid work. As
Martha May has pointed out, the family wage ‘‘promised a means to
diminish capitalists’ control over family life, by allowing workingmen
to provide independently for their families.’”’ But the demand for the
family wage also signaled the gendering of the emerging class system,
and, in this, the gendering of early industrial culture. Identifying the
husband as the proper and “‘natural’’ wage-earner, the family-wage ideal
reinforced a distinctive male claim to the role of “breadwinner.” By
nature, women were ill-suited to wage-earning, many laboring-class men
insisted. The National Trades’ Union called attention to Woman’s
“physical organization” and “moral sensibilities” as evidence of her
unfitness for paid labor, and the anonymous “mechanic” focused on
‘‘the fragile character of a girl’s constitution, [and] her peculiar liability
to sickness.””’ Presumably, only men had the constitution for regular,
paid labor.

It is tempting to see in the antebellum ideology of spheres a simple

extension of the Puritan injunction to wives to be keepers at home and
faithful helpmates to men. Certainly the two sets of beliefs were related.
The colonists brought with them a conviction that men and women were
156 HOME AND WORK
socially different beings, so created by God and so designated in the
order of nature. Both were meant to labor, but they were meant to
labor at different tasks. Perhaps even more important, they were meant
to occupy quite different stations in social life and to exercise quite
different levels of control over economic life. Women contributed to
the household estate, but men were its owners. ‘“‘Labor’”’ may have been
a gender-neutral term in colonial culture, but “authority” and “‘prop-
erty’’ were masculine concepts, while ‘“‘dependence’’ and ‘“subordina-
tion” were clearly feminine conditions. Insofar as its gendered division
of labor was overlaid with a hierarchy of status, seventeenth-century
Euro-American culture provided the firm bedrock for the nineteenth-
century ideology of spheres—with its attendant convention, the pastor-
alization of housework.
The origins of the antebellum gender culture were as much in the
particular conditions of early industrialization as in the inherited past,
however. Moreover, although historians have tended to focus on
changes in women’s work in accounting for the declining social status
of housework, the specific character of the nineteenth-century gender
culture was dictated less by transformations in women’s experiences than
by transformations in men’s. To be sure, the principle of male dominance
persisted into the nineteenth-century. If anything, the economic devel-
opments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries served to
strengthen it. Social power in the antebellum Northeast rested increas-
ingly on the ability to command the instruments of production and to
accumulate and reinvest profits. From these activities wives were legally
barred, as they were from the formal political processes that established
the ground rules for the development of industrial capitalism. While
most men were also eliminated from the contest on other grounds (race,
class, and ethnicity, primarily), one had to be male to get into the
competition at all.
But if early industrialization preserved male dominance, it effectively
eroded the material basis for the specific form that male dominance had
assumed in the colonial period: patriarchy. Few men could ground their
claims to familial (and by extension, social) authority on their capacity
to provide the material foundation for the welfare of succeeding gen-
erations. This was perhaps most strikingly the case for working-class
men. With the demise of the artisan system, and so of a man’s hopes
to pass along a trade to his sons, the practical grounds on which a
laboring man might lay claim to the role of male head-of-household had
altered. Increasingly, it was less his position as future benefactor of the
next generation than his position as the provider of the present gener-
 The Pastoralization of Housework 157
ation (that is, the “breadwinner’’) that established a man’s familial
authority.
For men of the emerging middle class, the stakes were equally high
but somewhat different. Many of these were the sons and grandsons of
middling farmers, forebears who, while not wealthy, had established
their adulthood through the ownership of land, and whose role in the
family had centrally been that of the “father.”’ Their power residing in
their control of the inheritance left to the next generation, these were
men who might have been described with some degree of accuracy as
‘‘patriarchs.”” But by the second decade of the nineteenth century, mid-
dling farms throughout much of the Northeast were scarcely capable of
supporting the present generation; much less were they sizeable or fertile
enough to establish patriarchal control of the family. Simultaneously,
the emergence of an increasingly urban and industrial society rendered
the inheritance of land a less useful and less attractive investment in the
future for sons. Even successful businessmen and professionals expe-
rienced diminishing control over their sons’ economic futures. A son
might still read the law with his father, but new law schools, like medical
schools, foreshadowed the time when specialized education, rather than
on-the-job-training with his father or his father’s friends, would offer a
young man the best chance for success. As Mary Ryan has pointed out,
small businessmen, ‘‘struggling to keep their own firms solvent,’ found
it difficult ‘‘to put their progeny on a sound economic footing within the
middling sort.” Young men had to make their own way, Ryan empha-
sizes; at best, what a father was likely to be able to provide was not ‘‘a
stock of cash, tools, goods, or real estate,” but the “training acquired
at secondary schools or colleges’”””—training purchased by his father,
but acquired at someone else’s hand.
Early industrialization preserved the principle of male dominance,
then, but in a new form: the “husband” replaced the ‘“‘father.”” Men
claimed social authority—and indeed exercised economic control—not
because they owned the material resources upon which subsequent gen-
erations would be founded, but because they owned the resources upon
which the present generation subsisted. More important, they had es-
tablished hegemony over the definition of those resources. In the gender
culture of the antebellum Northeast, subsistence was purchased by
wages—and men were the wage-earners.
Early industrialization had simultaneously redefined the paradigm that
guided the social and economic position of women. If the paradigm of
manhood shifted from “father” to “husband,” the paradigm of wom-
anhood shifted from “goodwife” to ‘“‘mother’’—that is, from “‘worker”’
158 HOME AND WORK
to “nurturer.”” Certainly, the role of mother carried some forms of
cultural authority, but they were forms that derived from, and had
practical power only within the context of, a society structured on re-
lations of obligation and dependence. In a society in which power was
asserted competitively and tallied by cash profit and loss, those forms
seemed (and were) antiquated. Moreover, whatever cultural authority
women gained as ‘‘mothers” was at the direct cost of a social identity
in the terms that most counted in the nineteenth century—that is, as
workers. As Caroline Dall noted in 1860, most Americans cherished
“that old idea, that all men support all women... .”’’ Dall recognized
this to be ‘“‘an absurd fiction,” but it was a fiction with enormous social
consequences. Even when women did enter paid work, their preeminent
social identity as “‘mothers’’ (in distinct contrast to ‘“‘workers”) made
their status as producers in the economy suspect: the predisposition to
consider women “unfit” helped justify underpaying them.”
In all of this, the pastoralization of housework implicitly reinforced
both the social right and the power of husbands and capitalists to claim
the surplus value of women’s labor, both paid and unpaid. It accom-
plished this by rendering the economic dimension of the labor invisible,
thereby making pointless the very question of exploitation: one cannot
confiscate what does not exist. Since the ideology of spheres made the
noneconomic character of housework a simple “‘fact of nature,” few
observers in the antebellum Northeast felt compelled to argue the point.
The ideology of spheres did not affect all women the same way, of
course. Insisting that the domestic ideal was founded on the nature of
Woman (and not in the nature of society), prescriptive writers saw its
embodiments everywhere—from the poorest orphan on the streets, to
the mechanic’s daughter, to the merchant’s wife. But their models trans-
parently were meant to be the women of the emerging middle class. It
was, after all, in the middle classes that women had presumably been
freed from the necessity for labor that had characterized the colonial
helpmate; there, that mothers and wives had supposedly been enabled
to express their fullest capacities in the service of family formation.
Indeed, in the celebrations of middle-class ‘‘Motherhood”’ lay the fullest
embodiments of the marginalization of housewives as workers.
But if middle-class women were encased in the image of the nurturant
(and nonlaboring) mother, working-class women found that their visible
inability to replicate that model worked equally hard against them. As
historian Christine Stanseil has vividly demonstrated, the inability (or
unwillingness) of working-class women to remain in their homes—that
is, their need to go out into the streets, as vendors, washerwomen,
 The Pastoralization of Housework 159
prostitutes, or simply as neighbors helping a friend out—provided the
excuse for a growing middle-class intrusion into working-class house-
holds, as reformers claimed that women who could not (or did not wish
to) aspire to middle-class standards were poor mothers.”

In all of this, the ideology of spheres bespoke the presumed differences

between men and women—between ideal manhood and ideal woman-
hood. And yet, as the foregoing discussion may suggest, its construction
as a gender system accounts for only a part of its power in antebellum
America, and only a part of its lasting implications for American culture
and society. The language of the ideology of spheres was the language
of gender, but its essential dualism was less precisely the opposition of
“female” and “‘male”’ than it was the opposition of ‘“‘home’”’ and “work,”
an opposition founded on the gendering of the concept of labor.
In addition to its specific implications for women, the ideology of
spheres, and the pastoralization of housework that lay at the heart of
that ideology, both represented and supported larger cultural changes
attending the evolution of early industrial capitalism. The transition to
industrialization was not purely material: it was ideological as well,
involving and requiring new ways of viewing the relationship of labor
to its products and of the worker to his or her work. In its denial of the
economic value of one form of labor, the pastoralization of housework
signaled the growing devaluation of labor in general in industrial Amer-
ica. Artisans were discovering, and would continue to discover, what
housewives learned early in the nineteenth century: as the old skills were
debased and gradually replaced by new ones, workers’ social claims to
the fruits of their labor would be severely undercut. Increasingly pro-
ductivity was attributed, not to workers, but to those “‘most wonderful
machines.”"' It was in part against such a redefinition that the craft
workers of New York and the shoemakers of Lynn, Massachusetts,
struggled.”
The denial of the economic value of housework was also one aspect
of a tendency, originating much earlier but growing throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to draw ever-finer distinctions be-
tween the values of different categories of labor, and to elevate certain
forms of economic activity to a superior status on the grounds of the
income they produced. As with housework, these distinctions were
rarely founded on the actual material value of the labor in question.
Rather, they were based on contemporary levels of power and wealth,
and served to justify those existing conditions. An industrialist or
financier presumably deserved to earn very sizeable amounts of mon-
160 HOME AND WORK
ey, because in accumulating capital he had clearly contributed more
labor and labor of a more valuable kind to society than had, for exam-
ple, a drayman or a foundry worker. In her Conversations on Po-
litical Economy (written in England but widely used by colleges and
secondary schools in the United States after 1816), Jane Marcet offered
what was to become the standard formulation of this argument: civili-
zation originated in private property, and private property was the
result of individual industry. Poverty was a sign of indolence and sav-
agery; wealth symbolized the expenditure of labor toward the better-
ment of society.”
Finally, the ideology of spheres functioned to support the emergence
of the wage system necessary to the development of industrial capitalism.
The success of the wage system depends on a number of factors—among
them the perception of money as a neutral index of economic value and
the acceptance of the wage as representing a fair “livelihood.” The
devaluation of housework was part of a larger process of obscuring the
continuation of and necessity for barter-based exchanges in the Amer-
ican economy. In this, it veiled the reliance of the family on resources
other than those provided through paid labor and heightened the visi-
bility of the wage as the source of family maintenance.

But how did women respond to the growing devaluation of their con-
tributions as laborers in the family economy? As we have seen, in their
private letters and diaries, wives quietly offered their own definition of
what constituted the livelihood of their families, posing their own per-
ception of the importance of conservation and stewardship against the
cash-based index of the marketplace and easily integrating the family’s
periodic needs for extra cash into their understanding of their own
obligations.
Nevertheless, among the public voices affirming that Woman was
meant for a different sphere than Man, and that the employments of
Woman in the home were of a spiritual rather than an economic nature,
were the voices of many women. In Woman in America, for example,
Mrs. A. J. Graves declared: ‘‘[H]ome is [woman’s] appropriate sphere
of action; and . .. whenever she neglects these duties, or goes out of this
sphere ...she is deserting the station which God and nature have as-
signed to her.”” Underscoring the stark contrast between Woman’s duties
in the household and Man’s in “‘the busy and turbulent world,” Graves
described the refuge of the home in terms as solemn as any penned by
men during the antebellum period: ‘{OJur husbands and our sons...
will rejoice to return to its sanctuary of rest,” she averred, “there to
 The Pastoralization of Housework 161
refresh their wearied spirits, and renew their strength for the toils and
conflicts of life.”
Graves was not unusual in her endorsement of the ideology of spheres
and of the pastoralization of housework. Even the women who most
championed the continuing importance of women’s household labor
often couched that position in the language of spheres. No one more
graphically illustrates this combination than Catharine Beecher, at once
probably the most outspoken defender of the importance of women’s
domestic labor and one of the chief proponents of the ideology of female
domesticity. As we have seen, Beecher was clear and insistent that
housework was hard work, and she did not shrink from suggesting that
its demands and obligations were very similar to men’s “‘business.”’ In
her Treatise on Damestic Economy, Beecher went so far as to draw a
specific analogy between the marriage contract and the wage-labor
contract:

No woman is forced to obey any husband but the one she chooses for
herself; nor is she obliged to take a husband, if she prefers to remain
single. So every domestic, and every artisan or laborer, after passing from
parental control, can choose the employer to whom he is to accord obe-
dience, or, if he prefers to relinquish certain advantages, he can remain
without taking a subordinate place to any employer.

Nevertheless, Beecher regularly characterized women’s work in the

home as the occupation merely of administering ‘‘the gentler charities
of life,” a ‘“‘mission”’ chiefly of ‘‘self-denial” to “lay up treasures, not
on earth, but in heaven.”’ This employment she contrasted with the
“toils” of Man, to whom was “appointed the out-door labor—to till the
earth, dig the mines, toil in the foundries, traverse the ocean, transport
the merchandise, labor in manufactories, construct houses...and all
the heavy work....°’*
Beecher’s apparently self-defeating endorsement of a view that ulti-
mately discounted the value of women’s labor arose from many sources,
not the least of which was her own identification with the larger middle-
Class interests served by the ideology of spheres. Beecher enjoyed the
new standing afforded middle-class women by their roles as moral guard-
ians of their families and of society, and based much of her own claim
to status as a woman on the presumed differences between herself and
immigrant and laboring-class women. For example, she ended a lengthy
discussion of “‘the care of Servants” in The American Woman's
Home with the resigned conclusion that ‘‘({t]he mistresses of American
families, whether they like it or not, have the duties of missionaries
 162 HOME AND WORK
imposed upon them by that class from which our supply of domestic
servants is drawn.”
But, also like many women in antebellum America, Catharine
Beecher was sharply aware of the power difference between males and
females. It was a theme she constantly returned to in her writings,
especially in her discussions of women’s rights, where she warned again
and again that the movement for woman suffrage was “unsafe,” since
men....In her Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, Beecher was quite
explicit about the reasons why a ‘woman might cloak herself and her
opinions in the language of dependence and subordination:
[T]he moment woman begins to feel the promptings of ambition, or the
thirst for power, her aegis of defence is gone. All the sacred protection
of religion, all the generous promptings of chivalry, all the poetry of
romantic gallantry, depend upon woman's retaining her place as depen-
dent and defenceless, and making no claims. ...
It was much the same point that Elizabeth Ellet would later make in
her Practical Housekeeper: since men had many more alternatives than
women, the smart woman made it her “policy” to create an appearance
of domestic serenity.”
But it would be a mistake to read women’s endorsement of the pas-
toralization of housework purely as a protective strategy. Women were
not immune from the values of their communities, and many wives
appear to have shared the perception of the larger society that their
work had separated from the economic life of the community and that
it was, in fact, not really work at all.
Those misgivings were nowhere more evident than in the letter that
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote to her sister-in-law, Sarah Beecher, in
1850. It was the first opportunity Harriet had had to write since the
Stowes had moved to Brunswick, Maine, the spring before. Since her
arrival with the children, she explained, she had “‘made two sofas—or
lounges—a_ barrel chair—divers bedspreads—pillowcases—pillows—
bolsters—mattresses . . . painted rooms. . . [and] revarnished furniture.”
She had also laid a month-long seige at the landlord’s door, lobbying
him to install a new sink. Meanwhile, she had given birth to her eighth
child, made her way through the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and tried
to meet the obligations of her increasingly active career as an author—
all of this while also attending to the more mundane work of running a
household: dealing with tradespeople, cooking, and taking care of the
children. From delivery bed to delivery cart, downstairs to the kitchen,
upstairs to the baby, out to a neighbor’s, home to stir the stew, the
 The Pastoralization of Housework 163
image of Stowe flies through these pages like the specter of the sorcerer’s
apprentice.
Halfway through the letter, Stowe paused. ‘“‘And yet,’ she confided
to her sister-in-law, “I am constantly pursued and haunted by the idea
that I don’t do anything.’’” It is a jarring note in a letter—and a life—
so shaped by the demands of housework. That a skilled and loving
mother could impart dignity and a sense of humane purpose to a family
otherwise vulnerable to the degradations of the marketplace, Stowe had
no doubt. But was that really ‘work’? She was less certain. In that
uncertainty, to borrow Daniel Eddy’s words, lay ‘‘a world of domestic
meaning’ ’—for housewives of the antebellum era, and for women since.
 | NOTES

Introduction

1. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, ‘Industrial Reconstruction,’’ The Woman’s

Advocate 1/1 (January 1869): 41-42. I thank Lori D. Ginzberg for bringing this
article to my attention.
2. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Jocelyn Gage,
eds., History of Woman Suffrage (New York: Arno and The New York Times,
1969; orig. pub. New York: Fowler and Wells, 1881) 1:70, 105, and 233.
3. Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist
Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, Mass.;
MIT Press, 1981), p. 1.
4. The character of the ‘“‘cult of domesticity,” coined by Aileen Kraditor
(Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism
[Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968], p. 10), has been well documented by recent
women’s historians. The classic descriptions are: Barbara Welter, “The Cult of
True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151-
75; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds
of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of
Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century Amer-
ica (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Carl N. Degler, At
Odds: Women and the Family from the Revolution to the Present (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980); and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class:
164
 Notes 165
The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1981). A recent study that argues that the ‘‘cult of domesticity”
was the source of enormously increased power and influence for women is
Glenna Matthews’ “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
5. Juliet Mitchell, ““Women: The Longest Revolution,” New Left Review 40
(November-December, 1966); Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The
Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol, England: Falling
Wall Press, 1973); Margaret Benston, ‘“‘The Political Economy of Women’s
Liberation,” Monthly Review (September 1969): 13-27.
6. Wally Seccombe, “The Housewife and Her Labour Under Capitalism,”
New Left Review 83 (January—February 1974): 3-24; see esp. pp. 8-13.
7. Margaret Coulson, Branka Magas, and Hilary Wainwright, ‘* ‘The House-
wife and Her Labour Under Capitalism’—A Critique,” New Left Review 89
(January—February 1975): 59-72; Jean Gardiner, ‘‘Women’s Domestic Labour,”
New Left Review 89 (January-February 1975): 47-58. Quotations from Gardiner
are from p. 5I.
8. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’
of Sex,” in Rayna R. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 162 (note) and 164.
9. M. Z. Rosaldo, “The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on
Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding,” Signs 5 (Spring 1980): 399; 400;
n. 20, p. 402. Italics added.
10. Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Sphere, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place:
The Rhetoric of Women’s History.” Journal of American History 75/1 (June
1988): 9-39.
11. Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-
Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983); Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in
Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982); Joan
M. Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850 (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986).
12. Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1982); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother:
The lronies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave
(New York: Basic Books, 1983); Annegret S. Ogden, The Great American
Housewife: From Helpmate to Wage Earner, 1776-1986 (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1986); Matthews, “Just a Housewife.”
13. Cowan, More Work for Mother, pp. 4 and 7.
14. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977),
1:162, 164-65, 196, 197.
15. See, for example, Peggy Reeves Sanday, Female Power and Male Dom-
inance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1981).
16. As noted by Zulma Recchini de Lattes and Catalina H. Wainerman, this
166 Notes
point is forcefully illustrated in the categories recommended for labor-force
analysis by both the Inter-American Statistical Institute and the United Nations
Statistical Commission. Based on the model of “‘the activity of males in devel-
oped economies without crisis,’’ the categories undercount the extent of women’s
economic participation in Latin America and the Caribbean by 12 to 52 percent,
according to the authors. See “Unreliable Account of Women’s Work: Evidence
from Latin American Census Statistics,”’ Signs 11/4 (Summer 1986): 740-S0.
17. Judith K. Brown, “Iroquois Women: An Ethnohistoric Note,” and Pa-
tricia Draper, ‘“iKung Women: Contrasts in Sexual Egalitarianism in Foraging
and Sedentary Contexts,” in Reiter, Toward an Anthropology of Women,
pp. 77-109 and 235—Sl. See also Karen Anderson, “Commodity Exchange and
Subordination: Montagnais-Naskapi and Huron Women, 1600-1650,” Signs 11/
1 (Autumn 1985): 48-62. Anderson argues that Huron women were better able
to resist male domination than were the Algonkian Mantagnais-Naskapi, not
because of the nature of their work, but because of the extent of their access
to the means of livelihood: “{a]Jmong the Huron... kin-based social relations
of production continued to guarantee women, as well as men, the right of
unmediated access to the necessities of life” (p. 62).
For a synthesis of the anthropological literature on women’s work in prein-
dustrial societies, see Martin King Whyte, The Status of Women in Pre-Industrial
Societies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).
18. Heidi I. Hartmann, “Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Job Segregation by
Sex,” Signs 1/3 (Spring 1976): 137-70. See also idem, ‘“The Family as the Locus
of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework,’’ Signs
6 (Spring 1981): 366-94. Several review essays have provided overviews of the
recent historical treatments of the subject. See especially Martha C. Howell,
‘Marriage, Property, and Patriarchy: Recent Contributions to the Literature,”
Feminist Studies 13/1 (Spring 1987): 203-24; and Marjorie Murphy, “Work,
Protest, and Culture: New York on Working Women’s History,” Feminist Stud-
ies 13/3 (Fall 1987): 657-67.

Notes to Chapter I

1. Ann D. Gordon and Mari Jo Buhle, “Sex and Class in Colonial and
Nineteenth-Century America,” in Berenice A. Carroll, ed., Liberating Women's
History: Theoretical and Critical Essays (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1976), p. 279. The thesis that the colonial period represented a more equitable
environment for women was developed by Elisabeth A. Dexter as early as 1924,
in her Colonial Women of Affairs: Women in Business and the Professions in
Colonial America Before 1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin). The influence of
this interpretation on the new field of women’s history in the late 1960s and
1970s is visible in such works as: Gerda Lerner, ‘“The Lady and the Mill Girl:
Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson,” Midcontinent American
 Notes 167
Studies Journal X (Spring 1969): 5-15; Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America:
From Colonial Times to the Present (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975); and
Joan Hoff Wilson, ‘‘The Illusion of Change: Women and the American Rev-
olution,” in Alfred F. Young, ed., The American Revolution: Explorations in
the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press,
1976): 383-445.
2. The depiction of colonial farms as largely self-sufficient and non—market-
oriented extends as far back as Percy W. Bidwell and Frank I. Falconer’s History
of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1680-1860 (Washington, D.C.:
1925). More recently, the extent of market involvement by eighteenth-century
New Englanders has become the stuff of lively debate among historians. For
interesting contributions to that discussion, see: Richard L. Bushman, From
Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), especially pp. 107-43; James Henretta,
“Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,” William and Mary
Quarterly, 3rd ser., 35 (January 1978): 3-32; idem, The Evolution of American
Society, 1700-1815: An Interdisciplinary Analysis (Lexington, Mass.: D. C.
Heath, 1973), especially pp. 95-107; Robert E. Mutch, “Colonial America and
the Debate about the Transition to Capitalism,” Theory and Society 9 (1980):
847-63; Michael Merrill, ““Cash Is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange
in the Rural Economy of the United States,’’ Radical History Review (Winter
1977), 42-71; Christopher Clark, ‘““The Household Mode of Production—A
Comment,” Radical History Review (Fall 1978), 166-71; Winifred Rothenberg,
“The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750-1855,” Journal of Economic
History 6 (1981): 283-313; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians,
Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983);
and Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, ‘‘Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of
Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 41
(1984): 333-64.
3. Mary Beth Norton, “‘The Myth of the Golden Age,” in Carol Ruth Berkin
and Mary Beth Norton, Women of America: A History (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1979), p. 42; and Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revo-
lutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston: Little, Brown,
1980), p. 38.
4. Ulnch, Good Wives, pp. 33-34.
5. William Secker, A Wedding ring for the finger. ... Directions to those men
who want wives, how to choose them (Boston: Samuel Green, 1690), n.p.;
“Church Trial of Mistress Ann Hibbens,” in Nancy F. Cott, ed., Root of Bit-
terness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (New York: E. P.
Dutton, 1972), p. 5S.
6. For general studies of the society and culture of colonial New York, see
Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New
York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971); and Michael G. Kammen,
Colonial New York: A History (New York: Scribner’s, 1975). Useful discussions
of the economic status of women (especially widows) in colonial New York
 168 Notes
include Christine H. Tompsett, ‘‘A Note on the Economic Status of Widows in
Colonial New York,” New York History 55 (1974): 319-32; and David Narrett,
‘Preparation for Death and Provision for the Living: Notes on New York Wills
(1665-1760), New York History 52 (1976): 417-37.
7. John Winthrop, The History of New England, Vol. 2., ed. James Savage
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1853), p. 216.
8. Samuel Willard, A Compleat Body of Divinity (Boston, 1726).
9. Alexander Niccoles, Discourse on Marriage and Wiving (London, 1615).
10. Proverbs 31:30; John Cotton, A Meet Help. Or, a Wedding Sermon,
Preached at New-Castle in New-England, June 19, 1694 (Boston: B. Green and
J. Allen, 1699), p. 14; A Marriage Prayer (London, 1637); Mary Boutwell,
Essex Record, 1640, as quoted in Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, and Susan
Reverby, eds., America’s Working Women: A Documentary History—1600 to
the Present (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 21. For my interpretation of
Cotton's sermon, I am indebted to Carol F. Karlsen.
11. Bartlett Burleigh James and J. Franklin Jameson, eds., Journal of Jasper
Danckaerts, 1679-1680 (New York: Scribner's, 1913), pp. 47, 54, and 215; ad-
vertisement for ‘“Tambour Work,” The New York Gazette and the Weekly Mer-
cury, March 7, 1774, as quoted in The Arts and Crafts in New York, 1726-1776:
Advertisements and News Items from New York City Newspapers, Vol. 69 (New
York Historical Society Collections, 1939), p. 280.
12. Francis Higginson, ‘‘New England’s Plantation” (London, 1630), in Alex-
ander Young, ed., Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts
Bay (Boston, 1846), pp. 266-67; Order of Fall, 1639, Sudbury Town Book,
Office of the Town Clerk, Sudbury, Massachusetts.
13. George Abbott, will, December 21, 1681, Probate Records of Essex
County, as quoted in Philip J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land,
and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1970), n. 12, pp. 82-83; William Brigham, The Compact with the
Charter and Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth (Boston: Dutton and Went-
worth, 1836), p. 281.
14. David Pulsifer, ed., Deeds, &c., 1620-1651, Vol. 12 of Records of the
Colony of New Plymouth, in New England, ed. Nathaniel B. Shurtleff and David
Pulsifer (Boston: Press of William White, 1855-1861), May 22, 1627, pp. 9-13;
Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Mas-
sachusetts Bay in New England (Boston: Press of William White, 1853), Sep-
tember 28, 1630, 1:76—77.
15. Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, May 14, 1645, 2:116—17.
| 16. Ibid., November 4, 1646, 2:180.
17. Bernard Bailyn, ed., The Apologia of Robert Keayne: The Self-Portrait
of a Puritan Merchant (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), pp. 5 and 79.
18. Alexander Keyssar, ‘“Widowhood in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts:
A Problem in the History of the Family,” Perspectives in American History 8
(1974): 83-119; Cotton Mather, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion. Or The
Character and Happiness of a Virtuous Woman (Boston: S. G[reen] and B.
 Notes 169
G[reen], 1692), p. 8; Thomas Foxcroft, The Character of Anna. ... Ina Sermon
Preach'd after the Funeral of ... Dame Bridget Usher .. . (Boston: S. Kneeland,
1723), p. 5S.
Discussions of widowhood are also found in: Cotton Mather, Maternal Con-
solations. An Essay... on the Death of Mrs. Maria Mather . . . (Boston: T. Fleet,
1714), especially p. 9; Increase Mather, Two Discourses. . . (Boston: B. Green,
1716), especially pp. 100-101; idem, ‘“‘Preface”’ to Cotton Mather, Marah Spo-
ken to. A Brief Essay to do good unto the Widow... (Boston: S. Kneeland,
1718), especially pp. i-iv.
19. Benjamin Colman, The Duty and Honour of Aged Women. A Sermon
on the Death of Madam Abigail Foster (Boston: B. Green, 1711), p. ii; I. Mather,
“Preface,” p. iv; Thomas Foxcroft, A Sermon Preach'd at Cambridge, After the
Funeral of Mrs. Elizabeth Foxcroft... (Boston: B. Green, 1721), p. 7.
20. George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, Advice to a Daughter (London: n.p.,
1688); Norton, Liberty's Daughters, p. 113.
21. Nicholas Noyes, a poem for Mrs. Mary Brown in Cotton E. Mather,
Eureka. Or a Vertuous Woman Found: An Essay on the Death of Mrs. Mary
Brown (Boston: n.p., 1703), p. 3.
22. ““A-La-Mode, for the Year 1756,” Boston Evening Post, supplement,
March 8, 1756; untitled poem, Boston Gazette, February 9, 1748; “By the
Ranger,”’ Boston Evening Post, October 16, 1758.
23. New York Mercury, October 16, 1758, as quoted in Arts and Crafts
in New York, pp. 276-77; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in
New York, 1789-1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986); see especially pp.
19-30.
24. For additional discussion of the ‘‘notable housewife,”’ see Norton, Lib-
erty's Daughters, pp. 4-5 and 38-39.
25. Shurtleff, Records, October 1, 1633, 1:109; October 7, 1640, 1:304.
26. This discussion is based on: Cowan, More Work for Mother; John Deetz,
In Small Things Forgotten: The Archeology of Early American Life (Garden
City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1977); and Alice Morse Earle, Colonial Dames and
Goodwives (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1895); Joan M. Jensen, “Cloth,
Butter and Boarders: Women’s Household Production for the Market,” Review
of Radical Political Economics 12 (Summer 1980): 14—24; idem, Loosening the
Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 1986); Norton, Liberty’s Daughters; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, ‘‘ ‘A
Friendly Neighbor’: Social Dimensions of Daily Work in Northern Colonial
New England,” Feminist Studies 6 (Summer 1980): 392-405; and idem, Good
Wives.
27. Henry M. Burt, ed., The First Century of the History of Springfield: The
Official Records from 1636 to 1736 (Springfield, Mass.: H. M. Burt, 1898),
January 10, 1644, 1:176-77.
28. Samuel G. Drake, ed., Annals of Witchcraft in New England and Else-
where in the United States, from their First Settlement (Boston: W. E. Woodward,
1864), p. 229; Alice Apsley is cited in Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: “The
170 Notes
Weaker Sex” in Seventeenth-Century New England (Urbana: The University of
Illinois Press, 1980), p. 115.
29. The Diary of Mary Cooper: Life on a Long Island Farm, 1768-1773, ed.
Field Horne (Oyster Bay, N. Y.: Oyster Bay Historical Society, 1981), July 13,
1769, p. 15.
30. Ibid.: March 7, 1769, p. 9; December 24, 1768, p. 5.
31. Ibid.: July 3, 1772, p. 34; October 5, 1772, p. 41; Apnil 14, 1773, p. 56;
October 11-13, 1768, p. 1; July 20—21, 24—25, and 28, 1769, pp. 15-16; August
20, 1772, p. 38; October 16, 1772, p. 42; November 2, 1772, p. 43; November
23, 1768, p. 4; June 2, 1769, p. 13; July 6, 1769, p. 15; December 2, 1769, p. 24;
December 16, 1772, p. 46; November 6, 1772, p. 43; November 15, 1769, p. 23;
November 16, 1769, p. 23; December 12, 1769, p. 25; May 1 and 4, 1771, pp.
31-32.
32. Ibid.: October 11 and 14, 1768, p. 1; February 3, 1769, p. 7; September
25, 1769, p. 19; August 20, 1772, p. 38; August 3, 1772, p. 35; August 22, 1772,
p. 38; October 3, 1768, p. 1; March 20, 1769, p. 10; November 18, 1768, p. 3;
October 24, 1768, p. 2.
33. Ibid.: August 4, 1772, p. 37; September 1, 1772, p. 39; August 15, 1772,
p. 37; August 5, 1772, p. 64; October 16, 1772, p. 42.
34. Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New Ha-
ven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964), p. 145.
35. Ulrich, Good Wives, p. 75.
36. Carol F. Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker, eds., The Journal of Esther
Edwards Burr, 1754-1757 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984),
pp. 100, 127, and 165.
37. Ibid., pp. 51, 74, and 170.
38. Ibid., pp. 57, 93, and 155.
39. Ulrich, “* ‘Friendly Neighbor,’ ’’ pp. 395-98. In her larger study, Ulrich
speculates from the number of beds present in the household that the Grafton
family of late~seventeenth-century Salem included both boarders and servants.
Joseph Grafton was a young mariner. See idem, Good Wives, p. 25.
40. Karlsen and Crumpacker, Esther Burr, p. 155.
41. Willard, Compleat Body of Divinity, p. 610. For useful discussions of this
early view of ‘“‘“economy” and of its subsequent changes, see Bushman, From
Puritan to Yankee, pp. 135-43; and J. E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self: The Con-
ceptualization of Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century America (Baltimore,
Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), passim.
42. See Herbert Moller, “Sex Composition and Correlated Cultural Patterns
in Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 2 (1945): 113-53.
43. Cotton Mather, Family Religion Urged (Boston: n.p., 1709), p. 1; Thomas
Cobbett, A Fruitfull and Usefull Discourse touching the Honour due from Chil-
dren to Parents and the Duty of Parents towards their Children (London: n.p.,
1654), n.p.; William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Harvey Wish (New
York: Capricorn Books, 1962), p. 90.
 Notes 171
44. Shurtleff, Massachusetts Records, June 14, 1642, 2:6—7; Ulrich, ‘“‘ ‘Friend-
ly Neighbor,’ ” pp. 402-3.
45. These similarities are also noted by Cowan in her discussion of prein-
dustrial housework. See More Work for Mother, pp. 24-25.
46. Henretta, Evolution of American Society, p. 9; Rowland Berthoff, An
Unsettled People: Social Order and Disorder in American History (New York:
Harper and Row, 1971), p. 34.
47. Douglas Lamar Jones, ‘The Strolling Poor: Transiency in Eighteenth-
Century Massachusetts,”’ Journal of Social History (Spring 1975), 32-33; Hen-

22 (1965): 87.
retta, Evolution of American Society, p. 96; idem, ‘“‘Economic Development
and Social Structure in Colonial Boston,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser..,

48. Linda Auwers Bissell, “Family, Friends, and Neighbors: Social Interac-
tion in Seventeenth-Century Windsor, Connecticut” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis Uni-
versity, 1973), p. 33; Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town, The First
Hundred Years: Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636—1736 (New York: W. W. Norton,
1970), p. 149; Jones, “Strolling Poor,”’ pp. 32-33; Jackson Turner Main, The
Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1965), pp. 7-43.
49. Christopher M. Jedrey, The World of John Cleaveland: Family and Com-
munity in Eighteenth-Century New England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979),
p. 63; Lockridge, New England Town, pp. 10 and 71.
50. Greven, Four Generations, pp. 57-62; William B. Scott, In the Pursuit
of Happiness: American Conceptions of Property from the Seventeenth to the
Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), pp. 15-17.
51. See note 2 of this chapter.
52. Boston Evening Post, p. 4. On Northampton, see Patricia J. Tracy, Jon-
athan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth-Century Northampton
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), p. 97. On Kent, see Bushman, From Puritan
to Yankee, pp. 74-76. See also Berthoff, Unsettled People, p. 74; and Henretta,
Evolution of American Society, p. 103.
53. Benjamin Franklin, ““The Way to Wealth,” in The Works of Benja-
min Franklin, ed. Jared Sparks (Boston: Hilliard, Gray, 1840) 2:96; Tracy, Jona-
than Edwards, p. 102; Colonial Currency Reprints, 1682-1751, ed. Andrew
McFarland Davis (Boston: 1910-1911) 2:325; Greven, Four Generations, p.
154.
In addition to larger urban areas, these eighteenth-century shifts have
been documented for smaller communities such as Dedham, Chebacco, And-
over, and Northampton, Massachusetts; and Kent, Windsor, and Norwich, Con-
necticut. See, respectively: Lockridge, New England Town, pp. 145-46;
Jedrey, World of John Cleaveland, pp. 65-68; Greven, Four Generations, pp.
243-53; Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, pp. 40-42, 92, and 97; Henretta, Evolution
of American Society, p. 103; and Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee,
p. 123.
172 Notes
54. The Journal of Madame Knight (Boston: David R. Godine, 1972), pp. 40-
41; Main, Social Structure of Revolutionary America, pp. 134, 136, and 145—
the quotation is from p. 145; Arthur Nussbaum, A History of the Dollar (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1957), pp. 19-20; Richard Hofstadter,
America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971),
p. 140.
55. Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century
(New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 187; Edmund S. Morgan and Helen
M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (New York: Collier
Books, 1962), p. 48.
56. Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in
Colonial New England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), see especially Chap-
ters III and VI; Keyssar, ““Widowhood,” pp. 101-11; Tracy, Jonathan Edwards,
p. 103. Although the evidence has not been examined from precisely this point
of view, John Demos’ study of Plymouth and Philip Greven’s study of Andover
suggest that parallel developments may well have occurred in those communities.
See Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New
York: Oxford, 1970), pp. 75, 99, and 177-178; and Greven, Four Generations,
pp. 90, 137, 143, 145-46, and 152-53.
57. Karlsen, Devil in the Shape of a Woman, pp. 153-81; Mather, Ornaments,
pp. 103-4.
58. In Andover, Massachusetts, for example, the average age at first marriage
for men rose from 26.7 in the late seventeenth century to 27.1 throughout the
first half of the eighteenth century; the corresponding rise for women was from
22.3 to 24.5 (Greven, Four Generations, pp. 33-36, 118-22); Colman, Duty and
Honour of Aged Women, p. 6.
59. Ulrich, “ ‘Friendly Neighbor,’ *’ pp. 394—95; Mather, Ornaments, pp. 42
and 85.
60. Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village, The Formation of a New Eng-
land Town (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1963), p. 161.
61. In Boston the rate of warnings-out tripled between 1745 and 1759 and
doubled again in the next decade; in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, the
proportion of households warned out increased by 75 percent between 1739 and
1754 and by another 250 percent by 1764. See Alan Kulikoff, ‘‘The Progress of
Inequality in Revolutionary Boston,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 28
(1971): 400; and Jones, ‘Strolling Poor,”’ p. 33.
62. Quoted in Koehler, Search for Power, p. 137.
63. Quoted in Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, including the Early History
of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst and Granby, Massachusetts (Springfield,
Mass.: H. R. Huntting and Company, 1905), p. 75; Jared Eliot, Essays upon
Field Husbandry in New England and Other Papers, 1748-1762, ed. Harry J.
Carman, Rexford G. Tugwell, and Rodney H. True (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1942), p. 187.
64. Crowley, This Sheba, Self, p.65; Cotton, A Meet Help, p. 21.
 Notes 173
Notes to Chapter II

1. Boston Evening Post, July 3 and September 21, 1769.

2. American State Papers, 1789-1815, Vol. 2: Finance (Washington, D.C.:
Gale and Seaton, 1832) Part 1, pp. 10—11.
3. On the nature of particular shortages, see Henretta, Evolution of Amer-
ican Society, p. 159. Quotations are from Victor S. Clark, History of Manufac-
tures in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1929) 1:200
and 212; and Tench Coxe, A View of the United States of America (London: J.
Johnson, 1795; orig. pub. Philadelphia, 1794), pp. 167-68.
4. Mary Beth Norton, “Eighteenth-Century American Women in Peace and
War: The Case of the Loyalists,”” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33 (July
1976): 386-409. The quotation is from p. 387. Elsewhere, Norton has argued
that an important dynamic in the new recognition accorded women as economic
agents during the Revolution was wives’ gradual movement into (and developing
competence in) occupations vacated by their soldier-husbands, particularly farm-
ing and shopkeeping. For that view, see Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, especially
pp. 214-24.
5. See, for example, the attack on a Boston merchant by patriot women as
recounted in Abigail Adams’ letter to John Adams, July 31, 1777, in L. H.
Butterfield, Marc Friedlander, and Mary-Jo Kline, eds., The Book of Abigail
and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1975), pp. 184-85.
6. Minutes of the Town Meeting, July 21, 1780, in Francis Olcott Allen,
ed., The History of Enfield, Connecticut (Lancaster, Pa.: The Wickersham Print-
ing Company, 1900) 1:457-58.
7. Minutes of the Committee and of the First Commission for Detecting and
Defeating Conspiracies in the State of New York, as cited in Linda K. Kerber,
Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 43—44. See also Norton,
Liberty’s Daughters, pp. 157-61.
8. Kerber, Women of the Republic, pp. 42-43.
9. Henretta, Evolution of American Society, p. 160; Abigail Adams to John
Adams, June 23, 1777, in Butterfield, et al., Book of Abigail and John, p. 177;
Rolla Milton Tryon, Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640-1860:
A Study.in Industrial History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917),
p. 114, n. 5.
10. John Adams to Abigail Adams, August 28, 1774, in Butterfield et al.,
Book of Abigail and John, p. 69; Providence Gazette, November 7, 1767, quoted
in Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, p. 166.
11. In New Jersey, the exception, unmarried women worth fifty pounds were
initially permitted to vote. This oversight in the law was rectified in
1807.
12. For a detailed discussion of these local trading networks, see Christopher
174 Notes
Clark, ““The Household Economy, Market Exchange and the Rise of Capitalism
in the Connecticut Valley, 1800-1816,” Journal of Social History 13 (Winter
1979): 169-90.
13. Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-
1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), pp. 20-51. For examples of the pro-
liferation of local manufactories, see Arthur Harrison Cole, ed., /ndustrial and
Commercial Correspondence of Alexander Hamilton, Anticipating His Report
on Manufactures (Chicago: A. W. Shaw, 1928), passim; and The Diary of Wil-
liam Bentley (Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute, 1905), especially Vol. 1. The quo-
tation is from Coxe, View of the United States, p. 260.
14. S. G. Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetime, or Things | Have Seen: Ina
Series of Familiar Letters to a Friend (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan,
1857) 1:64, 71-72, 74; Douglas S. Robertson, ed., An Englishman in America,
1785: Being the Diary of Joseph Hadfield (Toronto: Hunter-Rose, 1933), p. 200;
Abigail Lyman, note dated August 31, 1801, entered in The Ladies’ Remem-
brancer,; or, Polite Journal, for the Year 1800 (London: W. Wilson, 1799);
Greene-Roelker Papers, Cincinnati, Ohio Historical Society; ‘‘Diary of Martha
Moore Ballad, 1785-1812,” in Charles Elventon Nash, ed., The History of
Augusta [Maine] (Augusta: Charles Nash and Sons, 1904), entry for May 21,
1787; Mary Ann Archbald to ‘““The Revd Doctor Wodrow,” April 19, 1808, the
journals and diary of Mary Ann Archbald, Archbald Papers, Schlesinger Li-
brary, Radcliffe College (hereafter, Archbald Papers).
Abigail Brackett Lyman’s notes are reprinted in Helen Roelker Kessler, ‘“The
Worlds of Abigail Brackett Lyman,” (M.A. thesis, Tufts University, 1976),
Appendix C. I am indebted to Laurie Crumpacker for bringing Abigail Brackett
Lyman’s journals to my attention.
1S. Henry A. Hazen, History of Billerica, Mass[achusetts] (Boston: A. Wil-
liams, 1883), p. 274; J. P. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States
of America (London: J. S. Jordan, 1792) 1:127. For a discussion of the pro-
portion of landless men in the late eighteenth century, see Henretta, Evolution
of American Society, p. 164.
16. Abigail Brackett Lyman to Mrs. [Abigail Pond] Brackett, October 11,
1797, reprinted in Kessler, ““Worlds of Abigail Brackett Lyman,” Appendix B;
Diary of William Bentley 2:293.
17. See, for example, Brissot, New Travels 1:282—83; Benjamin Rush to Gran-
ville Sharp, August 1791, in L. H. Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 608; Ezra Stiles Ely,
Visits of Mercy, 6th ed. (Philadelphia: S. F. Bradford, 1829), pp. 154 and 168-
69; Henry Bradshaw Fearon, Sketches of America: A Narrative of a Journey of
Five Thousand Miles through the Eastern and Western States of America (Lon-
don: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818), p. 34; Thomas F. DeVoe,
The Market Book, containing a Historical Account of the Public Markets in the
Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Brooklyn (New York: Burt Frank-
lin, 1969; orig. pub. 1862), pp. 203-4, 229-30, 325, 347, and 391. Quotations
are from Brissot, New Travels 1:105; and DeVoe, Market Book, p. 344.
 Notes 175
18. DeVoe, Market Book, pp. 217 and 331-32; J. Hector St. John Creve-
coeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904; orig-
inally published 1782), p. 209; Charles William Janson, The Stranger in America,
1793-1806 (New York: Press of the Pioneers, 1935; reprinted from the 1807
London edition), pp. 21 and 44; John M. Duncan, Travels through Part of The
United States and Canada in 1818 and 1819 (New York: W. B. Gilley, 1823),
pp. 242-43. The quotation is from DeVoe, Market Book, p. 219.
19. Diary of Anna Bryant Smith, January 23, 1807, as quoted in Cott, Bonds
of Womanhood, p. 42; DeVoe, Market Book, p. 345; Tryon, Household Man-
ufactures, p. 201.
20. See, for example, Tryon, Household Manufactures, pp. 188-241; Judd,
History of Hadley, pp. 344-87; Richard Osborn Cummings, The American and
His Food: A History of Food Habits in the United States (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1941), p. 25; Frederick Tupper and Helen Tyler Brown, eds.,
Grandmother Tyler’s Book: The Recollections of Mary Palmer Tyler, 1775-1866
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925), pp. 141-44; DeVoe, Market Book,
pp. 150, 249; ‘“‘Diary of Martha Moore Ballard,” p. 350.
21. Mary Ann Archbald to Miss Wodrow, March 13, 1815, journals and diary
of Mary Ann Archbald, 1762-1840, Archbald Papers; Brissot, New Travels,
1:134.
22. ‘‘Diary of Martha Moore Ballard,” pp. 244 and 248.
23. Ibid., pp. 274, 296, 322; 416; 317, 306, 347, and 374-75.
24. Ibid., p. 349.
25. Ibid., p. 349. For a detailed accounting of cash receipts and expenses for
the single year in 1796, see p. 359.
26. Ibid. For examples of these activities, see pp. 238, 247, 251, 254, 256,
279, 296, 326, 339, 341, 346, 348, 374, 390, 397, and 417.
27. Ibid. For examples of these activities, see pp. 271, 303-4, 314, 318, 344,
346, 355, 363, 377, and 392-93.
28. Mary Ann Archbald to Mr. Summervill, 1808, and Mary Ann Archbald
to ‘“‘My Dear Margaret,” June 20, 1809, journals and diary of Mary Ann Arch-
bald, 1762-1840, Archbald Papers; *“‘Diary of Elizabeth Fuller,” in Francis Ev-
erett Blake, History of the Town of Princeton [Massachusetts] (Princeton, Mass.:
Published by the Town, 1915): see, pp. 303-22, et passim.
For examples and discussions of these various processes and products, see
Tryon, Household Manufactures, pp. 188-241; Helen M. Morgan, ed., A Season
in New York, 1801: Letters of Harriet and Maria Trumbull (Pittsburgh, Pa.:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969), pp. 78-79 and 96; Goodrich, Recollections
of a Lifetime 1:71—75, Butterfield, Letters of Benjamin Rush, pp. 591-92; Bessie;
or, Reminiscences of a Daughter of a New England Clergyman of the Eighteenth
‘Century, by a Grandmother (New Haven, Conn.: J. H. Benham, 1861), pp. 35,
112-15, and 150; Cole, Correspondence of Alexander Hamilton, especially pp.
1-52.
29. Mary Ann Archbald to ““My Dear Margaret,” June 20, 1809, journals
and diary of Mary Ann Archbald, 1762-1840, Archbald Papers; Letters from
176 Notes
John Pintard to his Daughter Eliza, 1816-1833 (New York: New York Historical
Society, 1940) 1:212.
30. Raymond A. Mohl, Poverty in New York City, 1783-1825 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 24; Bessie, pp. 35, 87-88, 93, 107-9. The
quotation is from “Diary of Martha Moore Ballard,” p. 393.
31. Journal of Abigail Brackett Lyman, February 3 and 18, 1800; Abigail
Brackett Lyman to Erastus Lyman, May 29, 1797; Abigail Brackett Lyman to
Mrs. (Abigail Pond] Brackett, May 22, 1799, all reprinted in Kessler, ‘““Worlds
of Abigail Brackett Lyman,” Appendices A and B; Letters from John Pintard
1:162, 188, 215, 230, 247—48, 252-53, 288, and 301-2.
32. Mary Ann Archbald to ‘“‘My Dear Margaret,” January 13, 1822, journals
and diary of Mary Ann Archbald, 1762-1840, Archbald Papers; Bessie, p. 100;
“Diary of Martha Moore Ballard,”’ pp. 251, 304, and 370; Letters from John
Pintard 1:226, 242, 300-301, and 329; Mary Ann Archbald to ““My Dear M,”
January 1, 1821, journals and diary of Mary Ann Archbald, 1762—1840, Archbald
Papers.
33. “Diary of Martha Moore Ballard,”’ pp. 319, 329, 363, 367, 370, and
374-75.
34. New York Magazine, May 1795, pp. 301-S.
35. Brissot, New Travels 1:95; Mary Ann Archbald to ““My Dear M,” January
1, 1821, journals and diary of Mary Ann Archbald, 1762-1840, Archbald Papers;
Ruth H. Bloch, ‘“‘American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral
Mother, 1785-1815,” Feminist Studies 4 (June 1978): 101-27.
For additional discussion of the ideology of republican motherhood, see Ker-
ber, Women of the Republic, pp. 189-288 (especially pp. 269-88) and Norton,
Liberty’s Daughters, pp. 228-99.
36. Lisa Norling, “‘ ‘I Have Ever Felt Homeless’: Mariners’ Wives and the
Ideology of Domesticity,” paper presented at the Society of the History of the
Early American Republic, July 17, 1987, p. S.
37. Mary Lynn Salmon has argued that women experienced significant im-
provements in their rights to own property in the post-Revolutionary period.
See Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 189-93. For an earlier, contrast-
ing view, see Wilson, “Illusion of Change,” pp. 383—445.
38. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). The importance of
eighteenth-century “republican” thought in the political and cultural formation
of the early republic has been the subject of a rich secondary literature. In
addition to Wood, the most useful of these works include: J.G.A. Pocock,
“Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth
Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 22 (1965), and “Virtue and
Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,”’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3
(1972): 119-34; Bernard Bailyn, /deological Origins of the American Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); Eric Foner, Tom Paine
and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford, 1976); Pauline Maier, From
 Notes 177
Resistance to Revolution (New York: Random House, 1972); Robert Shalhope,
“Republicanism in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 38
(1982): 334-56; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise
of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford, 1984).
39. Kerber, Women of the Republic, p. 47. For a discussion of the growing
disenchantment with the war, see Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their
World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), pp. 160—70.
40. See Henretta, The Evolution of American Society, p. 160; and Clark,
History of Manufactures 1:229-30.
41. Alexander Hamilton, ‘Plan for the Support of Public Credit,’’ January
14, 1790, in American State Papers: Finance 1:15.
42. Peter Colt to John Chester, July 21, 1791, in Cole, Correspondence of
Alexander Hamilton, p. 3.
43. Alexander Hamilton, “Report on the Subject of Manufactures,” in Cole,
Correspondence of Alexander Hamilton, pp. 251, 256, and 280.
44. Ibid., p. 259. The Boston Society for Encouraging Industry and Em-
ploying the Poor is cited in Edith Abbott, Women in Industry: A Study in
American Economic History (New York: D. Appleton, 1910), p. 22.
45. Coxe, Views of America, pp. 46, 55S, and 301; “Diary of Martha Moore
Ballard,” p. 348.
46. John Cosens Ogden, The Female Guide: or, Thoughts on the Education
of that Sex Accommodated to The State of Society, Manners, and Government,
in the United States (Concord, N.H.: George Hough, 1793), pp. 5, 11, and 12.
47. Ibid., pp. 9 and 26.
48. Prices are for Massachusetts and are based on data provided in Carroll
D. Wright's Comparative Wages, Prices, and Cost of Living (Boston: Wright
and Potter Printing Company, 1889), pp. 66, 69, 114, 115, and 124-25. On the
distribution of wealth, see Kulikoff, ‘Progress of Inequality,” Table II-b, p. 381.
49. M. L. Davis, A Brief Account of the Epidemical Fever Which lately pre-
vailed in the City of New York, as quoted in James Ford, Slums and Housing
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936) 1:64.
50. In Massachusetts, carpenters’ wages rose from 59 cents a day in 1790, to
about 91 cents in 1800, to about $1.24 in 1811. Masons received about $1.00 a
day in 1788; with the exception of unusually high rates in 1812, their wages did
not exceed $1.74 a day throughout the period. See Wright, Comparative Wages,
pp. 48-49 and 55.
In 1806-1809, journeymen shoemakers were still earning roughly the same
rate they had received in 1794. See “Commonwealth vs. Pullis” in John R.
Commons et al., eds., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society
(Cleveland, Ohio: Arthur H. Clark, 1910) 3:119.
51. For a discussion of the bakers’ strike, see Howard B. Rock, “The Perils
of Laissez-Faire: The Aftermath of the New York Bakers’ Strike of 1801,”
Labor History 18 (Summer 1976): 372-87. See also Commons et al., Docu-
mentary History 3:106—7, 119, and 125; and American State Papers: Finance,
1:495-96 and 694-95. The quotation is from John Mix, Jr., to John Chester,
178 Notes
September 30, 1791, in Cole, Correspondence of Alexander Hamilton, pp.
49-50.
52. Albert Matthews, ed., Journal of William Loughton Smith, 1790-1791
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917), p. 48; Winifred B. Roth-
enberg, ‘“‘The Market and Massachusetts Farmers, 1750-1855,” Journal of Eco-
nomic History 41 (June 1981), Table I, p. 291; Nash, History of Augusta,
pp. 142-46; Blake, History of Princeton, pp. 159-61.
53. American State Papers: Finance 1:694.
54. Ibid.; George Daitsman, ‘‘Labor and the ‘Welfare State’ in Early New
York,” Labor History 4 (Fall 1963): 252; Commons et al., Documentary History,
p. 371.
55. Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, p. 73; [Arthur Young],
Rural Economy, or Essays on the Practical Parts of Husbandry (Burlington,
Vt.: Issac Neale, 1792), p. 3; DeVoe, Market Book, p. 204.
56. This was not universally the case. In her Letters Addressed to Young
Married Women, Mrs. Griffith stressed the importance of daily household man-
agement: ‘(W]e all know,” she asserted, “that without economy, the greatest
wealth will soon dwindle to nothing; but with it, a very moderate share of fortune
may enable its possessors to live with ease and comfort.” Mrs. Griffith, Letters
Addressed to Young Married Women (Philadelphia, Pa.: John Turner, 1796),
p. 55.
57. Blake, ‘““‘The Diary of Elizabeth Fuller,” p. 307; ‘““The Diary of Martha
Moore Ballard,” p. 257.
58. Lydia Almy diary, typescript copy, Essex Institute; Francis Rollins Morse,
ed., Henry and Mary Lee: Letters and Journals, with Other Family Letters, 1802-
1860 (Boston: Thomas Todd Company, 1926), pp. 178, 202, and 214. I am
grateful to Lisa Norling for bringing the Almy diary to my attention.
59. Niles Weekly Register, January 23, 1813, p. 328.
60. Niles Weekly Register. November 2, 1811, p. 138; April 25, 1812, p. 125
(italics added); November 21, 1812, p.189; February 22, 1812, p. 138.
61. History of the Town of Whateley, Mass[achusetts], 1661-1889, rev. by
James M. Crafts (Orange, Mass.: D. L. Crandall, 1899), pp. 128-29; Adam
Hodgson, Letters from North America, Written During a Tour in the United
States and Canada (London: Hurst, Robinson, 1824), p. 71.

Notes to Chapter III

1. Henretta, Evolution of American Society, p. 180. For an overview of this

period, see ibid., pp. 179-222.
2. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Co-
lonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, Part 1, Washington, D.C., Series A
195-209, pp. 27 and 33, and Series A 172-194, p. 22. In 1830, the north-central
 Notes 179
region included the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Missouri,
and the territories of Wisconsin, lowa, and Minnesota.
3. Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Com-
munity in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826—1860 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1979), pp. 20 and 66 (Table 4.1).
4. Judith A. McGaw, Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social
Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801-1885 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1987), passim; Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium:
Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815~—1837 (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1978), p. 39; Wilentz, Chants Democratic, p. 404 (Table 11); see also
Wilentz’s discussion on pp. 112-15.
5. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, pp. 115 and 404 (Table 11). Alan Dawley,
Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 47; Thomas Dublin, ‘““Women and Outwork
in a Nineteenth-Century New England Town: Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire,
1830-1850,” in Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds., The Countryside in the
Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 55.
6. See, for example, the New York Daily Tribune, June 8, 1853.
7. Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 155 and 165-66; Robert Ernst,
Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825-1863 (New York: King’s Crown Press,
Columbia University, 1949), pp. 61-83. For a discussion of methods used by
whites to ensure that the numbers of black draymen and carters would remain
small, see Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850: The
Shadow of the Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 18-19.
8. Fred Mitchell Jones, Middlemen in the Domestic Trade of the United
States, 1800-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1937), p. 45; Allan Nev-
ins, ed., The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828-1851 (New York: Kraus Reprint
Company, 1969; orig. pub. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927) 1:614.
9. Dublin, Women at Work, p. 137. For additional discussion of wages, see
below.
10. Alonzo Lewis and James R. Newhall, History of Lynn, Essex County,
Massachusetts: Including Lynnfield, Saugus, Swampscot, and Nahant (Boston:
John L. Shorey, 1865), p. 447. My discussion of the central shop is based on
Dawley, Class and Community, especially pp. 11-72; and Wilentz, Chants Dem-
ocratic, especially pp. 107-42.
11. E. S. Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in The United States of North
America, from April, 1833, to October, 1834 (London: John Murray, 1835) 1:121,
195 and 358. For fuller discussions of whites’ unwillingness to work with blacks,
see Curry, Free Black, pp. 15-36; and Litwack, North of Slavery, pp. 151-86.
12. John M. Duncan, Travels through Part of The United States and Canada
in 1818 and 1819 (New York: W. B. Gilley, 1823) 2:339-41.
13. Wages for carpenters, foundrymen, masons, masons’ helpers, and labor-
180 Notes
ers are from Wright, Comparative Wages, pp. 49, 54,55, and 56. Railroad wages
are from Francis B. C. Bradlee, ‘‘The Boston and Lowell Railroad, The Nashua
and Lowell Railroad, and the Salem and Lowell Railroad,” Essex Institute
Historical Collections, 54 (1918): 209.
14. Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860: The Reaction of Amer-
ican Industrial Society to the Advance of the Industrial Revolution (New York:
Hart, Shaffner, and Marx, 1924; reprinted Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith,
1959), p. 7; Wilentz, Chants Democratic, pp. 117 and 405 (Table 14); Ryan,
Cradle of the Middle Class, p. 46; Dublin, Wornen at Work, pp. 159, 185, 186,
and 195; and Dawley, Class and Community, pp. 53-54.
15. Ernst, Immigrant Life, p. 40. See also The New-York Cries in Rhyme
(New York: Mahlon Day, 1836) and The Cries of New-York, with Fifteen Il-
lustrations (New York: John Doggett, Jr., 1846).
16. John H. Griscom, The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of
New York (1845; reprinted New York: Arno Press, 1970), pp. 10 and 17.

p. 145. ,
17. New York Tribune, Apnil 12, 1841; Charles Dickens, American Notes for
General Circulation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1842), p. 36; D. W.
Mitchell, Ten Years in The United States: Being an Englishman's View of Men
and Things in the North and South (London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1862),

18. Donald B. Cole, Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845—1921

(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963), p. 28; Gardner Morse,
‘Recollections of the Appearance of New Haven and of its Business Enterprises
and Movements in Real Estate between 1825 and 1837,” Papers of the New
Haven Colony Historical Society, 5:98~100.
19. Prices for food and fuel are from Wright, Wages, Prices, and Cost of
Living, pp. 107-8, 124-25, 133. Rents are from Abdy, Journal of a Residence,
1:216-17; and Edgar W. Martin, The Standard of Living in 1860: American
Consumption Levels on the Eve of the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1942), p. 172. Martin found $6~$8 to be an average monthly rent for a
rear tenement apartment, $4~—$6 for a front tenement apartment, and $3 for a
basement apartment. D. W. Mitchell cites the New York Tribune as suggesting
a slightly lower range of $4—$5 for tenement apartments in New York City in
the same period: see Mitchell, Ten Years in the United States, p. 153. For an
excellent study of the changing nature of the housing market in antebellum New
York City, see Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785-1850 (Ithaca,
N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989).
20. Martin, Standard of Living, pp. 22, 55. See also Cole, Immigrant City,
pp. 29-30.
21. Ely, Visits of Mercy 2:87-88; Martin, Standard of Living, pp. 122-23.
22. Seth Luther, An Address Delivered Before the Mechanics and Working-
Men, of the City of Brooklyn, on the Celebration of the Sixtieth Anniversary of
American Independence, July 4, 1836 (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Alden Spooner and
Sons, 1836), pp. 7 and 10—11.
23. William Henry Channing, ““The Temptation in the Wilderness, from the
 Notes 181
Harbinger,” in John Thomas Codman, Brook Farm: Historic and Personal
Memoirs (Boston: Arena Publishing, 1894), Appendix, p. 321.
24. Luther, Address... July 4, 1836, p. 11.
25. Seth Luther, An Address to the Working Men of New England, on the State
of Education, and on the Condition of the Producing Classes in Europe and Amer-
ica (New York: George H. Evans, 1833; orig. pub. 1832), pp. 17 and 35.
26. George Combe, Notes on the United States of North America, during a
Phrenological Visit in 1838-39—40 (Edinburgh: MacLachan, Stewart, 1841) 3:145.
27. ‘“‘A Mechanic,”’ Elements of Social Disorder: A Plea for the Working
Classes in the United States (Providence, R.I.: Benjamin F. Moore, 1844),
pp. 69-70. Both of the latter two classes were charged with “responsibility for
the poverty, misery, and vice, that so generally prevail” among workers.
28. George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light: With Here and There a Streak
of Sunshine (New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1850), p. 69. For a useful
discussion of the emergence of the middle class, and of the term ‘“‘middle class,”
see Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and
the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: W. W. Norton,
1976), especially pp. 1-79.
29. Luther, Address... July 4, 1836, pp. 10-11.
30. “How to Get Rich,” Manual of Self-Education: A Magazine for the Young
1/1 (August 1842): 66—67.
31. (Samuel G. Goodrich], Enterprise, Industry, and Art of Man (Boston:
Bradbury, Soden, 1845), p. 335.
32. Stuart M. Blumin, “The Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation in
Nineteenth-Century America: A Critique and Some Proposals,” American His-
torical Review 90 (April 1985): 315. I am indebted to Blumin throughout the
present discussion of the new “middle-class” occupational patterns.
33. See, for example, Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, pp. 108 and 254
(Table B.4); and Ernst, Immigrant Life, pp. 214-17 (Table 27).
34. A growing secondary literature is helping to illuminate the emergence
and importance of this new occupational sector. Especially important among
these are Stuart Blumin, “‘Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation”; Ryan, Cradle
of the Middle Class; Johnson, Shopkeeper's Millennium; Biedstein, Culture of
Professionalism; and John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1965S).
35. James Dawson Burn, Three Years among the Working-Classes in the
United States during the War (London: Smith, Elder, 1865), pp. 308-9; Six
Hundred Dollars a Year: A Wife's Effort at Low Living, under High Prices
(Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867); Charles Edward Stowe and Lyman Beecher
Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life (Boston and New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1911), p. 143; Thomas L. Nichols, Forty Years of American
Life, Vol. 2 (London: John Maxwell, 1864), pp. 202-3. Although the title of
the anonymous Six Hundred Dollars a Year would seem to suggest an annual
income of that amount, the figure refers to the cash remaining after house rent;
the actual income was $800 a year. Grant Thorburn set the annual earnings of
182 Notes
clerks at $500; see Thorburn, Sketches from the Note-book of Laurie Todd (New
York: D. Fanshaw, 1847), p. 12. On the earnings of lawyers, see Edward Pessen,
Riches, Class, and Power Before the Civil War (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath,
1973), p. 58. The salary of a typical New York businessman is cited in Martin,
Standard of Living, p. 12.
36. Herman Melville, “Bartleby,”’ in Jay Leyda, ed., The Portable Melville
(New York: Viking Press, 1952), p. 475. |
37. For an excellent overview of business forms and procedures during the
antebellum period, see Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial
Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
Belknap Press, 1977), pp. 15-49. It is not my intention here to enter the debate
over whether these structures and procedures ultimately hampered the devel-
opment of early industrialization; for a summary of that discussion, see Judith
A. McGaw, “Accounting for Innovation: Technological Change and Business
Practice in the Berkshire Paper Industry ,’’ Technology and Culture 26/4 (October
1985): 703-25. Melville, “Bartleby,” pp. 468-69, 472-73.
38. Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Wom-
an’s Home; or, Principles of Domestic Science (New York: J. B. Ford, 1869;
reprint ed. Hartford, Conn.: Stowe-Day Foundation, 1975), pp. 25-42.
39. Among others, John M. Duncan found that living in boardinghouses was
“very common” in the United States as early as 1818. See Duncan, Travels,
2:249. See also Thomas B. Gunn, Physiology of New York Boarding Houses
(New York: Mason Brothers, 1857). Gunn was particularly critical of women
who sought in this way to relieve themselves of some of their domestic labor;
see op. cit., p. 168.
40. For Boston, Pessen identifies as the ‘‘upper middle” level, people who
owned $6,000-$20,000 worth of taxable property; for New York, he includes
in this group people who owned $7,000—$20,000 in taxable property. See Pessen,
Riches, Class, and Power, pp. 132 and 140; on the upward mobility of this group,
see p. 133.
Based on an examination of property ownership in Brooklyn in 1841, Pessen
(p. 36) suggested the following distribution of property:

Level of Wealth % of Population

$50,000 or more 1
$15,000 to $50,000 2
$4,500 to $15,000 9
$1,000 to $4,500 15
$100 to $1,000 7
under $100 66
41. Years later, David Wright recalled that when he and Martha Coffin Wright
set up housekeeping in Aurora, New York, in 1829, they paid $750 for a house
and lot. The purchase was possible only because Martha Coffin Wright had an
inheritance of $1,000 from her first marriage. Travelling in Boston in the mid-
 | Notes 183
1830s, E. S. Abdy noted that a shopkeeper, married and with children, had
paid $1,500 for a dwelling. Catharine Beecher suggested in 1841 that a two-
story cottage with a porch in a semirural area would cost between $900 and
$1,300. See David Wright, ‘‘Reminiscences,” n.d., Garrison Papers, Sophia
Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts (hereafter Gar-
rison Papers); Abdy, Journal of a Residence 1:180; Catharine E. Beecher, A
Treatise on Domestic Economy, rev. ed. (Boston: Thomas H. Webb, 1842),
p. 265. The propensity of (especially) young couples in the city to take rooms
in boardinghouses and hotels rather than go into housekeeping was registered
in the anxieties of a number of observers.
42. Mrs. [Lydia Maria] Child, The American Frugal Housewife, 12th ed.
(Boston: Carter, Hendee, 1833), pp. 111-13; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy
in America, Book II, Chapter 10.
43. Goodrich, Recollections of a Lifetirne 2:71; William A. Alcott, Ways of
Living on Small Means, 3rd ed. (Boston: Light and Stearns, 1837), p. 180;
Nevins, Diary of Philip Hone 1:185; Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power, p. 148.
44. Henry Ward Beecher, Lectures to Young Men (Boston: J. P. Jewett,
1846), p. 28; Nichols, Forty Years of American Life 1:402, 404.

Notes to Chapter IV

1. Martha Coffin Wright to [Lucretia Mott], {January} 23, [1845], Martha

Coffin Wright Correspondence, 1825-1841, Garrison Papers, The Sophia Smith
Collection, Smith College.
2. Ibid.; Harriet Beecher Stowe to Sarah Buckingham Beecher, December
17, [1850], Beecher—Stowe Family Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Col-
lege (hereafter, Beecher—Stowe Family Papers); Diaries of Sarah Smith Browne,
March 27, 1858, Browne Family Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College
(hereafter, Browne Family Papers); Susan B. Anthony to Antoinette Brown,
April 22, 1858, quoted in Alice Stone Blackwell, Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Wom-
en's Rights (Boston: Little, Brown, 1930), p. 198; George S. Merriam, ed.,
Reminiscences and Letters of Caroline C. Briggs (New York: Houghton, Mifflin,
1897), pp. 22-23.
3. The Reverend Hubbard Winslow, A Discourse delivered in The Bowdoin
Street Church (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, 1837), p. 8; William A. Alcott, The
Young Wife, or Duties of Woman in the Marriage Relation (Boston: George W.
Light, 1837), p. 86.
4. Virtually the only extended discussion of the unpaid household labor of
women of the working classes in the antebellum Northeast is to be found in
Stansell, City of Women. The quotation on middle-class women is also from
Stansell, pp. xii—xiti. Stansell is not alone in depicting antebellum middle-class
women as leisured. Julie A. Matthaei asserts that the presence of paid domestic
workers “‘[flreed [the wife] from the drudgery of housework,” and Faye E.
 184 Notes
Dudden argues that ‘‘[a]s employers demanded longer hours and more stringent
work discipline from domestics... , they were able to free themselves from a
significant part of the burden of household work.” See Matthaei, An Economic
History of Women in America: Women’s Work, the Sexual Division of Labor,
and the Development of Capitalism (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), p. 157;
and Dudden, Serving Women, p. 7.
A contrary claim, and one much closer to the argument made here, is offered
by Patricia Branca in her examination of middle-class women in Victorian Eng-
land. Branca contends that the image of the “‘leisured lady’”’ ill-fit the lives of
most middle-class women. See Branca, “Image and Reality: The Myth of the
Idle Victorian Lady,” in Mary Hartman and Lois W. Banner, eds., Clio’s Con-
sciousness Raised (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), pp. 170-89.
5. Martha Coffin Wright to Lucretia Mott, November 19, 1841, Martha
Coffin Wright Correspondence, 1825-1841, Garrison Papers.
6. Martha Coffin Wright to Lucretia Mott, November 7 and 19, 1841,
Sept[ember] 12, 1844, and Jan[uary] 23, [1845], Martha Coffin Wright Corre-
spondence, 1825-1841, Garrison Papers.
7. Martha Coffin Wright to Lucretia Mott, Sept{[ember] 12, 1844, and
Jan{uary] 23, [1845], Martha Coffin Wright Correspondence, 1825-1841, Gar-
_ rison Papers.
8. Martha Coffin Wright to Lucretia Mott, Jan{uary] 15, 1845, Martha Coffin
Wright Correspondence, 1825-1841, Garrison Papers.
9. Wright’s household almanac for 1838 indicates only one payment to a
‘“‘mantuamaker,” for $1.75 in October. This may well have been for a winter
cloak. Wright’s diary for 1852—1858 includes a March entry for $1.50 payment
to a “‘dressmaker”’ for three days’ work. Almanac, 1838, n.p., Diaries of Martha
Coffin Wright, 1856-1874, Garrison Papers.
10. See n. 40, Chapter IIT. The census evidence is reviewed and evaluated
in Dudden, Serving Women, pp. 78-79, and notes 19-27, pp. 273-74.
11. Combe, Notes on the United States 1:201; Fredrika Bremer, The Homes
of the New World; Impressions of America (New York: Harper, 1853) 1:111.
12. Elizabeth Cabot to Mrs. Twistleton, November 26, 1860, in Letters of
Elizabeth Cabot (Boston: privately printed, 1905) 1:232-33 and 261.
13. Merriam, Briggs, p. 94. Faye Dudden also notes the changing educational
and training goals of middle-class daughters. See Dudden, Serving Women,
p. 47.
14. See, for example, T. S. Arthur, ed., The Mother's Rule; or, The Right
Way and the Wrong Way (Philadelphia: Smith and Peters, 1856), passim. The
Ladies Museum 1/11 (October 8, 1825): 44.
15. For excellent discussions of changes in attitudes toward child-rearing in
this period, see Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, pp. 19-62, 84-92, and 150-51,
and Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, pp. 145-85.
16. Arthur, Mother's Rule, pp. 91-92; Harriet Beecher Stowe to Sarah Buck-
ingham Beecher, December 17, [1850], Beecher-Stowe Family Papers; Abigail
 Notes 185
Bradley Hyde to Mr. and Mrs. Bradley, April 5, 1829, Bradley-Hyde Collection,
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College (hereafter, Bradley-Hyde Collection);
Diary of Sarah Connell Ayer (Portland, Me.: Lefavor-Tower, 1910), pp. 226
and 237.
17. Francis J. Grund, The Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political
Relations (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1837), p. 32; Six Hundred Dollars
a Year, p. 49.
18. Journal of Sarah M. Munro, 1853-1856, February 9, 1853, Caroline Wells
Dall Papers, 1832-1956, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College (hereafter, Car-
oline Wells Dall Papers); Diaries of Mrs. Bardwell of Walpole, Vt., October
3, 1858—June 15, 1860, November 17, 1858, Helen Temple Cooke Papers, 1858-
1951, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College (hereafter Helen Temple Cooke
Papers); Diaries of Sarah Preston Everett Hale, 1859-1861, March 23, 1859,
Hale Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College (hereafter, Hale Papers);
Diary of Sarah Smith Browne, October 6, 1860, and May 10 and 13, 1858,
Browne Family Papers.
19. Journal of Sarah M. Munro, 1853-1856, April 8, 1853, Caroline Wells
Dall Papers. Italics added.
20. Diary of Lydia Maria Child, 1864, Lydia Maria Child Papers, Anti-Slavery
Collection, Cornell University Library. Cited in Gerda Lerner, The Female
Experience: An American Documentary (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977),
pp. 125-26; Diary of Sarah Smith Browne, May 5, 1858, Browne Family Papers;
Blackwell, Lucy Stone, p. 233; Martha Coffin Wright to Lucretia Mott, February
7, 1847, Martha Coffin Wright Correspondence, 1825-1841, Garrison Papers;
Diary of Sarah Mynderse Campbell, April 6, 1824, New-York Historical Society;
Beecher and Stowe, American Woman's Home, pp. 87-89, 91, 171, 353-59,
and 362.
21. Blackwell, Lucy Stone, p. 233; Martha Coffin Wright to Lucretia Mott,
February 7, 1847, Martha Coffin Wright Correspondence, 1825-1841, Garrison
Papers; Diaries of Sarah Preston Everett Hale, 1859—1861, March 24, April 27,
May 26, and June 16 and 17, 1859, Hale Papers; Claudia L. Bushman, ‘‘A Good
Poor Man’s Wife’: Being a Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and Her
Family in Nineteenth-Century New England (Hanover, N.H.: University Press
of New England, 1981), p. 108; Strasser, Never Done, p. 16; Six Hundred Dol-
lars a Year, pp. 22-26.
22. Harriet Beecher Stowe to Sarah Buckingham Beecher, December 17,
[1850], Beecher-Stowe Family Papers; Six Hundred Dollars a Year, p. 11; Diar-
ies of Mrs. Bardwell, November 15, 1858, Helen Temple Cooke Papers.
23. Letters from John Pintard 1:206; Eliza [?] to Mary [B. Kinsley], July 29,
1822, Anne Ware Allen Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College (here-
after, Anne Ware Allen Papers).
24. For a fuller discussion of this subject, see Chapter V.
25. Luella Case to Sarah Edgarton, July, 1841, Hooker Collection, Schle-
singer Library, Radcliffe College (hereafter, Hooker Collection); Louisa Meigs
 186 Notes
to Mrs. John Rodgers, December 17, 1850, Alger Family Papers, Schlesinger
Library, Radcliffe College (hereafter, Alger Family Papers); Beecher, Treatise
on Domestic Economy, p. 162.
26. Diary of Lydia Maria Child, 1864, as cited in Lerner, Female Experience,
p. 126; Alcott, Young Wife, p. 85; Diaries of Sarah Smith Browne, March 27,
1858, Browne Family Papers. For a quite different interpretation of antebellum
middle-class women’s attitudes toward cooking, see Matthews, “Just a
Housewife.”
27. Diaries of Sarah Smith Browne, April 19, 21-27, and 30, and May 3,
1858, Browne Family Papers; Bushman, “Good Poor Man’s Wife’’, p. 112.
28. Six Hundred Dollars a Year, pp. 48-49, 58-59, and 73; Merriam, Briggs,
p. 89.
29. Diary of Lydia Maria Child, 1864, as cited in Lerner, Female Experience,
p. 125; Harriet Beecher Stowe to Calvin Stowe, 1850, quoted in Stowe and
Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 143.
30. E. S. Abdy, Journal of a Residence 1:251; Diary of Sarah Mynderse
Campbell, July 22, 1826, and November 26, 1824, New-York Historical Society;
Sarah Jackson Russell to Hannah Lowell Jackson Cabot, April 25, 1844, Almy
Family Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College (hereafter, Almy Family
Papers).
31. Solon Robinson, Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated (New
York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1854), pp. 31 and 198; DeVoe, Market Book,
pp. 219, 331-32, 370, 391, 408, 409, and 499; New-York Cries in Rhyme, pp. 6,
8, 13, and 14; Blackwell, Lucy Stone, p. 78.
32. Ernst, Immigrant Life, pp. 66-68; DeVoe, Market Book, pp. 463 and
573; Litwack, North of Slavery, p. 155; Abdy, Journal of a Residence 2:44.
33. Diary of Wilham H. Bell, 1850-1851, November 6, 1850, New-York
Historical Society.
34. See, for example, Burn, Three Years among the Working-Classes. pp. 106
and 298. Although Burn contended that laboring-class housewives did little
work, his own observations belie the assertion. See also Ernst, /mmigrant Life,
pp. 52 and 86-87.
35. Mary Paul Guild to ‘Dear Father,” April 27, 1862, in Thomas Dublin,
ed., Farm to Factory: Women’s Letters, 1830-1860 (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1981), p. 129.
, 36. Mary Paul Guild to ‘“‘Dear Father,”” October 27, 1861, in Dublin, Farm
to Factory, p. 128.
37. One frequently finds these incidents reported in the newspapers of the
period. See, for example, the New York Tribune, April 12, 14, 19, and 20, and
May 17, 1841. The quotation ts from April 20, 1841.
38. Ely, Visits of Mercy 1:168—69; 2:88; Boston Evening Transcript, Septem-
ber 20, 1830. For additional discussion of the significance of these networks in
four very different times and places, see: Ulrich, ‘‘ ‘A Friendly Neighbor’,”’
pp. 392-405; Stansell, City of Women, pp. 55-62; Judith E. Smith, ““Our Own
Kind: Family and Community Networks in Providence,’ Radical History Review
 Notes 187
17 (Spring 1968): 99-120; and Ellen Ross, ‘Survival Networks: Women’s Neigh-
bourhood Sharing in London before World War One,” History Workshop 15
(Spring 1983): 4-27.
39. Boston Evening Transcript, July 27, 1830.
40. Diary of William H. Bell, 1850-1851, July 31, 1851, New-York Historical
Society; Ely, Visits of Mercy 1:169.
41. Diary of Phebe Orvis Eastman, St. Lawrence County Historical Center,
Canton, New York. Cited in Dudden, Serving Women, pp. 17-18.
42. Nichols, Forty Years of American Life 1:23; Blackwell, Lucy Stone, p. 10;
Sarah Smith to Josiah Smith, in letter of Linus Smith to Josiah Smith, Feb{ruary]
7, 1845, and Philena Thorp to Mrs. Joseph [Sally] Smith, July 31, 1851, Hooker
Collection; Tryon, Household Manufactures, Table XVI, pp. 304—S.
43. Mary Ann Archbald to “My Dear Margaret,’ January 13, 1822, the
journals and diary of Mary Ann Archbald, 1762-1840, Archbald Papers.
44. Cynthia [H. Allen] to Mary Goodridge, Jan{uary] 8, 1848, Gilbert-
Cheever Family Papers, Manuscript Room, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale
University (hereafter, Gilbert-Cheever Family Papers).
45. Blanche Brown Bryant and Gertrude Elaine Baker, eds., The Diaries of
Sally and Pamela Brown, 1832-1838, and Hyde Leslie, 1887 (Springfield, Vt.:
William L. Bryant Foundation, 1970), pp. 11, 13, 16-18, and 24; Diary of Phebe
Orvis Eastman, cited in Dudden, Serving Women, p. 17; Nichols, Forty Years
of American Life 1:23.
46. Nichols, Forty Years of American Life 1:33; DeVoe, Market Book,
pp. 408 and 450; Abdy, Journal of a Residence 1:132; Six Hundred Dollars a
Year, p. 11.
47. See, for example, Thomas Dublin, ““Women and Outwork in a
Nineteenth-Century New England Town: Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, 1830—
1850,” in Hahn and Prude, Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation,
pp. 51-69.
48. Merriam, Briggs, pp. 4 and 7; Mary Ann Archbald to ‘““My Dear Mar-
garet,” January 13, 1822, the journals and diary of Mary Ann Archbald, 1762-
1840; Bryant and Baker, Diaries of Sally and Pamela Brown, p. 12; Diary of
Phebe Eastman, cited in Dudden, Serving Women, pp. 15-17. Dudden provides
a detailed examination of the relationships between mistresses and hired workers
in rural families; see especially pp. 17-18, 30-32, and 76-77.
49. Jane Swisshelm, Letters to Country Girls (New York: J. C. Riker, 1853),
p. 75; Merriam, Briggs, p. 15; Blackwell, Lucy Stone, p. 19.
50. Caroline H. Gilman, The Lady’s Annual Register and Housewife's
Memorandum-Book (Boston: T. H. Carter, 1838), p. 80.
51. For an interesting discussion of these changes as reflected in plans for
farmhouses, see Sally McMurry, Families and Farmhouses in Nineteenth-Century
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
52. George S. Boutwell, Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (New
York: McClure, Phillips, 1902), pp. 2-5.
53. Mary Wilkins Freeman, “The Revolt of ‘Mother’,” in Barbara H. Sol-
188 Notes
omon, ed., Short Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman (New
York: Signet, 1979), p. 423.
54. Dudden, Serving Women, pp. 14-16.
55. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, p. 29.

Notes to Chapter V

1. Helen Sumner, Report on the Condition of Women and Child Wage-

Earners in the United States, Vol. 9: History of Women in Industry in the United
States (Washington, D.C.: 1910), p. 29. Jesse T. Peck, The True Wornan; or,
Life and Happiness at Home and Abroad (New York: Carlton and Porter, 1857),
p. 243.
2. Paul Johnson discusses these changing residential patterns in Shopkeeper's
Milienium, pp. 48-—S5.
3. L[ydia] Maria Child, Letters from New York, 1st series (New York: C. S.
Francis, 1845), pp. 14-15 and 69. The street lives of city women have been
richly documented by Christine Stansell in City of Women.
4. The only major study of women’s domestic lives to argue that housework
underwent a historical process of ‘“industrialization” is Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s
More Work for Mother. The view that women’s household experiences remained
essentially distinct from the processes of industrialization has informed most
examinations of the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity. See, for example,
Cott, Bonds of Womanhood.
5. Child, American Frugal Housewife, p. 113.
6. Griscom, Sanitary Condition, pp. 8, 9, and 13.
7. Diary of Sarah Smith Browne, February 8, 1858, Browne Family Papers;
Diaries of Mrs. Bardwell, October 13, 1858, Helen Temple Cooke Papers; Diary
of Lucretia Warner Hall, March 25 [18347] and May 19 (1835], New-York
Historical Society; Journal of Sarah M. Munro, 1853—1856, January 17, March
7, and April 11, 1853, Caroline Wells Dall Papers; Gunn, Physiology of New-
York Boarding-Houses, p. 33.
8. Mrs. [Elizabeth] Ellet, ed., The Practical Housekeeper; A Cyclopedia of
Domestic Economy (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1857), p. 33.
9. Arthur, The Mother's Rule, p. 79.
10. Alcott, Young Wife, p. 247.
11. “Cleo Dora,” letter to the editor, Anti-Slavery Bugle, August 21, 1846,
as quoted in Lerner, Female Experience, pp. 119-20.
12. Alcott, Young Wife, pp. 129 and 134.
13. “Cleo Dora,” as quoted in Lerner, Fernale Experience, p. 119; Gilman,
Lady's Annual Register, pp. 39-40; Christopher Crowfield [Harriet Beecher
Stowe], House and Home Papers (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1869), p. 125.
14. Dudden, Serving Women, p. 134.
15. Several of the recent studies of the history of housework have focused
 Notes 189
especially on domestic technology. See Strasser, Never Done, and Cowan, More
Work for Mother. The classic source on new domestic technologies of the nine-
teenth century is Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1948). Based largely on an analysis of patents,
Giedion’s conclusion was that the nineteenth century witnessed an explosion of
new domestic inventions. William D. Andrews and Deborah C. Andrews con-
curred in this. More recently, Susan Strasser has pointed out that scholars should
be seeking to learn ‘‘when things became commonplace, not when they were
invented,”’ and has argued that, for most women, housework remained com-
paratively unmechanized through the nineteenth century. William D. Andrews
and Deborah C. Andrews, ‘‘Technology and the Housewife in Nineteenth- _
Century America,” Women’s Studies 2 (1974): 321-23; Strasser, Never Done,
p. xiv.
16. Ladies’ Literary Cabinet, New Series, IV (July 21, 1821), p. 85; Burn,
Three Years among the Working-Classes, p. 298.
17. Jane Sophia Appleton, “Sequel to the ‘Vision of Bangor in the Twentieth
Century,’ in Arthur Orcutt Lewis, ed., American Utopians: Selected Short
Fiction (New York: Arno Press, 1971), p. 256. The story was originally published
in 1848.
18. See, for example, Amelia Simmons, Amercian Cookery (New York: Ox-
ford University Press, 1958; orig. pub. 1796). On the diet of New Englanders,
see also: Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont, Eating in America: A
History (New York: William Morrow, 1976); John L. Hess and Karen Hess,
The Taste of America (New York: Grossman, 1977); and Sarah Frances
McMahon, “ ‘A Comfortable Subsistence’: A History of Diet in New England,”
(Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1982).
19. Diaries of Sarah Smith Browne, September 25 and November 21, 1860,
Browne Family Papers.
20. Martha Coffin Wright to Lucretia Mott, November 7, 1841, Martha Coffin
Wright Correspondence, 1825-1841, Garrison Papers; [Stowe], House and
Home Papers, p. 140.
21. Stansell, City of Women, pp. 11-12.
22. Combe, Notes on the United States 3:206.
23. Zephaniah W. Pease, ed., The Diary of Samuel Rodman: A New Bedford
Chronicle of Thirty-Seven Years, 1821-1859 (New Bedford, Mass.: Reynolds
Printing Company, 1927), p. 203; Beecher and Stowe, American Woman's
Home, p. 175.
24. Elizabeth Cabot to Ellen Twistleton, March 27, 1860, in Letters of Eliz-
abeth Cabot 1:237. Cabot’s household income, which was approximately $6,000
in 1860, placed her well above the ‘‘middle class” as defined in this study.
25. Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World (New York: Feminist Press, 1987),
p. 103.
26. Glenna Matthews offers a rather different reading of the importance of
housework in The Wide, Wide World (and other domestic novels of the period).
Although she also finds in Warner’s depiction of Aunt Fortune a deep respect
190 Notes
for ‘‘a female craft tradition,” she sees the recurrent discussion of housewifery
in early nineteenth-century women’s novels as evidence of the continued vitality
of that tradition. Indeed, Matthews argues that the pre—Civil War era was ‘“‘the
golden age of domesticity.” As I argue throughout this chapter as well as in
Chapters IV and VI, the evidence seems to me considerably more complicated
and contradictory.
27. Burn, Three Years among the Working-Classes, p. 81.
28. Mrs. L{ouisa] Caroline] Tuthill, Reality; or, The Millionaire's Daughter
(New York: Charles Scribner, 1856), p. 297; Caroline H. Gilman, Recollections
of a Housekeeper (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), p. 152; Ellet, Prac-
tical Housekeeper, p. 15.
29. Beecher and Stowe, American Woman's Home, p. 175; Anonymous,
Women’s Influence and Wornan’s Mission (Philadelphia: Willis P. Hazard, 1854),
pp. 57-58.
The prolific Catharine Beecher, whose Treatise on Domestic Economy went
through fifteen printings in as many years, called attention again and again to
the poor preparation of housewives for their tasks. See Beecher, Treatise on
Domestic Economy, pp. 140-42; and idem, Suggestions Respecting Improve-
ments in Education, Presented to the Trustees of the Hartford Female Seminary
(Hartford, Conn.: Packard and Butler, 1829), pp. 7-9.
30. Diaries of Sarah Smith Browne, July 6, 1859, Browne Family Papers.
See also Beecher and Stowe, American Woman's Home, pp. 66-83 and
403-18.
31. [Stowe], House and Home Papers, pp. 281-82; Bremer, Homes of the
New World, p. 230. For additional discussion of the dangers of the new lamps,
see Dudden, Serving Women, p. 129.
32. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, pp. 142, 143, 171, 175, and 176;
U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Documents Relating to the Manufactures in the
U.S., House Doc. 308, 22nd Cong., 2nd sess. (1833), 2:844.
33. Sarah Smith to Josiah Smith in letter of Linus Smith to Josiah Smith,
February 7, 1845, Hooker Collection.
34. Dudden, Serving Women, p. 156. See pp. 154-92.
35. Household account book of Ann (Lyon) Garfield, 1821-1825 [May 17,
1825], John Metcalf Garfield Papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University
(hereafter, John Metcalf Garfield Papers).
36. Diaries of Sarah Smith Browne, January 7, 9, and 20, 1858, Browne
Family Papers. The quotation is from January 20, 1858.
37. Quotation from “Eliza” to Mary [B. Kinsley], July 29, 1822, Anne Ware
(Winsor) Allen Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College (hereafter, Anne
Ware [Winsor] Allen Papers). See also Mary [Lovell Pickard Ware] to Mary
[Kinsley], March 22, 1827, Anne Ware (Winsor) Allen Papers.
38. M. A. S{carborough?] to W. B. [Weltha Brown], May, 1818, Hooker
Collection.
39. Louisa (?] to W. B. [Weltha Brown?], n.d., Hooker Collection.
 Notes 191
40. Child, American Frugal Housewife, pp. 14, 16, and 22; Merriam, Briggs,
p. 89.
41. Lydia D. Pierce to Sally Smith, December 4, 1836, Hooker Collection.
42. Child, American Frugal Housewife, p. 3; [Stowe], House and Home Pa-
pers, p. 175; Gilman, The Lady’s Annual Register, p. 57.
43. [Stowe], House and Home Papers, p. 175; Martha Coffin Wright to [Lu-
cretia Mott], [December] 18, [1841], Martha Coffin Wright Correspondence,
1825-1841, Garrison Papers.
44. Gilman, Recollections, pp. 152-55. The quotation is from p. 152.
45. Appleton, “Sequel,” pp. 254-58. The quotation is from page 258.
46. Mary Antoinette Doolittle, Autobiography of Mary Antoinette Doolittle
(Mount Lebanon, N.Y.: 1880), pp. 35-36. The status of women in American
Fourierist communities is examined in Kathryn M. Tomasek, “‘Fourierist As-
sociation in Theory and in Practice: Women, the Family, and Social Change”
(Master’s thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1989).
47. Doolittle, Autobiography, pp. 35-36; Edward D. Andrews, The Com-
munity Industries of the Shakers (Albany: University of the State of New York,
1932; reprinted Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1972), pp. 40-44.
48. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, pp. 151 and 152; Ellet, Practical
Housekeeper, pp. 16 and 17.

Notes to Chapter VI

1. Griscom, Sanitary Condition, pp. 2, 10, and 17.

2. Ibid., p. 39.
3. Ibid., pp. 10 and 17.
4. These include: Ware, Industrial Worker, Dawley, Class and Community;
Johnson, Shopkeeper’s Millennium; Dublin, Women at Work; Wilentz, Chants
Democratic.
Included among those studies that have paid some attention to the relationship
between household life and the transformation of the paid economy are Hahn
and Prude, Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation, and McGaw,
Most Wonderful Machine.
5. Six Hundred Dollars a Year, pp. 28-29.
6. [Stowe], House and Home Papers, pp. 184-85.
7. Martha Coffin Wright to Lucretia Mott, February 7, 1847, Martha Coffin
Wright Correspondence, 1825-1841, Garrison Papers.
8. Six Hundred Dollars a Year, pp. 49, 58, 68-69, 73, and 117.
9. Paul Smith argues that it is especially inappropriate to include work like
cooking in the concept of productive Jabor, arguing that ‘‘there is no social
mechanism which defines the necessary tasks which are supposed to contribute
to the value of labour power.” “‘If cooking meals is necessary for its production,”
 192 Notes
he asks, ‘‘why not eating them?" He concludes that, ‘‘{o]ne might as well argue
that since sleeping is necessary for the replenishment of the capacity for labour,
it too is value creating labour.’’ Smith fails to take cognizance of the important
difference between cooking and either eating or sleeping: women’s cooking is
a part of the marital exchange. Men do not require that their wives either eat
or sleep for them. See Paul Smith, “Domestic Labour and Marx’ Theory of
Value,”’ in Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, eds., Feminism and Materi-
alism: Women and Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1978), p. 208.
10. Journal of Sarah M. Munro, 1853-1856, April 18, 1853, Caroline Wells
Dall Papers; Diary of Sarah Connell Ayer, p. 259; Diaries of Mrs. Bardwell,
November 2, 1858, Helen Temple Cooke Papers; Six Hundred Dollars a Year,
p. 83.
11. Child, American Frugal Housewife, pp. 4 and 7.
12. Merriam, Briggs, p. 7; Child, American Frugal Housewife, p. 6.
13. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, p. 65.
14. Cowan, More Work for Mother, pp. 40-68.
15. [Stowe], House and Home Papers, p. 65. See Luke 10:38—42 for the story
of Martha.
16. Ellet, Practical Housekeeper, p. 16.
17. See Stansell, City of Women, pp. 48-49 and 193-216.
18. Alcott, Young Wife, p. 247.
19. Using the wages of paid household workers as a basis for imputing a
market value to unpaid domestic labor does not raise for the antebellum period
the methodological probiems that it has raised in some contemporary studies.
For a detailed analysis of existing techniques for evaluating the economic worth
of housework, see Luisella Goldschmidt-Clermont, Unpaid Work in the House-
hold: A Review of Economic Evaluation Methods (Geneva: International Labour
Office, 1982).
20. Wages are from Martin, Standard of Living, p. 177; and Dudden, Serving
Women, p. 149. These figures are supported by my own research. On seam-
stresses, see: entry for October, 1838, Almanac, Diaries of Martha Coffin
Wright, 1856-1874, Garrison Papers. For the wages of nurses, see, for example,
the household account book of Ann (Lyon) Garfield, 1821-1825, n.d., John
Metcalf Garfield Papers.
21. This is calculated on the basis of an average weekly budget for a working-
class family of five, as itemized in the New York Daily Tribune, May 27, 1851.
According to that budget, flour could be bought in bulk at $5 a barrel, a barrel
| lasting a family of five about eight weeks. Since the Tribune budget assumes a
family with an annual income over $500 (and therefore able to benefit from the
savings of buying in bulk), I have increased the cost by 30%. On savings from
buying in bulk, see Griscom, Sanitary Condition, p. 8. For additional discussions
of food prices, see Martin, Standard of Living, p. 122; and Cummings, American
and His Food, pp. 75-78.
22. The New York Daily Tribune, May 27, 1851.
 Notes 193
23. Martin, Standard of Living, p. 168.
24. Ibid., p. 177.
25. This calculation is based on wages in Wright, Comparative Wages, pp. 47
and 55. It provides a very conservative index for wives’ work; wives frequently
had skills far beyond the “‘helper’’ level.
26. Thorburn, Sketches, p. 12. Thorburn recommended marriage as a sensible
economic decision for young men earning as little as $500 a year—more than
males of the laboring poor, but within the range of better-paid workingmen.
27. See, for example, household receipts, 1844, Almy Family Papers.
28. This estimate is based on expenditures recorded by Martha Coffin Wright
for December, 1825, and January, February, and April, 1826. See diary of 1825,
Diaries of Martha Coffin Wright, 1856-1874, Garrison Papers.
29. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women
in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 56-57.
30. See Martin, Standard of Living, p. 168, for the average weekly cost of
room and board for a single, adult male living in New York City.
31. Ibid.
32. In her study of working-class families in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-
century England, Laura Owen has concluded that women’s inferior power in
the family often resulted in their existing at a lower standard of maintenance
than their husbands. See Owen, “‘The Welfare of Women in Laboring Families:
England, 1860-1950,"’ Ferninist Studies 1/3—-4 (Winter—Spring 1973): 107-25.
33. On the rhetoric of the “‘famtly wage” in antebellum America, see Martha
May, ‘“‘Bread before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions and the
Family Wage,” in Ruth Milkman, ed., Women, Work, and Protest (Boston:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 1-21. For an illuminating analysis of the
assertion of the prerogatives of the male ‘‘breadwinner” by working-class men
in Victorian England, see Wally Seccombe, ‘‘Patriarchy Stabilized: The Con-
struction of the Male Breadwinner Wage Norm in Nineteenth-Century Britain,”
Social History 2/1 (January 1986): 53-76.
34. Ely, Visits of Mercy 1:98 and 193-94.
35. The most complete analysis to date of married women’s property rights
in the nineteenth century is Norma Basch’s In the Eyes of the Law: Women,
Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1982).
36. Alice Kessler-Harris and Karen Brodlin Sacks make this point in their
examination of the contemporary effects of de-industrialization in the United
States. They note, “For most of the American working class for most of its
history, the wage of even the principal (male) earner was inadequate to raise a
family.’’ See ““The Demise of Domesticity in America” in Lourdes Beneria and
Catharine R. Stimpson, eds., Women, Households and the Economy (New
Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), p. 67.
37. See Dublin, Women at Work, p. 20; and Clark, History of Manufactures
1:374.
38. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, p. 117, n. 20.
194 Notes
39. Quoted in Ware, Industrial Worker, p. 77. Italics added.
40. John McVickar, Outlines of Political Economy (New York: Wilder and
Campbell, 1825), p. 107.
41. Theodore Sedgwick, Public and Private Economy (New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1836), pp. 30 and 225.
42. Harriet A. Weed, ed., Life of Thurlow Weed, including His Autobiog-
raphy and A Memoir (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883), pp. 74-75.
43. Reported in the New York Times, November 15, 1861. I am indebted to
Lori Ginzberg for bringing this item to my attention.

Notes to Chapter VII

1. Peck, True Woman, p. 245.

2. The Ladies Museum, July 16, 1825, p. 3; Beecher, Lectures to Young
Men, pp. 87 and 91.
3. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1977), p. 12.
4. Peck, True Woman, pp. 242-43.
5. Arthur, Mother's Rule, p. 261; Alcott, Young Wife, p. 149.
6. Daniel C. Eddy, The Young Woman’s Friend; or, the Duties, Trials,
Loves, and Hopes of Woman (Boston: Wentworth, 1857), p. 23.
7. Alcott, Young Wife, p. 265.
8. Peck, True Woman, p. 243-44.
9. Although he does not discuss women’s labor, Raymond Williams’ expli-
cation of the “pastoralization” of the labor of the English peasants in the sev-
enteenth century provides a model for deciphering the discontinuity in the status
and value of housework in industrial societies. I am indebted to him for this
concept. See Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto
and Windus, 1973), p. 31.
10. Ibid., p. 32.
11. Alcott, Young Wife, pp. 84-85.
12. Journal of Sarah M. Munro, 1853-1856, January 20, 1853, Caroline Wells
Dall Papers; Mary Ann Archbald to “My Dear M{argaret],”” January 1, 1821,
the journals and diary of Mary Ann Archbald, 1762-1840.
13. J. H. Agnew, ““Woman’s Offices and Influence,” Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine 3/17 (October 1851): 654-57.
14. For an excellent discussion of the meaning and importance of the concept
of female ‘‘influence,’’ see Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benev-
olence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).
15. Agnew, ‘““Woman’s Offices,” p. 657.
16. Mary Bushnell Cheney, Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell (New York:
Harper and Brothers, 1880), p. 27.
 Notes 195
17. Washington Irving, ‘““The Wife,” Ladies Literary Cabinet, July 4, 1819,
pp. 82-84. Quotations are from Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey
Crayon, Gent. (New York: Signet Classic, 1961), pp. 34-36.
18. These examples are taken from Thorburn, Sketches, p. 8; and Beecher,
Treatise on Domestic Economy, p. 149, respectively. Eddy, Young Woman's
Friend, p. 28.
19. “Pastoral Letter of the Massachusetts Congregationalist Clergy (1837),”
in Kraditor, Up from the Pedestal, pp. 51-52; Winslow, Discourse, p. 8.
20. Allan Nevins and Milton Malsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George
Templeton Strong 1:179-80 and 325; Calvin Stowe to Harriet Beecher Stowe,
quoted in Catherine Gilbertson, Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: D. Apple-
ton-Century Company, 1937), p. 105.
21. “Editor’s Drawer,’’ Harper's New Monthly Magazine 8/44 (January
1854): 282.
22. The Man, May 13, 1835; Maine Washingtonian Journal as quoted in The
Northern Star and Freeman's Advocate, January 2, 1843; James C. Sylvis, ed.,
Life, Speeches, Labors, and Essays of William H. Sylvis (Philadelphia: Claxton,
Remsen, and Haffelfinger, 1872), p. 120.
23. The Rights of All, June 12, 1829; The Northern Star and Freeman’s Ad-
vocate, December 8, 1842, and January 2, 1843.
24. Luther, “Address... July 4, 1836,” p. 10; “Mechanic,” Elements of So-
cial Disorder, p. 51. Moore is quoted in Wilentz, Chants Democratic, p. 239.
The ‘“‘Cordwainers’ Song” is printed in Dawley, Class and Community, pp.
82-83.
25. “Mechanic,” Elements of Social Disorder, p. 96.
26. Quoted in John Andrews and W. D. P. Bliss, A History of Women in
Trade Unions, Vol. 10 of Report on Condition of Woman and Child Earners in
the United States, Senate Doc. 645, 61st Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1911; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1974), p. 48;
“Mechanic,” Elements of Social Disorder, p. 4S; Working Man's Advocate, June
11, 1831.
- 27. May, “Bread before Roses,” p. 4; Commons et al., Documentary History
6:281; “Mechanic,” Elements of Social Disorder, p. 42.
28. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, pp. 152 and 169.
29. Caroline Dall, ‘‘Woman’s Right to Labor’; or, Low Wages and Hard
Work (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1860), p. 57. Veronica Beechey discusses the
function of this assumption in lowering women’s wages in ‘“‘Women and Pro-
duction: A Critical Analysis of Some Sociological Theories of Women’s Work,”
in Kuhn and Wolpe, Feminism and Materialism, pp. 156—97.
30. Stansell, City of Women, pp. 193-216.
31. The phrase is from the title of Judith McGaw’s study, Most Wonderful
Machine. McGaw has adapted the phrase from Melville’s ‘“‘most wonderful
factory” in his tale ““The Tartarus of Maids.”
32. Wilentz, Chants Democratic, Dawley, Class and Community.
33. Mrs. [Jane] Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy; in which the
196 Notes
Elements of that Science are Familiarly Explained, 7th ed. (London: Longman,
Orme, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1839), especially pp. 25-72.
34. Mrs. A. J. Graves, Woman in America: Being an Examination into the
Morals and Intellectual Condition of American Female Society (New York: Har-
per and Brothers, 1841), p. 156.
35. Beecher, Treatise on Domestic Economy, p. 26; Catharine E. Beecher,
An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with reference to the Duty of American
Females (Philadelphia, Pa.: Henry Perkins, 1837), p. 128; Beecher and Stowe,
American Woman's Home, p. 19.
36. Beecher and Stowe, American Woman’s Home, p. 327.
37. Beecher, Essay on Slavery, pp. 101-2; Ellet, Practical Housekeeper,
p. 17.
38. Harriet Beecher Stowe to Sarah Buckingham Beecher, December 17,
[1850], Beecher—Stowe Family Papers.
 Bibliography

Archival Collections

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven,
Connecticut:
American Literature Collection ,
Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America,
Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Almy Family Papers
Anne Ware (Winsor) Allen Papers
Archbald Papers
Beecher-Stowe Family Papers
Bradley-Hyde Collection
Browne Family Papers
Caroline Wells Dall Papers
Helen Temple Cooke Papers
Hooker Collection
Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts:
Garrison Family Papers
Hale Family Papers
The New York Historical Society, New York City, New York
Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut:
Beecher Family Papers
Gilbert-Cheever Family Papers
John Metcalf Garfield Papers
Stowe-Day Foundation, Hartford, Connecticut:
Acquisitions
197
198 Bibliography
Katharine S. Day Collection
Foote Collection

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Blank Page
 Index

Abdy, E. S., 87, 89 olution, 33-34, 35-36, 48; post-

Adams, Abigail, 33, 34 Revolutionary, 53-54
Adams, John, 34 “Bartleby the Scrivener,” 70
Address to the Society for the Encourage- Beecher, Catharine, 71, 83, 85, 97, 109,
ment of Manufactures and the Useful 112, 113, 119, 125, 128, 161-62
Arts, 47 Beecher, Henry Ward, 73
Address to the Working Men of New Eng- _ Beecher, Sarah Buckingham, 162
land, 66 Bell, William, 89
Advice to a Daughter, 9 Benston, Margaret, xii
Agnew, J. H., 148-49 Bentley, William, 36
Alcott, William, 75, 85, 104, 129, 145, Billington, Peter, 62
147 Blackwell, Antoinette Brown,
Almy, Lydia, 51 Vili—xi
American Frugal Housewife, The, 72, Bloch, Ruth, 43
115, 128 Blumin, Stuart, 68
American Notes, 63 Boarding and lodging, 7, 17, 37, 51, 80,
American Woman’s Home, The, 71, 83, 91, 116, 132, 133; laundry as a part
109, 112, 113, 130, 161 of, 87
‘*‘Anniss,” 95 Boston Evening Post, 23, 30-31
Anthony, Susan B., 75 Boston Society for Encouraging Industry
Anti-Slavery Bugle, 104 and Employing the Poor, 46—47
Appleton, Jane Sophia, 117 Boutwell, George S., 96
Apsley, Alice, 12 Boutwell, Mary, 6
94, 95, 148 34
Archbald, Mary Ann, 38, 40, 41, 42, 46, Boycotts, Revolutionary-era, 31,
Arthur, T. S., 81, 103, 144, 145 Bremer, Fredrika, 79, 113
Ayer, Sarah, 81, 126 Brennan, Mary, 91
Ballard, Martha Moore,Brewing,
38,6,41,
12, 39
46, 47 . . _
Barter, 11, 12, 23-24, 38, 50; during Rev- "88: atgane Clapp. 7, 77, 89, 95-96,

217
718 Index
Brissot, J. P., 36, 37, 42 57; as self-made man, 69. See also Ide-
Brown, Mary, 9 ology of gender spheres
Brown, Sally, 94, 95 Cult of true womanhood, 1, 110. See also
Browne, Sarah Smith, 75, 77, 82, 83, 86, Ideology of gender spheres
107, 112, 115
Burn, James Dawson, 106, 107, 111 Dairying, 6, 11, 12, 38, 40, 94
Burr, Esther Edwards, 15-18 Dall, Caroline, 158
Bushnell, Horace, 149-50 Dalla Costa, Mariarosa, xii
Daughters, participation in housework,
40, 42, 80, 94, 95, 110-12, 126
Cabot, Elizabeth, 79, 110, 112 Davis, Matthew L., 49
Campbell, Samuel, 87 Dawley, Alan, 58, 62
Campbell, Sarah, 83, 87-88 Denison, Patience, 19
Case, Luella, 85 . “Dependence” (economic), associated
Cash-earning, association of men with, with womanhood, 26, 43—44, 156
29, 44, 50, 55, 74, 123, 153, 155, “Deputy husband,”’ 14, 16, 26, 32
156-57 oo Dickens, Charles, 63
Cash exchange (and the denigration of Doolittle, Mary Antoinette, 118-19
women’s domestic labor), 22, 24, 26, Douglas, Ann, 143
28, 35-38, 44, 51, 54; decline of cash Dower rights, 6, 8, 24

households ce
nexus during Revolution, 33-34, 45. Dublin, Thomas. 60
See also Market dependence of Dudden, Faye E., xv, 97, 105, 114
Channing, William Henry, 65-66 Eastman. Phebe. 94. 95
Child, Lydia Maria, 72, 83, 85, 87, 100, “Economy,” changing definitions of, 18,
101, 115, 116, 127, 128, 133, 137 20. 27-29. 32-34. 45-55. 57. 67-68
Child care, 42-44, 78, 80-82, 92, 103-4, 16-17 —
114-15, 117, 126-28, 132, 133, 145-46. Eddy, Daniel C., 145, 151, 163
See also Paid domestic service Edgarton Sarah, 85
Citizenship, associated with economic in- — Eqwardes. Sarah, 12
dependence, 43-44 Elements of Social Disorder, 66
ayarissa,
of women.Ellet, 108 Eliot,103,
Elizabeth, Jared, 111,28 119, 129, 130,
Cleaning, 13, 15~16, 75, 79, 80, 85, 86~ io °
87, 95, 129, 132, 133. See also Paid do- Ely, Ezra Stiles, 64, 136
mestic service English, William, 99

66-68 a
“Cleo Dora,” 104, 105 Enterprise, Industry, and Art of Man, 68
Colman, Benjamin, 9 “Equality,” 43, 66-67
Colt, Peter, 45, 46 Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, 162
Combe, George, 66, 79 Eve (biblical), and Puritan attitudes to-
‘““Common weal,” 27-28, 32, 43, 45, 54, ward women’s work, 25, 26-27
Conversations on Political Economy, 160 “Family” 99. 155
Cooking, 7, 13, 17, 80, 85, 90, 94, 104-5, Foraging. 41°94, 95. 97, 108
111, 128, 132, 133, 191-92, n. 9. See Foster, George, 66
also Paid domestic service; Technology — Fourier. Charles. 117
(domestic) Foxcroft, Thomas, 9
, , _ Eli . 40
Cooper, Mary, 12-14, 15, 17-18 Franklin, Benjamin, 23, 28

Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, xv, xvi, 128 Fuller, Elizabeth, 4

Coxe, Tench, 31, 47, 48, 51 Galusha, Jonas, 53
se i rsa

Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John, 51 Gardens and orchards, 7, 11, 13, 38, 39-
Crowley, J. E., 28 . 40, 48, 83, 94, 124, 132
Cult of the male breadwinner, 43, 153- Gardiner, Jean, xii—xiii
 Index 219
Garfield, Ann, 114 Ideology of gender spheres, viii—ix, xiii,
Gender division of labor: colonial, 5-6, xiv, 141, 142-63; class distinctions, 158-
11-12, 14; Revolutionary, 32; post- 59, 161. See also Cult of true woman-
Revolutionary, 36, 37-38, 42; early hood; Cult of the male breadwinner.
industrial, 57, 122 “Independence,” 66
General Trades’ Union, 154 “Industrial Reconstruction,” viii
Gilman, Caroline, 96, 105, 111, 116,117 “Industry,” 43, 66-68
Golden Age Theory, 1-3, 4, 34 “Influence” (female), 148-49
Good Wives, xv, 3 Inheritance, 6; changing colonial patterns,
Goodrich, Samuel, 35, 36, 68 8, 21; See also Dower rights
Grand Domestic Revolution, The, x Innkeeping, 6
Grave, Mrs. A. J., 160 Irving, Washington, 150
Great American Housewife, The, xv .
Great Awakening, 28 James, Selma, xii
Greven, Philip, 22 Jensen, Joan M., xv
Grimké, Angelina, 151 Just a Housewife,” xv
Grimké, Sarah, 151
Griscom, John, 63, 101, 120 Ronee aro! F, 25
Gross, Robert, 54 cayne, Anne, 6
Grund
oa ’ Kerber,81Linda,
Francis Keayne,xiii-xiv,
Robert, 833
Guild, Mary Paul, 90, 91 Keyssar, Alexander, 8, 25
King Philip's War, 21
Hadfield, Joseph, 36 Kinsley, Mary, 84
Hale, Sarah Preston, 83 Knight, Madame, 23
Hallowell, Mr. (tinsmith), 39 a
Hamilton, Alexander, 45-47, 49, 50 Labor, men's paid: in colonial period, 11,
Hamilton Company (Lowell, Mass.), 58, 17, 23; and Embargo Act, 49-51; early
60, 62 industrialization’s effect on, 58-63, 68-
Harper's, 152 70, 156-57; compared to women’s paid,
Hartmann, Heidi, xviii 26; compared to women’s unpaid, 96,
Hayden, Dolores, x 105-6, 113-14, 121-22, 130
Health care, 126, 129-30. See also Labor, men’s unpaid, 11~12, 15, 83; com-
| Midwifery pared to women’s unpaid, 20; decline
Hodgson, Adam, 53 of unpaid household contribution, 37,
Hone, Philip, 60, 73 102-4, 123; child care, 11, 42, 43,
Houteheld sdvice manuals, 112-13, 114, ‘bor, women's paid, 6, 7, 12, 13, 16-17,
115. See also separate titles oS 3 7 14 3 b6 37 a8 Bn BS 90 95
Household economy, structure of: self- 125, 132; early industrialization’s effect
sufficient, XIV-Xvi, 3; Puritan, 18-19; on, 58-60, 62; antebellum middle-class
post-Revolutionary, 35-36; antebellum, women’s, 87-88; antebellum working-
84, 91, 97, 101, 122-28, 132-37, 140- class women’s, 77, 88-90; antebellum
41. See also Gender division of labor rural women’s, 94, 95, 97; attitudes to-
Housework, privatization of, 10-11, 19, ward, in antebellum period, 154-55.
27-28, 45; decline of privatized house- See also Paid domestic service; specific
hold during Revolution, 32-34, 53; an- types of work
tebellum models for deprivatization, Labor, women’s unpaid: social recogni-
117-18 tion of, 3, 5-8, 19-20, 30, 121, 141; cul-
Housing conditions, early industrial: tural invisibility of, 9~10, 20-21, 27-29,
working-class, 63-65, 101-2, 120; 30-31, 47—48, 141, 146-63; urban/rural
middle-class, 71-72. See also Prices distinctions, 14-15, 16-17, 38, 40-41,
“How to Get Rich,” 67 77, 93-94, 96; class distinctions and,
Hyde, Abigail, 81 16-17, 40-41, 77, 90-91, 95, 139-40;
220 Index
antebellum middle-class and, 77-88, Matthews, Glenna, xv
105-108, 109-19, 133-34; antebellum May, Martha, 155
working-class and, 88-92, 108-9, 132- Meigs, Louisa, 85
33, 135; antebellum rural, 93-97; and Meiville, Herman, 70, 144
status labor, 71, 128, 137; cash-earning Merchant's Magazine (Hunt's), 70
as an aspect of housework, 115, 125; ‘‘Middle class,”’ as designation in antebel-
and industrial time discipline, 104, 105, lum period, 66-67, 72. See also Wages
114; calculation of cash replacement Midwifery, 14, 37, 38-39
value, 130-35; value to capitalized in- Ministers, attitudes toward women’s
dustry, 138-39. See also Worker con- work, 8-9, 25. See also individual
sciousness; Market dependence of ministers
households; specific types of work Mitchell, D. W., 63
Lady’s Annual Register, 105 Mitchell, Juliet, xii
Ladies Literary Cabinet, 106, 150 Moore, Ely, 154
Ladies Museum, 81, 142 More Work for Mother, xv
Laundry, 6, 13, 41, 77, 80, 84-85, 87, Mott, Lucretia, 75
132, 133. See also Boarding and lodg- Mott, Maria, 75
ing, Paid domestic service Munro, Sarah, 126, 148
Lectures to Young Men, 73
Lee, Henry, 52 National Trades’ Union, 155
Lee, Mary, 52 New Netherlands, 4, 6, 22
Leisure: and housewives, 15, 26-27, 76, Never Done, xv
97; and men’s work, 95 New York Mercury, 10
Letters from an American Farmer, 51 New York Times, 62
Locke, John (on education), 81 New York Tribune, 63, 132
Loosening the Bonds, xv Niccoles, Alexander, 5
Lowell (Mass.) textile mills, 58, 60, 105, Nichols, Thomas, 73-74, 94
154 Niles Weekly Register, 53
Lowell, Anna Jackson, 88 Norling, Lisa, 43
Lyman, Abigail Brackett, 36, 41 Northern Star and Freeman's Advocate,
Luther, Seth, 65, 66, 153 153
Norton, Mary Beth, 2-3, 9
McVickar, John, 138 “Notable” housewife, 10—11, 108
Magas, Branka, xit Noyes, Nicholas, 9
Maine Washingtonian Journal, 152 Nursing. See Health care
Manual of Self-Education, 67-68
Manufacturing, capitalized, 35-38, 46-47, Ogden, Annegret S., xv
52-53, 58, 96. See also Labor, women’s Ogden, John Cosens, 47-48, 53
unpaid Orcutt, Theodora, 53
Manufacturing, women’s domestic, 13, Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion, 26
16, 35, 38, 39, 40, 51; during Revolu- Outwork, 59, 121, 125, 132
tion, 31-32, 33, 34; and the Hamilto-
nian system, 46; after War of 1812, 52, Paff, Andrew, 38
53; in antebellum households, 77, 82- Paid domestic service, 13, 15, 16-17, 19,
83, 93-94, 108, 124, 133 37, 77, 78, 79-80, 89, 131-135
Marcet, Jane, 160 ‘‘Pastoralization,”’ defined by Raymond
Market dependence of households, 22-23, Williams, 147
35~38, 49-51, 54, 72-73, 96, 108-9, Patriarchy: of colonial household struc-
123, 124; function of housework in lim- ture, 4~5, 28, 29; and civic republican-
iting, 40, 42, 83-84, 91, 93, 115, 116, ism, 43-44; decline of, 156-57
123-25, 135-36. See also Cash exchange Pawning, 109, 123
Married or Single? , 119 Peck, Jesse, 142, 146
Marx, Karl, xi-xvit, 131 Perkins, William, 18
Mather, Cotton, 9, 26, 27 Pessen, Edward, 72, 73, 79
Mather, Increase, 9 Peterson, Susannah, 89
 Index 221
Philadelphia Temperance Advocate, 153 15, 41, 82-83, 87, 116, 125, 132, 133.
Pierce, Lydia D., 116 See also Paid domestic service
Pintard, John, 40, 41, 84 Shakers, 118-19
Poultry- and animal-tending, 40, 51, 77, Sherman, Richard, 7
83. 125, 132; women's participation in Shopping, 13, 14, 16, 53, 72, 84, 93, 102-
slaughtering, 12, 3, 124, 132, 133, 134
Practical Housekeeper, 162 Simpson, Mary, 37
Prices: of food, 49, 64, 132; of housing, Six Hundred Dollars a Year, 82, 83, 87,
49, 72, 180 n. 19, 18-83 n. 41; of land, 125, 126, 133, 137
50; of boarding, 132; of room and Sketch Book, The, 150
board, 134; of clothing, 134; of overall — siater, Samuel, 100

’ oe mothers, 8
Prince Sarah 1 5 ‘ 135 Sons: settlement of, 23; attitudes toward
Property ownership: and the denigration
of women’s domestic labor, 21-22, 24— Smith, Anna Bryant, 37
ae . Smith, Sarah, 93, 114
25, 45, 135-37, 156; and political rights, Spinning. 13. 31. 39. 40, 48. 52. 53. 93
43-44; as a sign of industriousness, 28- Bee ete
39 67-68 160 ’ 94, 95, 96, 106, 125. See also Paid do-
Providence Gazette, 34 mestic service
Public and Private Economy, 138 Springer, Mrs. (patient) » 39
Puritans. 4-6. 18-19. 25. 56 Stansell, Christine, 10, 108, 158
’ ’ o_o Status, women’s, 4—5. See also Golden
Age Theory
Recollections of a Housekeeper, 117 Stone, Hannah Matthews, 93
51 Stowe, Calvin, 151
Reflections on the State of the Union, 47, Stone, Lucy, ix, 83, 96

Report on Manufactures, 45-57 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 71, 75, 77, 81,
Republican manhood, 43-44, 56, 67 83, 87, 105, 107, 113, 116, 117, 124,
Republican motherhood, 42, 43, 56 129, 133, 151, 162-63
Raptr 2’ MAH 56 ae,
Strong, George San 151
Templeton,
.Richer
, ’sonSuffrage, 34, 43
Revo ve ; 21, 22, 29, 30-34 Sudbury, Massachusetts, land division, 6
ae ts Supervision of other household workers,
Ries Of ee a6 by women, 11-12, 13, 15, 17, 41, 77,
Rodman. Samuel 109. 78, 79-80, 95, 126. See also Paid do-
Rosaldo, Michele, xiii mestic Service
Swisshelm, Jane, 95
Rural
Rubin,Economy, 51yivis,
Gayle, xiii Svivis. Will 152
wamam,
Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Popu- Taverns, 6
lation of New York, The, 63, 101 Teaching, 6
Savage, Mr., 36 Technology (domestic), 6, 38, 105-8,
Scavenging, 14, 17, 40, 91, 95, 97, 108, 109-11, 113; cooking stoves, 106-7,
132, 133 109, 112; sewing machines, 107, 109-
Seccombe, Wally, xii 10, 112
Secker, William, 4 Thompson, Mary, 95
Sedgwick, Catharine, 119 Thorp, Philena, 93
Sedgwick, Theodore, 138 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 72
Seneca Falls (N.Y.), ix Tracy, Patricia, 23, 25
“Sequel to the ‘Vision of Bangor in the “Traffic in Women, The,” xiii
Twentieth Century,’ ” 117 Transportation revolution, 57-58, 106
Serving Women, xv Treatise on Domestic Economy, 114, 161
Sewing (and other needlework), 12, 13, Tuthill, Louisa, 111
222 Index
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, xv, 3, 10, 15, Williams, Raymond, 147
19, 26 Winslow, Rev. Hubbard, 76, 151
Uncle Tom's Cabin, 129 Winthrop, John, 5
Witchcraft (Puritan), 25, 56, 154
Vending, 6, 37, 62, 84, 88, 89, 92, 94, 109 Woman in America, 160-61
“Virtue,” 43; changing meaning of, 66-68 | Woman's Advocate, The, viii
Visiting and entertaining (as an aspect of | ‘Woman's Offices and Influence,’ 148-49
women's domestic labor), 16, 17 Woman's Rights Movement, ix
Women's Influence and Woman's Mission,
Wages: in early republic, 49-51; in ante- _ 112 ,
bellum period, 61-62, 70, 87, 132, 134, | Work swapping, 14, 48, 89
136 Worker consciousness: women’s, 17-18,
Wainwright, Hilary, xii 51-52, 97; men’s, 18, 31
Ware, Norman, 62 Working Man's Advocate, 155
Warner, Susan, 110-11 Wright, David, 77, 117
Weed, Thurlow, 141 Wright, Martha Coffin, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80,
Wide, Wide World, The, 110-11 82, 83, 107, 113, 117, 125, 134, 140
Widows, 6, 8, 24 Wright, William (‘Willy’), 78
‘Wife, The,”” 150
Wilentz, Sean, 62 Young, Arthur, 51
Willard, Samuel, 5 Young Wife, The, 76, 147-48