History of Women in the United States: Volume 4/1 Domestic Ideology and Domestic Work [Reprint 2012 ed.] 9783110968859, 9783598414589

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Historical Articles on Women's Lives and Activities

Edited by Nancy F. Cott Series ISBN 3-598-41454-4 1.

Theory and Method in Women's History ISBN 3-598-41455-2 Parti ISBN 3-598-41477-3 Part 2

2.

Household Constitution and Family Relationships ISBN 3-598-41456-0

3.

4.

Domestic Relations and Law ISBN 3-598-41457-9 Domestic Ideology and Domestic Work ISBN 3-598-41458-7 Parti ISBN 3-598-41475-7 Part 2

11. Women's Bodies: Health and Childbirth ISBN 3-598-41465-X 12. Education ISBN 3-598-41466-8 13. Religion ISBN 3-598-41467-6 14. Intercultural and Interracial Relations ISBN 3-598-41468-4 15. Women and War ISBN 3-598-41469-2

5.

The Intersection of Work and Family Life ISBN 3-598-41459-5 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41476-5 Part 2

16. Women Together: Organizational Life ISBN 3-598-41470-6

6.

Working on the Land ISBN 3-598-41460-9

17. Social and Moral Reform ISBN 3-598-41471-4 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41695-4 Part 2

7.

Industrial Wage Work ISBN 3-598-41461-7 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41693-8 Part 2

18. Women and Politics ISBN 3-598-41472-2 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41697-0 Part 2

8.

Professional and White-Collar Employments ISBN 3-598-41462-5 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41694-6 Part 2

19. Woman Suffrage ISBN 3-598-41473-0 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41696-2 Part 2

9.

Prostitution ISBN 3-598-41463-3

20. Feminist Struggles for Sex Equality ISBN 3-598-41474-9

10. Sexuality and Sexual Behavior ISBN 3-598-41464-1

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Historical Articles on Women's Lives and Activities

4

•

Domestic Ideology and Domestic Work

PART Ι

Edited with an Introduction by

Nancy F. Cott Yale University

K G · Saur Munich - London · New York · Paris 1992

ruDiisners i>oie The articles and chapters which comprise this collection originally appeared in a wide variety of >f publications and are reproduced here in facsimile from the highest quality offprints and d photocopies available. The reader will notice some occasional marginal shading and text-curl 1 common to photocopying from tightly bound volumes. Every attempt has been made to correct or r minimize this effect Copyright information for articles reproduced in this collection appears at the end of this volume. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data History of women in the United States : historical articles on women's lives and activities / edited with an introduction by Nancy F. Cott. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: 1. Theory and method in women's history — 2. Household constitution and family relationship» -- 3. Domestic relations and law — 4. Domestic ideology and domestic work — 5. The intersection of work and family life — 6. Working on the land -- 7. Industrial wage work ~ 8. Professional and white-collar employments -9. Prostitution - 10. Sexuality and sexual behavior --11. Women's bodies - 12. Education — 13. Religion — 14. Intercultural and interracial relations — 15. Women and war - 16. Women together — 17. Social and moral reform — 18. Women and politics — 19. Women suffrage - 20. Feminist struggles for sex equality. ISBN 3-598-41454-4 (set) 1. Women-United States-History. 2. Women-United States-Social conditions. I. Cott, Nancy F. HQ1410.H57 1992 305.4Ό973--dc20 92-16765 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP - Einheitsaufnahme History of women in the United States: historical articles on women's lives and activities / ed. with an introd. by Nancy F. Cott. - Munich ; London ; New York ; Paris : Saur. ISBN 3-598-41454-4 NE: Cott, Nancy F. (Hrsg.) Vol. 4. Domestic ideology and domestic work. PL 1. - (1992) ISBN 3-598-41458-7 © Printed on acid-free paper/Gedmckt auf säurefreiem Papier All Rights Strictly Reserved/Alle Rechte vorbehalten K.G.Saur Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Munich 1992 A Reed Reference Publishing Company Printed in the United States of America Printed/Bound by Edwards Brothers Incorporated, Ann Arbor ISBN 3-598-41458-7 (vol. 4/part 1) ISBN 3-598-41454-4 (series)

Contents Series Preface Introduction

ix xi Part 1

American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785-1815 RUTH H. BLOCH

3

To Earn Her Daily Bread: Housework and Antebellum Working-CIass Subsistence JEANNE BOYDSTON

29

The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860 BARBARA WELTER

48

Sentimental Womanhood and Domestic Education, 1830-1870 PHILLIDA BUNKLE

72

Women Shoeworkers and Domestic Ideology: Rural Outwork in Early Nineteenth-Century Essex County MARY H. BLEWETT

90

The Domestic Balance of Power Relations Between Mistress and Maid in Nineteenth-Century New England CAROL LASSER

116

Freedom's Yoke: Gender Conventions among Antebellum Free Blacks JAMES OLIVER HORTON

134

Women's Perspective on the Patriarchy in the 1850s ANNE FIROR SCOTT

160

Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History LINDA K. KERBER

173

Household Values, Women's Work, and Economic Growth, 1800-1930 W.ELLIOT BROWNLEE

204

American Women and Domestic Consumption, 1800-1920: Four Interpretive Themes JEAN GORDON and JAN McARTHUR

215

Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West ELIZABETH JAMESON

244

Cloth, Butter and Boarders: Women's Household Production for the Market JOANM. JENSEN

264

"The Sphinx in the Household": A New Look at the History of Household Workers BETTINA BERCH

291

Part 2 The Black Washerwoman in Southern Tradition HEATHER BIOLA

307

From Frontier Activism to Neo-Victorian Domesticity: Mormon Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries LAWRENCE FOSTER

317

Technology and Women's Work: The Lives of Working Class Women in Pittsburgh, 1870-1900 SUSAN J. KLEINBERG

336

Embellishing a Life of Labor. An Interpretation of the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885-1915 LIZABETH A. COHEN

351

The "Industrial Revolution" in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century RUTH SCHWARTZ COWAN

375

The Manufacture of Housework BARBARA EHRENREICH and DEIRDRE ENGLISH

398

Time Spent in Housework JO ANN VANEK

433

Experts and Servants: The National Council on Household Employment and the Decline of Domestic Service in the Twentieth Century FA YE E. DUDDEN 443 The Dialectics of Wage Work: Japanese-American Women and Domestic Service, 1905-1940 EVELYN NAKANO GLENN

464

Regulating Industrial Homework: The Triumph of "Sacred Motherhood" EILEEN BORIS 504 Chicanas Modernize Domestic Service MARY ROMERO

523

Copyright Information

539

Index

543

Series Preface In the space of one generation, women's history has become the fastest-growing area of scholarship in U.S. history. Since the resurgence of feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s, insistent questions about the historical meanings of "woman's place" have sowed and reaped a garden of scholarship. Where scholarly works used to be bare of mention of women, academic enterprise has now produced a vigorous growth of books and articles, bringing to light diverse women of every region, race, class and age. This research is marked by a renovating intent that refuses to accept as "human" history a history of men. Interest is lively and debate is stimulating and sought after attendance at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women rivals the size of the annual convention of the American Historical Association. While books in women's history are daily increasing in numbers and strength, as in any fast-developing field the scholarly literature in the form of articles is most expansive and up-to-the-minute. All the history journals now publish articles on women's work, domestic settings, family relations, household matters, female politics and organizations and so forth, and new journals have sprung into being to concentrate on such topics. Women's historians publish in numerous regional and thematic history journals as well as in feminist outlets and in journals of other social science disciplines. This series brings together a collection of outstanding articles from the field, almost all written in the past twenty years and more than half published during the 1980s. It brings together, in volumes organized by topic, essays otherwise widely dispersed. These volumes reprint only articles that originally appeared in journals, not chapters of books; review articles are not included. Articles have been chosen for overall quality and for range. Each one was chosen for one or more of the following reasons: because it is the standard authority on its subject matter; represents an important statement on a topic by a recognized scholar; presages an important book to come; provides a first look at new evidence or new methods; or opens an untapped area or new controversy. Older articles have been reprinted if their data or interpretation have not been surpassed or if they marked an important stage in the historiography, even if since superseded. The historical coverage of the series extends from the Revolutionary era to the 1960s. The articles themselves are dated from the 1940s through 1988. Volumes are organized by topic rather than time period. Within each volume, the ix

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SERIES PREFACE

articles are ordered chronologically (with respect to substance), so that the whole can be read as an historical overview. The only exception to this ordering principle is volume 1, on Theory and Method, in which the contents are arranged in order of publication. Within each volume there is an attempt to include articles on as diverse kinds of women as possible. None of the volume topics is regionally or racially defined; rather, all volumes are topically designed so as to afford views of women's work, family lives, and public activities which cut across races and regions. Any volume in the series stands on its own, supplying as full a treatment of a designated subject matter as the scholarly literature will provide. Several groupings of volumes also make sense; that is, volumes 2 through 5 all center around domestic and family matters; volumes 5 through 9 consider other varieties of women's work; volumes 9 through 11 concern uses and abuses of women's bodies; volumes 12 through 14 look at major aspects of socialization; and volumes IS through 20 include organizational and political efforts of many sorts. As a whole, the series displays in all its range the vitality of the field of women's history. Aside from imbuing U.S. history with new vision, scholarship in this area has informed, and should continue to inform, current public debate on issues from parental leave to the nuclear freeze. By bringing historical articles together under topical headings, these volumes both represent accurately the shape of historical controversy (or consensus) on given issues and make historians' findings most conveniently available for current reference.

Introduction Since Barbara Welter found and described, in 1966, a "cult of true womanhood" in popular prescriptive literature of the early nineteenth-century United States, probably the most-sounded theme in women's history has concerned the definition of "true womanhood," and its accompanying ideal of "domesticity." The conflict between ideology and actuality in women's domestic lives, the differing relations of women of different classes and statuses to the ideal of domesticity, and regional and ethnic adaptations or rejections of "true womanhood" have been the subject of historians' inquiries in the last two decades. The articles in this volume develop these themes, treating not only the dominant ideology which linked respectable femininity to domestic occupations but also exploring the content of domestic labor and domestic production, for both the mistress and the female servant of a household. To all appearances the mid-nineteenth century saw the emergence of a peculiarly American religion whose goddess was the wife and mother at her household hearth. In ladies' magazines, novels, sermons, and manuals on marriage and childrearing--even in newspaper chatter-a stereotype of feminine goodness, mercy, and service through domestic ministrations was widely proposed to the reading public. Although significant eighteenth-century writers in England and Europe had proposed models of decorous and appropriate womanhood-Rousseau's Sophie, in his book of education, Emile, was only one of the famous-in the nineteenth century the ideology of female domesticity was much more wide-ranging and influential. Transportation and communication advances as well as population migration westward meant that an ideal propagated in eastern cities carried its influence to rural towns and pioneer settlements. The domestic ideal of womanhood had such wide effect because it concerned not only feminine characteristics but also the nature and functions of family life. It promised that the virtuous wife and mother, by behaving appropriately in her "domestic sphere," by securing harmony in the home, by providing for her husband's comfort and her children's morality and good character, could assure social order. Under woman's reigning presence, the domestic realm appeared to be the source of personal virtue and social adjustment, the preserve of Christian morality. Less and less the engine of economic production or community formation outside, the home was more xi

xii

INTRODUCTION

assiduously celebrated for emotional and moral accomplishments centering on the family members within. For many women-including opinion-makers such as Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of the magazine Godey's Ladies Book, or Catharine Beecher, author of The American Woman's Home and other popular treatises-this restructured understanding of the family supplied a positive concept of womanhood and a means of elaborating the responsibilities to society that women could and should carry out without departing from (indeed by fully understanding) "woman's sphere." In their view, the most important contribution women could possibly make to society-a contribution essential and irreplaceable-lay in Christian nurture of their husbands and children. The garment of true womanhood and domesticity covered the shape of woman's work as much as woman's character. Despite the way that the ideology of domesticity made women's operations in the home a matter of presence, love, and being, the work involved in a nineteenth-century household was continuous and demanding. Contrasting men's sphere of "work" to women's sphere of "home," the ideology glossed over how much work was done at home. True, urban households never saw the growing of foodstuffs (except small kitchen gardens), or butchering or dairying, and soap, candles, rugs and the material for clothing were no longer made at home. But women's work even in the urban household still included sewing, knitting and mending most of the family's clothing, all the cleaning tasks (including the arduous family wash), and provision of three meals a day. And-perhaps more important~the majority of households in the U.S. were not urban until after 1920. Although the preeminent public media speaking of woman's place emanated from cities, most women lived on frontiers, farms or rural towns, where growing food, milking cows, collecting eggs, and bringing water and firewood into the house were parts of daily tasks. Indoor running water was not a regular feature of the nineteenthcentury household until the latter part of the century, and even then, only for the more prosperous. Cooking on a woodburning or coal stove was hardly less timeconsuming, though perhaps somewhat less dangerous, than cooking on an open hearth. At the same time the growing commercial and industrial prosperity of the urban parts of the U.S. dictated higher standards of consumption and display, so that meals became more varied and elaborate, and items of household decoration more numerous, requiring more maintenance, among those who could afford them. In prosperous households, the lady of the house did not do all the domestic work requisite to sustaining gentility: her servant or servants did, under her watchful supervision. Throughout the nineteenth century domestic service remained the single largest occupational category for women: in the latter part of the century, when the possibility of factory employment enlarged, still half of all employed women were domestic servants. The work necessary to households-

INTRODUCTION

xiii

cleaning, cooking, mending-was so far identified with women that a nineteenthcentury person had only to say a girl or woman was wanted to make it clear what kind of job was being offered. 1 By the same token, immigrants to America-if female-were assumed to be suitable to be hired into domestic service, although in practice the differences in outlook between them and their female employers occasioned much conflict between them. For generations of female immigrants, domestic service acted as a form of forced socialization into American ways of life. As soon as other employment opportunities presented themselves, girls and women in the labor force put domestic service at the bottom of their lists of choice. By the twentieth century, white women were much more likely to be found in factory and clerical work than domestic service but black women, rural migrants or urban residents, were still kept out of alternatives to laundry and domestic work by employers' and workers' prejudice. As these articles show, the investigation of women's work in the household is as much a look at employer-employee relations between mistress and maid as it is a study of some family members serving others, and as much a study of work for wages as it is of unpaid work.

Notes 1. See Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, CT, Wesleyan University Press, 1983).

Domestic Ideology and Domestic Work

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK

3

AMERICAN FEMININE IDEALS IN TRANSITION: THE RISE OF THE MORAL MOTHER, 1785-1815

RUTH H. BLOCH

Motherhood has long held a special place of honor in the symbolism of American life. Still a dominant value today, the ideal of motherhood probably achieved its quintessential expression in the writings of the mid-nineteenth century. Women, according to the prevailing Victorian image, were supremely virtuous, pious, tender, and understanding. Although women were also idealized as virgins, wives, and Christians, it was above all as mothers that women were attributed social influence as the chief transmitters of religious and moral values. Indeed, other respectable female roles—wife, charity worker, teacher, sentimental w r i t e r - w e r e in large part culturally defined as extensions of motherhood, all similarly regarded as nurturant, empathic, and morally directive. 1 The Victorian maternal ideal was first manifest as part of the culture of the most articulate, Anglo-American, Protestant, middle and upper classes. Some of its features, particularly its asexuality, probably never permeated as deeply into the culture of other American groups. However, the high evaluation of maternal influence was destined in time to command a far wider allegiance. By the mid-twentieth century, it would be difficult to identify a more pervasive "all-American" ideal. Even among the social groups who gained cultural dominance in the Victorian era, however, motherhood had not always been a dominant feminine ideal. Indeed, in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century literature written and read in America, motherhood was singularly unidealized, usually disregarded as a subject, and even at times actually denigrated. Partially because pre-Victorian writers understated the importance of motherhood, historians of the colonial period have also given the subject far less attention than more overtly economic forms of female labor, women's legal status, and the more common literary depiction of women as wives and Christians. Moreover, the widely acknowledged "transitional" phase between mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century

4

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES attitudes toward motherhood has received surprisingly little examination. Recently, the valuable work of Linda Kerber and Nancy Cott has begun to fill this scholarly gap, but primarily because they focus on other, broader issues-Kerber on views of women in late eighteenth-century republican ideology and Cott on a wide constellation of changes in New England women's lives between 1780 and 1835—neither author has given extended attention to changing conceptions of motherhood per se. In particular, no one has yet analyzed the wide range of printed literature circulating in America between the late seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries, much of it British in origin, that bore on the question of mothering. The relationship between this literature and the consciousness (much less behavior) of even its limited readership is, of course, highly problematic; and many unanswered questions about mothering in this period remain. Yet even when viewed narrowly as the "official" culture of dominant groups, this body of literature reveals a change in attitudes of great and continuing significance to the history of American women. 2 Prior to the late eighteenth century, two, essentially mutually exclusive, ideal images of women appeared in the literature written and read in America. The first, that of woman as "help-meet," has been the most extensively described by modern historians. 3 It was the earliest and most indigenously American literary ideal, associated above all with New England Puritanism and, later, with significant modifications, with a part of the American Enlightenment. In its Puritan version, the help-meet ideal laid great stress on the value of female subordination to men, a position justified both by Old Testament patriarchal models and by general cultural assumptions that women were weaker in reason; more prone to uncontrolled emotional extremes; and in need, therefore, of practical, moral, and intellectual guidance from men. Yet while thus proclaiming female mental inferiority and insisting on the wife's duty to obey her husband (except when he violated divine law), Puritan literature tended to downplay qualitative differences between the sexes and to uphold similar ideal standards for both men and women. Faith, virtue, wisdom, sobriety, industry, mutual love and fidelity in marriage, and joint obligations to children were typically enjoined on both sexes. Good wives, who were above all defined as pious, frugal, and hardworking, were especially valued for the help they could be to men in furthering both spiritual and worldly concerns. Some eighteenth-century Enlightenment writings on women published in America also minimized differences between the sexes

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK

5

and emphasized the usefulness of sensible, industrious wives. These writings, however, often revised the earlier help-meet ideal by simultaneously stressing female rational capabilities, advocating more serious education for women, and urging greater equality in marriage. In their defense of women, these authors, even more than the Puritans, tended to place special emphasis on the practical value of diligent housewives. 4 The second feminine ideal that appeared in the eighteenthcentury literature emphasized ornamental refinement. 5 Whereas the help-meet ideal tended to downplay sexual distinctions and to stress the utility of good housewives, this more upper-class ideal instead concentrated on feminine graces and dwelt on the charms of female social companionship in polite company. It came to America primarily by means of imported English literature, especially sentimental romances, and didactic pieces on female education and etiquette, many of which were popular enough to be reprinted in America. Eighteenth-century periodicals, largely extracted from contemporary English magazines, were also full of articles conveying an ornamental image of women. According to this vision, often described in highly ornate eighteenth-century prose and verse, women were exquisite beings—beautiful, delicate, pure, and refined. Although modesty and piety constituted key features of this ideal, as they did of the help-meet image, charm and fashionable female "accomplishments" such as musical performance, drawing, and speaking French tended to be incorporated as well. Originally associated with· the chivalric tradition of romantic love, this image of ornamental refinement still retained aristocratic overtones and probably strongly appealed to those elements of the eighteenth-century English and American prosperous middle-classes aspiring to gentility. *

*

*

*

*

*

Both of these eighteenth-century feminine ideals, the help-meet and the ornament, dwelt primarily on woman's relationships to God and man as Christian, wife, and social companion. Neither placed much emphasis on motherhood. In practically all of the literature on women circulating in America prior to the late eighteenth century, the theme of motherhood tended either to be ignored altogether in favor of such topics as courtship or marriage, or it was subsumed among a variety of other religious and domestic obligations shared with men. This is not to say that women, in reality, had no special maternal relationships to their children; women not only gave birth, they usually nursed and tended small children far more than men. Yet despite this actual behavior, motherhood received less normative emphasis and symbolic

6

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES appreciation in early American literature than did many other aspects of women's lives. Throughout most of the colonial period, relationships between mothers and infants rarely drew literary attention. Although we know that mothers generally took care of their babies, their behavior for the most part evidently remained ascriptively controlled, dictated by custom passed down from one generation to the next without any felt need for written scrutiny. Inasmuch as mothering became a matter for literary treatment at all, it was far from idealized. Puritan writers whose works circulated in New England did occasionally tum to the subject, but the main maternal functions that aroused their commentary were regarded as biological givens: childbearing and breastfeeding. Childbirth, God's special curse on the daughters of Eve, received notice from Puritan writers because, above all, it raised the specter of death. In an age when women often died in delivery, and infants frequently thereafter, ministers viewed pregnancy primarily as an occasion to exhort women to guard their health and, more importantly, to seek their spiritual salvation. 6 Partly in response to this high risk of mortality, fertile women who successfully bore many children also drew some special recognition. 7 The only other aspect of mothers' relationships with infants to receive much attention in early American literature was breastfeeding. Ministers addressed this issue specifically in order to urge mothers to nurse their own children. During this period, it was still customary for many urban and landed families throughout western Europe to send babies to suckle wet nurses, and, although the evidence on colonial America is sketchy, in the eighteenth century, wet-nursing seems to have made a few inroads on this side of the Atlantic as well. 8 The Puritan clergy strenuously objected to this practice, insisting that mothers who chose not to nurse their babies opposed the clear will of God as revealed in both Scripture and nature. Ministers commonly cited Biblical examples of mothers suckling babies and also pointed out that God obviously designed the breasts on the female body for this use. To defy this divine intention constituted a basic violation of a mother's calling, a clear-cut sign of sinful sloth, vanity, and selfishness. On occasion this religious case against wet-nursing joined with a medical one, that maternal breastfeeding less often endangered the physical health of the child. Only rarely, and evidently only in imported English treatises, was the impact of wet-nursing upon a child's character raised as a noteworthy consideration. American writers who condemned the practice stressed the importance of the child's health and, especially, the mother's duty to God, not the value of

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK

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an affective relationship between mother and child. 9 This absence of literary emphasis on emotional bonds between mothers and children is no indication, of course, that such attachments did not actually exist. Even the act of sending a child out to a wet nurse is not evidence that a mother was indifferent to her baby's health and happiness. 1 0 Indeed, although maternal love was seldom a theme in early American literature, it seems to have been largely taken for granted. Several Puritan ministers issued warnings against "a Mother's excessive fondness," the tendency for mothers to spoil or "cocker," their children, " t o as it were smoother their Children in their Embraces." 1 1 The observation that mothers were particularly tender toward their children, however, more often gave rise to criticism than commendation. Cotton Mather's printed funeral sermon for his own mother, which gave almost sentimental homage to maternal c o m f o r t , was a rare departure from this tendency to devalue what seemed distinctive about a mother's love. Yet even there, in characteristically Puritan fashion, the overriding theme of Mather's sermon was that God is still a "better c o m f o r t e r . " " What," he asked, "is the best of Mothers weigh'd in the Ballance with such a FatherV'12 In keeping with this highly patriarchal Puritan God, early American literature on childrearing gave as much or more notice and appreciation to fathers as to mothers. Compared with the paucity of written material on infancy, there was a great deal to be read about childhood education after the nursing stage. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, children were attracting increased attention as objects of artistic, literary, religious, and pedagogical concern throughout the western world. 1 3 In New England, where Puritans took an especially vital interest in socialization that would maximize chances of religious conversion, sermons and treatises on family life meticulously enumerated parental responsibilities. Practically all these works assumed that parental obligation was either vested primarily in fathers or shared by both parents without sexual distinction. Puritan writings on the family generally divided into separate sections that defined ideal relationships between husband and wife, parent and child, and master and servant, specifying the mutual obligations of each figure within the complementary pairs. The main tasks encumbant upon the parent, in addition to insuring the child's physical well-being, were to provide baptism, prayer, religious instruction, and assistance in the choice of a calling and a spouse. Because " p a r e n t " was itself a genderless term, these works often conveyed the impression that mothers and fathers

8

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES ideally performed much the same role. 14 Indeed, those few works that dealt separately with specifically maternal responsibilities— usually as one small part of sermons on virtuous women-reiterated many of the same duties that other works on childrearing commonly assigned to fathers as well. Good mothers were described as caring, pious, and wise; they prayed for their children, instructed and catechised them, reproved their sins; and they served as examples of virtue and faith. 15 None of these were distinctively maternal obligations. At the most, writers would point out that because mothers had closer contact with small children, they had special opportunities to make lasting impressions on young minds. 16 At times, however, commentators actually denigrated the value of this early maternal influence, insisting that fathers subsequently undertook the more serious and ultimately most beneficial education of their children. As Cotton Mather once expounded upon the proverb "A wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother," applying it to children of both sexes: . . . it may be worth while to Enquire, Why 'tis rather the Gladness of the Father than of the Mother, that is here mentioned upon the Wise Child1 Unto this I answer; 'Tis because the Father ordinarily has most Share in procuring, and most Sense in perceiving, the Wisdom of his Children. When Children are come to such Maturity, that their Wisdom does become Observable, ordinarily the Mother has more dismissed them from her Conversation than the Father has from his.. .. But if you go on to Enquire, Why 'tis rather the Sadness of the Mother, than of the Father, that is mentioned upon the Foolish Child? Unto this I answer; 'Tis because when Children miscarry the Mother is ordinarily most Blamed for I f . People will be most ready to say t and very Often say it very Justly too, 'Twas her making Fools of them, that betray'd them into the Sinful Folly. . . , 1 7

Those works that outlined the more neutral "parent's" obligations were, moreover, often heavily patriarchal in tone, not only employing the pronoun "he," but also drawing from such Biblical models as Abraham, Joshua, and David. 18 At times, specifically paternal duties such as presiding over family worship received special emphasis. Other works on the upbringing of children were explicitly addressed to fathers alone, while only one book published in America prior to the late eighteenth century, an edition of The Mother's Catechism attributed to the English cleric John Willison, was designed specifically for mothers. 19 Indeed, ministers often felt it necessary to make a special point that mothers were not "exempted" from the duty to participate in the religious education of their children. 20 Others noted a tendency among children to

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respect their mothers less than their fathers and reminded them of the Fifth C o m m a n d m e n t injunction to h o n o r b o t h parents equally. William Gouge, the English Puritan whose treatise on family life was well known in New England, even sympathetically acknowledged that, at least for boys, the d u t y to h o n o r mothers despite their manifold female deficiencies was " t h e truest triall of a childes subjection." 2 1 This devaluation of m o t h e r h o o d was, on the one hand, an integral part of broader cultural assumptions about the inferiority of w o m e n . The traditional view that women were less rational, less capable of controlling e m o t i o n s than men, helped to explain not only their unfitness for civil and ecclesiastical leadership and their need to be deferential in marriage, but also their subordinate parental status. Certain qualities regarded as essential to good childrearing, such as self-discipline and theological understanding, were deemed more characteristic of men; and the Protestant Reformation even f u r t h e r accentuated the value of these supposedly masculine traits. Moreover, by abandoning certain Catholic and aristocratic traditions that had enhanced the position of women—such as the worship of Mary and the female saints and the extensive education of at least some privileged women—Puritanism in some ways actually lowered the status of w o m e n . At a time when the domestic socialization of children was becoming a m a t t e r of greater cultural scrutiny than before t h r o u g h o u t the western European world, the paternal role, in particular, drew p r o n o u n c e d emphasis and respect. On the other hand, despite this elevation of fathers over mothers, the standard against which they were measured was essentially the same. Although mothers had more weaknesses t o overcome, as " p a r e n t s " they were supposed t o strive toward an identical ideal. No differentiated maternal role received e x t e n d e d definition. Only childbearing, breastfeeding, and the preliminary education of very small children drew notice as uniquely maternal obligations. Partially because Puritans believed that infants were depraved and that the truly decisive process of conversion only began later o n , these early years of p r e d o m i n a n t l y maternal care aroused minimal interest relative to the later period of serious religious instruction that involved fathers as well. The lack of emphasis on m o t h e r h o o d in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritan literature reflected, in addition, certain social realities of family life. Fathers not only wielded superior intellectual and moral a u t h o r i t y as men, but they also worked in sufficient proximity to their children to take an active part in childrearing. Craftsmen and tradesmen typically c o n d u c t e d their

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businesses at home; even farmers worked close by and o f t e n spent long winter months indoors. Furthermore, although the term " p a r e n t " referred to mothers and fathers, other adult figures frequently lived with children and undoubtedly shared childrearing obligations, thereby further diffusing the parental role. Colonial households, for example, often included servants, many of them adolescents sent by their parents to learn practical skills from other adults. 2 2 Writings on familial obligations typically advised masters to treat servants as they would their own children; servants, in turn, were enjoined to aid in the religious education of the young. 2 3 Their involvement in the life of a growing child may well have further undermined the uniqueness of the maternal relationship. Mothers, moreover, much like fathers and servants, typically engaged in other activities in addition to childrearing. Not only were rudimentary household tasks demanding occupations; but women also had to produce many of their own commodities for domestic use in this preindustrial, and still relatively uncommercial, economy. They o f t e n helped their husbands with the craft or trade, and on occasion even owned and managed enterprises inherited from deceased husbands or fathers. 2 4 If parenthood was not regarded as a predominantly maternal responsibility, neither was motherhood the primary occupation of women. The prevailing image of women as wives, or "help-meets," rather than mothers, then, while partly a result of deprecatory opinions about both women and children, also accurately described major aspects of women's lives. The more fanciful ornamental ideal of female refinement sought, to the contrary, to elevate women above all the banalities of work. Yet even while taking the otherwise nearly opposite perspective on women, this ideal, too, tended to disregard motherhood in preference for other defining characteristics. The rearing of children was evidently considered a far too mundane and undistinguished feature of a woman's married life t o warrant idealization from either point of view. The second volume of Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela more than any other work first heralded the new, idealized conception of motherhood. Here the new ex-servant girl Pamela settles into her married life with the country squire Mr. B. and takes on the at once serious and pleasurable task of rearing their children. Although the plot actually revolves around other, more suspenseful themes, the novel dwells periodically on Mrs. B.'s maternal virtue: she unsuccessfully pleads with her husband to allow her to breastfeed her baby ; she jeopardizes her own health to nurse her son when he contracts smallpox (probably a consequence of using the wet

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nurse); she studiously engaged in a detailed examination of Locke's Thoughts on Education', and, in the closing scene of the novel, she recounts moral tales to enraptured children clustered about her in the nursery. One suspects that the popularity of Pamela was due far less to this domestic sequel than to the passionate romance of the first volume. Yet this work, which appeared in its first American edition as early as 1744, offered a preliminary sketch of a feminine ideal that by the turn of the century had become widespread— particularly in more explicitly didactic religious, educational, and medical literature. By transforming the virginal chambermaid Pamela into the wise matron Mrs. B., Richardson merged parts of the older ideals of domestic competence and ornamental purity with the new image of the moral mother. Although anticipated by Richardson, this new maternal ideal gained ascendancy in America only toward the end of the eighteenth century. It emerged in the context of an expanding literature on various aspects of women's lives, including female education, courtship, and marriage. Children, too, always objects of great concern in Puritan literature, received ever more specialized and detailed attention over the course of the eighteenth century. 2 5 The difference between these post-Revolutionary commentaries and earlier publications on women and children was not, however, merely a difference in number but a difference in kind. To be sure, in the literature on women the older help-meet and ornamental ideals were still much in evidence; and in literature on childrearing the genderless "parent" was still an object of address. However, an altered conception of motherhood developed alongside these traditional views. Between 1785 and 1815, large numbers of reprinted British and indigenously American works began to appear that stressed the unique value of the maternal role. Not only did the still popular Pamela articulate this new theme, but so did many contemporary books and magazines published in America on such subjects as family religion, children's health and morality, and female manners and education. It was taken up, moreover, by late eighteenth-century Enlightenment rationalists and evangelical Protestants both, groups representing broad Anglo-American intellectual orientations that became increasingly polarized near the end of the century. Although they tended to define it somewhat differently, the value of moral motherhood was one of the few things about which many on both sides agreed. During the late eighteenth century, writers began to dwell on the critical importance of proper maternal care during infancy.

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What had earlier been left to custom for the first time became a matter of widespread written analysis and prescriptive advice. Opposition to wet-nursing, for example, although always pronounced in Puritan America, now enlisted the support of many physicians and other secular commentators who advanced the cause of maternal breastfeeding on far more comprehensive grounds. Mothers who chose not to nurse their own children were still regarded as essentially profane and were now often charged with violating Enlightenment natural law as well as the Protestant will of God. The child's health became an even more salient factor in these discussions than it had been earlier. And, in addition to extending these older arguments, late eighteenthcentury authors introduced a new set of objections to wet-nursing. They began, for example, to stress the detrimental effects upon the child's character. The strict Calvinist doctrine of infant depravity began giving way to the more environmentalist psychology of the Enlightenment, and many writers came to portray the newborn baby's mind as infinitely impressionable, as "a blank sheet of paper," "spotless as new-fallen s n o w , " capable of being "easily moulded into any F o r m . " 2 6 Earlier European medical theorists had warned that a nurse could convey bad character, or "humour," through the physical medium of milk, an argument that had never caught on in Puritan America. 2 7 Now several writers contended that those who nursed babies wielded determining psychological influence, not so much through the milk itself (although the metaphor was on occasion employed) but, more significantly, through their personal interaction. Wet nurses, they argued, could not be trusted to implant desirable characters because they felt less affection for babies than natural mothers and because they might be mentally or morally deficient. "What prudent m o t h e r , " asked the Rhode Island minister Enos Hitchcock, "will trust the commencement of the education of her child in the hands of a mercenary nurse . . . who knows little more than how to yield nourishment to an infant [?] " 2 8 Borrowing an expression from Rousseau, a New York midwife named Mary Watkins protested that, in addition, wet-nursing violated " t h e rights of the mother to see her infant love another woman as well or better than herself." 2 9 Mindful that "even upon the breast infants are susceptible of impressions," authorities encouraged nursing mothers to be "double careful" of their tempers, " t o indulge no ideas but what are chearful, and no sentiments but what are kindly." 3 0 Indeed, several advised that even if a mother proved incapable of breastfeeding, she should never send her baby away from home to nurse. Rather she herself nevertheless should assume primary

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control over the physical and emotional care of her child, either by feeding it manually or by keeping a wet nurse on hand under her close supervision. 31 In another major revision of the case against wet-nursing, writers began to recommend maternal breastfeeding not only as a necessary religious duty, but also as a source of physical and psychological fulfillment for the mother as well as the child. Nursing, as well as infant care generally, came to be viewed as an exquisite pleasure, as an invaluable opportunity to delight in the charms of innocent infancy. Far from requiring physical sacrifice, many authors suggested, breastfeeding actually enhanced the mother's health; nursing mothers became more radiant, contented, graceful, and "harmonious." 3 2 And, contrary to fashionable opinion, men would find these mothers more attractive as well. As the widely read English physician Hugh Smith phrased this often highly sentimental appeal, "a chaste and tender wife, with a little one at her breast is certainly to her husband the most exquisitely enchanting object upon e a r t h . " 3 3 Not only were mothers strongly advised to feed their own children, but for the first time they were also furnished with extensive written information about how to do it. They were instructed how to overcome physical problems such as sore nipples, how to use manual devices like the " p o t " and the " b o a t , " how often to feed, when to wean, and so on. Medical experts also addressed mothers on various other aspects of infant care. Handbooks on child nurture and disease began to become widely available during this period. Most of these were American reprints of slightly earlier works by well-known English and Scotch obstetricians, but in the early nineteenth century, indigenous American publications also began to appear. These works urged mothers to tend closely to their small children—not just to nurse them competently when sick, but to clothe them loosely rather than swaddle them, to keep them meticulously clean, to exercise them regularly outdoors, to keep them on a special diet for years, and (some texts said) to feed them on demand rather than on schedule. 3 4 Although we know next to nothing about actual childrearing practices, most of these admonitions seem aimed toward increasing the amount of attention paid by mothers to small children. Infant care came to be viewed as an exacting occupation, one requiring not only heightened concentration, but also special expertise. Tasks that had earlier been regulated by unwritten custom now began to be matters for extended analysis and deliberate, rational manipulation. A few of the British physicians openly deplored the superstitious ignorance of most mothers

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and believed themselves to be on a mission of scientific enlightenment. 35 This medical condescension could, however, also backfire as mothers themselves came to take pride in their craft. The Maternal Physician, for example, a book of advice written by an American mother of eight, spoke more directly from the voice of experience. Acknowledging her debt to the books by the doctors, she adds: " . . . these gentlemen must pardon me if I think, after all, that a mother is her child's best physician, in all ordinary cases; and that none but a mother can tell how to nurse an infant as it ought to be nursed." 36 Several of these popular medical handbooks on childcare contained sections offering advice on the psychological as well as the physical management of small children. The dominant message was that mothers should establish gentle but firm moral discipline as early as possible. Just as the impressionability of infant minds became grounds for objecting to wet nurses, so prevailing assumptions about the continuing malleability of small children's characters served to heighten the responsibility assigned to mothers throughout these first formative years. Many writers warned against entrusting children to servants, who were commonly characterized as careless, ignorant, and even potentially corrupt. William Buchan, the author of the manual Advice to Mothers, described the far-reaching ramifications of this early maternal moral custody: Everything great or good in future life, must be the effect of early impressions; and by whom are those impressions to be made but by mothers, who are most interested in the consequences? Their instructions and example will have a lasting influence and of course, will go farther to form the morals, than all the eloquence of the pulpit, the efforts of schoolmasters, or the corrective power of the civil magistrate, who may, indeed, punish crimes, but cannot implant the seeds of virtue. 37

Not surprisingly, ministers and secular moralists as well as medical experts often took up this theme, exhorting mothers to use their power to "ingraft," "sow," and "root" steadfast principles of virtue in impressionable young minds. 38 "Weighty beyond expression is the charge devolved on the female parent," solemnly observed the New Hampshire minister Jesse Appleton, "It is not within the province of human wisdom to calculate all the happy consequences resulting from the perservering assiduity of motherers." 39 As writers thus accorded more significance to maternal care during the first years of life, they in effect upgraded the status of what had always been a female role. For mothers traditionally

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had been entrusted with very small children, particularly in America where wet-nursing was relatively rare from the outset. The change in conceptions of motherhood involved, however, not simply a higher evaluation of an age-old occupation but also a substantive redefinition of the maternal role. Many responsibilities that had earlier been assigned to fathers or to parents jointly became transferred to mothers alone. Whereas Puritan writers had portrayed fathers as taking an active, even primary role in childhood education once the children became capable of rational thought and moral discrimination, now fathers began to recede into the background in writings about the domestic education of children. By the turn of the century, Protestant clergymen frequently stressed the religious influence of mothers without reference to any subsequent paternal intervention at all. Whereas past literature on childhood education had been primarily addressed to fathers, now books and magazines catering to women offered advice on the moral upbringing, discipline, and education of growing children. 40 Catechisms, instructive dialogues, and moral stories for children began to feature mothers in the instructive role. One anonymous publication entitled The Mother's Gift, for example, a work that went into several American editions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, contained both a catechism and several heavily didactic stories about children's lives in which fathers scarcely appear. 41 Mrs. Elizabeth Helme, the English author of another such educational manual for mothers called Maternal Instruction reprinted in New York in 1804, introduced her work by explaining, "As I regard an informed mother the most proper and attractive of all teachers, I have chosen that character as the principal, in the following sheets." 4 2 A new Quaker catechism similarly cast "mother" as the questioner, as did other, less formal educational dialogues. 43 Even the earlier Mother's Catechism by John Willison now enjoyed an impressive revival.44 Nor were all of these works aimed solely at the religious and moral education of children. Practical information on the use of tools and money; basic skills such as reading and arithmetic; and even more advanced subjects such as history, biography, geography, science, and art all fell within the range of what at least some authors regarded as the mother's appropriate educational role. 45 Although this early maternal instruction scarcely substituted for the more formal education that children, especially boys, would receive later on, professional teachers were evidently to take up where mothers left off. "Business, and many cares, call the father abroad," explained a New Hampshire clergyman, "but

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home is the mother's province—here she reigns sole mistress the greatest part of her life." 4 6 Fathers, concurred an English author widely read in America, "can afford but little leisure to superintend the education of their children." 4 7 Indeed, just as a few Puritan commentators had seen fit to remind mothers that they, too, bore some responsibilities for childhood education, now an occasional work made the reverse point that fathers should not simply leave the rearing of children entirely to mothers alone 4 8 The literature that entrusted mothers with such wide-ranging physical, psychological, religious, and intellectual custody over the young in part accurately reflected concrete social changes that greatly expanded and specialized the maternal role. These structural changes occurred first and far more rapidly in England, still the source of much that was read in America even after the Revolution, but the indigenous as well as the imported literature also spoke to a long-range social process beginning in America. A real, although very gradual, realignment in the familial division of labor loosely coincided with this cultural redefinition of motherhood; and it occurred first among the same literate, commercial middle-class groups that provided the largest literary market. Whereas earlier mothers had often shared parental responsibilities with servants and fathers, by the late eighteenth century, these other figures had begun to withdraw from the domestic scene. Fewer middle-class households contained servants than they had earlier. Those who did become servants in the late eighteenth century, moreover, now usually came from much lower social and cultural backgrounds than their employers, a difference which undoubtedly contributed to the frequency of later warnings against their influence on children. 4 9 The structural change that altered parental roles the most, however, was the gradual physical removal of the father's place of work from the home, a process already under way in eighteenth-century America among tradesmen, craftsmen, manufacturers, and professionals (if not the majority of farmers), and one that in England was rapidly accelerating with the beginnings of industrialization. Fathers and their assistants who worked outside the domestic premises no longer had continuous contact with children. In the absence of these other parental figures, childrearing responsibilities slowly became less diffused, more exclusively focused on mothers. 5 0 Not only did mothers rear children more by themselves, but simultaneously—and for similar reasons—women became more exclusively preoccupied with their maternal roles. Although literature at the turn of the century still stressed the value of wives who were frugal "economisers," women were becoming less vitally

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engaged in economic production. Those whose husbands worked away from home could less directly assist their labor. And although the textile industry continued to provide work for some, usually unmarried, women in their homes, the decline of the domestic system of production was already under way in both England and America by the early nineteenth century. 5 1 Home manufacturing for domestic use, while still a major activity of most women, was becoming a less demanding job in settled regions as more goods became available at affordable prices on the expanding commercial market. As women were relieved of much of their former economic role and at the same time left in primary care of children, motherhood understandably came to be a more salient feature of adult female life. Still another interrelated development, also associated with increased material comfort as well as some expansion of literacy, was the growth of a female, middle-class reading public in England and America. 52 These more leisured women provided a ready market for authors, many of whom themselves were women, who spoke to their special concerns as mothers. As women came to be seen as the primary childrearers, motherhood often came to be viewed as a powerful vehicle through which women wielded broad social influence. Physicians and other writers delivering advice on childcare often pointed to the socially beneficial effects of good mothering, some even holding out the possibility of a wholesale "revolution" in human manners and morals: 53 As both Nancy Cott and Ann Douglas have recently observed, New England ministers who spoke to an increasingly female constituency in this period were especially taken with this vision of maternal moral influence permeating throughout society. 54 "Mothers do, in a sense, hold the reins of government and sway the ensigns of national prosperity and glory," the Reverend William Lyman typically glorified the role, "yea, they give direction to the moral sentiments of our rising hopes, and contribute to form their moral state." 5 5 This was, of course, a particularly compelling argument to those seeking to justify the restriction of women to the ever-narrowing domestic sphere. Characterizing the important responsibilities of motherhood, the minister Thomas Barnard, for example, took a direct swipe at Mary Wollstonecraft's feminist polemic, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. "These are not the fancied, but the real 'Rights of Women.' They give them an extensive power over the fortunes of man in every generation." 56 Yet such argumentation, far from being confined to antifeminists, carried weight even with Wollstonecraft herself who, while insisting that women were capable of other achievements as well, also stressed that "the rearing of children-that is,

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the laying a [sic] foundation of sound health both of body and mind in the rising generation . . . [is] the peculiar destination of women." 5 7 As motherhood was deemed a more demanding responsibility than it had been earlier, the complementary view arose that women, in particular, were eminently suited to rear children. Not only were they endowed with the physiology to bear and nurse babies, but, an increasing number of writers suggested, they also possessed the requisite mental qualities to take charge of the minds and morals of growing children. Challenging the traditionally vaunted moral, and often even intellectual, superiority of men, authors increasingly celebrated examples of female piety, learning, courage, and benevolence. 58 Women often came to be depicted not only as virtuous in themselves, but as more virtuous than men, indeed, as the main "conservators of morals" in society by means of their beneficial influence on both men and children. 59 Even New England clergymen regarded "the superior sensibility of females," their "better qualities" of tenderness, compassion, patience, and fortitude as inclining them more naturally toward Christianity than men. 6 0 In part, this exaltation of female piety came as an appreciative response to the ministers' increasingly female congregations, but it also reflected broad intellectual changes extending far beyond the New England churches. For during this period the qualities traditionally associated with women, particularly emotionalism, came to be more highly valued throughout Anglo-American culture. Not only religion, which became more revivalistic and softer in doctrine, but sentimental and romantic literature as well as other, less popular artistic and intellectual movements all registered this shift. No longer grounds for disparagement, the supposedly natural susceptibility of women to "the heart" jiow became viewed as the foundation of their superior virtue. In accord with this newly elevated characterization of female emotions, maternal fondness and tenderness toward childrenbehavior that had often provoked criticism from Puritan writersnow received highly sentimental acclaim. In Pamela, for example, when Richardson describes Mrs. B. disagreeing with a few points in Locke's Thoughts on Education, her objections arise from her own more gentle and indulgent approach to children. Around the turn of the century many authors presented tenderness as the primary component of good mothering, indeed, as the very quality most essential to the cultivation of morality in children. 61 In sentimental poetry carried by magazines—flowery verses bearing such titles as "A Mother's Address to a Dying Infant," "Sweet

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Infant," "Mother to Child"—this adulation of maternal love achieved its most maudlin expression. 62 Although writers still warned against the tendency of mothers to spoil their children, they no longer relied so much on the father's corrective influence as on the mother's own ability to achieve self-control. At times authors even envisioned the tender mother softening the " t o o rough and severe Passions of the Father." 6 3 Although paternal tenderness, too, could give rise to sentimental praise, fathers often appeared as excessively harsh and authoritarian—in fiction, for example, frequently cast in the roles of arranging unhappy marriages for their children. 6 4 An anonymous volume on women published in Philadelphia in 1797 drew the following extravagant contrast between the feelings of fathers and mothers: Where are the tender feelings, the cries, the powerful emotions of nature? Where is the sentiment, at once sublime and pathetic, that carries every feeling to excess? Is it to be found in the frosty indifference and the rigid severity, of so many fathers? No; it is in the warm impassioned bosom of the m o t h e r . . . . These great expressions of nature, these heartrending emotions, which fill us at once with wonder, compassion and terror, always have belonged, and always will belong only to women. They possess . . . an inexpressible something, which carried them beyond themselves. They seem to discover to us new souls, above the standard of humanity. 65

Significantly, many writers of the period incorporated a sentimental conception of maternal feelings into more overtly feminist arguments for female intellectual equality. 6 6 Indeed, the conviction that women innately possessed the best physical, emotional, and moral qualifications for rearing children did not preclude a simultaneous commitment to more extensive female education among feminists and nonfeminists alike. With increasing frequency, in fact, motherhood itself was presented as a compelling reason for improved female education. Raised in opposition to "vain" and "frivolous" instruction in the genteel social ornaments such as music and French, the argument that girls needed to be prepared for future maternal responsibilities carried a distinctively middle-class, anti-aristocratic, and utilitarian ring. As historian Linda Kerber has emphasized, this appeal had a special resonance in the newly republican United States where motherhood offered an acceptable outlet for female talent and patriotism despite women's exclusion from politics. 67 Far from an essentially indigenous response to the Revolution, however, it was an argument that became popular among middle-class ideologues on both sides of the

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Atlantic. Moreover, while in the long run it generally supported conservative desires to keep women in the home, in this transitional period the maternal ideal often lent support to contradictory points of view on female education and social roles. On the one hand, the ideal served to strengthen the Enlightenment feminist case for a more intellectually rigorous education for women. According to this line of thought, women, too, possessed human reason and with an advanced education would not only better fulfill their human potential and perhaps even make valuable contributions outside the home; but they would, in addition, handle themselves more rationally as mothers and pass valuable knowledge on to their children. 68 On the other hand, however, the responsibilities of motherhood could support the case for a more serious, but also more specialized, domestic education for women. This was an implicit message of much of the accumulating body of medical and educational childrearing literature addressed to mothers which deplored women's ignorance about the practical details of rearing children. Most writers proposing systematic programs of female education did not recommend the actual study of childcare, but many did cite the influence of mothers as a primary reason to tailor curricula to domestic utility. Benjamin Rush, for example, in his Thoughts upon Female Education, held that knowledge of foreign languages and musical instruments had no real use even for affluent American women who, unlike their British counterparts, were, as wives and mothers, vitally engaged in managing households and shaping the "manners and character" of the new republic. Their education should instead concentrate on handwriting, bookkeeping, "the more useful branches of literature," and, especially, Christianity. 69 This emphasis on religious instruction as essential preparation for female domestic responsibilities characterized the writings of various Christian apologists, including several English authors widely read in America around the turn of the century. Whereas Enlightenment feminists like Wollstonecraft argued that the development of female intellect best enabled women to become good mothers as well as the equals of men in other respects, these religious figures stressed the cultivation of female piety, as well as instruction in other "basics," to render women most capable as wives and mothers operating within an exclusively domestic context. Compared with more genteel writers who also viewed female piety as a central component of true feminine refinement, these generally middle-class Protestants laid far greater stress on the practical domestic utility of female Christian virtue. Hannah More, for example, the famous English Evangelical author of cheap

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religious tracts, described the care of families as "the profession of ladies" comparable to the demanding professions of men. Decrying the idle vanity of female ornamentation and intellectual prowess, she advocated "a predominance of those more sober studies, which, not having display for the object will not bring celebrity, but improve usefulness." 7 0 She warned adolescent girls that only religious women make desirable wives: . . how can a man of any understanding, (whatever his own religious professions may be) trust that woman with the care of his family, and the education of his children, who wants herself the best incentive to a virtuous life. . . ? 7 1 It was this evangelical perspective on motherhood, with its stress on women's religiosity rather than reason and its emphasis on the importance of their exclusively domestic role, that reigned supreme in the Victorian period. Emerging out of this earlier time of flux, this view began to achieve predominance after the turn of the century, bolstered by an upsurge of religious revivalism and a conservative reaction, especially in the churches, against the radicalism of the French Revolution. Indeed, insofar as eighteenthcentury feminism involved a non-Christian rationalism, it probably always appealed to a limited base. 7 2 The evangelical maternal ideal drew from a much more popular and indigenous Protestant tradition, one that began a resurgence in the early nineteenth century with the revivals and the organization of many voluntary "benevolent" associations. Even nonrevialist "liberal" Protestants were infected with much of this evangelical spirit and similarly promoted this new maternal ideal. 7 3 The evangelical image of the moral mother triumphed in part because it presented a compelling synthesis of the old and the new. In certain respects it constituted an updated version of the older feminine ideal of help-meet, with its downplaying of female intellect and its emphasis on domestic usefulness and Christian virtue. It also incorporated key features of the ideal of ornamental refinement, particularly its sentimental conception of feminine purity. In other respects, however, the evangelical ideal of the moral mother sharply diverged from these earlier predecessors and conformed more closely to Enlightenment feminist conceptions of women. This is, of course, particularly true of their c o m m o n elevation of the maternal role. Indeed it is ironic that influential evangelical polemicists sought to discredit feminism by characterizing it not only as anti-Christian, promiscuous, and vain, but as antimotherhood as well. 74 For although Enlightenment feminists and evangelical Protestants might disagree about how mothering stood in relation to other female intellectual, economic, domestic, and religious

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pursuits, they generally agreed about the imperative natural calling, the serious educational requirements, and the extensive social utility of motherhood. In the long run, the rise of the moral mother, even in its more conservative evangelical version, had ambiguous effects on the status of women. On the one hand, it provided b o t h ideological justification and incentive for the contraction of female activity into the preoccupations of motherhood. The newfound emphasis on the maternal role became an integral part of the rigid sexual differentiation that became so characteristic of nineteenth-century, middle-class Protestant culture. Women came to be perceived as, essentially, "moral mothers," not only in relation to their children, but also in their other major supportive and didactic roles as teachers, charity workers, and sentimental writers. Moreover, the personality traits stereotypically associated with these nineteeenthcentury w o m e n - t h e emotionalism, selflessness, and e m p a t h y that characteristically contrasted to male rationalism, competitiveness, and individualism-may well have been reinforced by the psychological repercussions of such intensively maternal nurture. For, as psychoanalytic sociologists have suggested, when mothers rear children virtually alone, the psychological responses of the sexes widely diverge: girls become more interdependent and expressive, and boys tend to become more independent and emotionally selfcontained. 7 5 Through this cycle of mutual reinforcement, then, the social, cultural, and psychological impact of the elevation of the maternal role limited the range of acceptable female pursuits and helped to generate highly distinctive and restrictive feminine and masculine styles. On the other hand, however, the rise of the moral m o t h e r also played its part in the long-range upgrading of the social status of women. The abortive rationalist feminism of the late eighteenth century may be more to the taste of contemporary women, but the evangelical ideal of motherhood also broke with tradition by attributing to women strong moral authority and granting them an important field of special expertise. It entitled them t o considerable autonomy within what came to be defined as the "woman's sphere," and it even helped to create both the legitimacy and the solidarity necessary for later, more successful, feminist agitation. 7 6

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NOTES 1 See especially Anne L. Kuhn, The Mother's Role in Childhood Education (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947); Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860," American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151-74; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977). ^Elizabeth Anthony Dexter, Colonial Women of Affairs (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1924); Julia Cherry Spruil, Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1938); Mary Sumner Benson, Women in Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935); Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); John Demos, A Little Commonwealth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America (New York: New Viewpoints, 1975), pp. 21135; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735,"American Quarterly 28 (Spring 1976): 20-40; Margaret W. Masson, "The Typology of the Female as a Model for the Regenerate: Puritan Preaching, 1690-1730," Signs 2 (Winter 1976): 304-15. For examples of the more recent trend see Linda K. Kerber, "Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic, 1787-1805," in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, eds. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick (New York: Knopf, 1974), pp. 3659; Linda K. Kerber, "The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment-An American Perspective," American Quarterly 28 (Summer 1976): 187-205; Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 46-47, 58-62, 85-92, and passim. 3This portrait of the Puritan "help-meet" ideal is drawn from Morgan, Ryan, Ulrich, and from my own reading of numerous Puritan published sermons and treatises on women and family life. More extensive documentation on many points in this paper is available from the author upon request. 4 A few examples are Benjamin Franklin, Reflections on Courtship and Marriage (Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1746); John Witherspoon, "Letters on Marriage," in A Series of Letters on Courtship and Marriage (Springfield, Mass.: F. Stebbins, 1798); "On the Choice of a Wife," The Columbian Magazine and the Universal Asylum 8 (March 1792): 176-79. 5This genteel ideal has received far less scholarly treatment than the help-meet, although it has been observed by Ryan and Benson. Also see Robert Middlekauff, Ancients and Axioms (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 106-108,167-68. This sketch draws primarily from my own reading of the eighteenth-century sources. öJohn Oliver, A Present for Teeming Women (Boston: Benjamin Harris, 1694); Cotton Mather, Elizabeth on her Holy Retirement (Boston: B. Green, 1710). Also see Catherine M. Schölten, " 'On the Importance of the Obstetrick Art': Changing Customs of Childbirth in America, 1760 to 1825," William and Mary Quarterly 34 (July 1977): 426-45. ? Benjamin Colman, Some of the Honours that Religion Does unto the Fruitful Mothers in Israel (Boston: B. Green, 1715). 8The evidence on wet-nursing in western Europe is summarized in Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975), pp. 175-77. For some scattered evidence on American wetnursing, see Joseph E. Illick, "Child-Rearing in Seventeenth-Century England and America," in The History of Childhood, ed. Lloyd deMause (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 325; Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 149; Spruill, Women's Life and Work, pp. 55-57. 9A few examples of numerous admonitions against wetnursing are Robert Cleaver,

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A Godlie Forme of Householde Government (London: Felix Kingston, 1598), pp. 23539; William Gouge, Of Domestical Duties (London: John Haviland, 1622), pp. 507-17; Cotton Matter, Ornaments for the Daughters ofZion (Cambridge, Mass.: Samuel Phillips, 1692), p. 93; Benajmin Wadsworth, The Well-Ordered Family (Boston: B. Green, 1712), p. 46; Sophia Hume, An Exhortation to the Inhaibtants of South-Carolina (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1748?), pp. 119-24. Cleaver and Gouge very briefly mention psychological effects. lOMany contemporary historians, primarily of Europe, have come to this dubious conclusion. Their case is based on at least two faulty assumptions: The first is that caring mothers should have known that wetnursing was medically dangerous, and the second is that a lack of written attention to maternal affection means that it did not exist. See especially David Hunt, Parents and Children in History (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); Lloyd de Mause "The Evolution of Childhood," History of Childhood (Quarterly 1 (1974): 503-75 ; and Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family. 1 'Cleaver, A Godlie Forme, pp. 60, 297; John Taylor, The Value of a Child (Philadelphia: B. Franklin and D. Hall, 1753), p. 7; Mather, Ornaments, p. 95; Cotton Mather, Help for Distressed Parents (Boston: John Allen, 1795), pp. 8-9; Philip Doddridge, Sermons on the Religious Education of Children, 4th ed. (Boston: Kneeland, 1763). 12 Cotton Mather, Maternal Consolations (Boston: T. Fleet, 1714), pp. 18, 21. Another unusual funeral sermon by a mourning son that praises maternal tenderness is Thomas Foxcroft, A Sermon Preach'd at Cambridge, After the Funeral of Mrs. Elizabeth Foxcroft (Boston: B. Green, 1721). 13 See especially Phillipe Aries, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962). l^This genre included numerous works. The best summary is Morgan, Puritan Family, pp. 65-108. Other historians have noted the relatively undifferentiated parental roles prescribed in Puritan literature. See Ryan, Womanhood in America, p. 60; Ulrich, "Vertuous Women Found," p. 39; Masson, "Typology of Female," pp. 306-307. l^For a few of many examples, see Mather, Ornaments, pp. 88-89; Mather, Maternal, pp. 11-15; Foxcroft, A Sermon·, and Benjamin Colman, The Honour and Happiness of the Vertuous Woman (Boston: B. Green, 1716). l^See, for example, Gouge, Of Domestical! Duties, pp. 546-47; Increase Mather, Call from Heaven to the Present and Succeeding Generations (Boston: John Foster, 1679), p. 23; Taylor, The Value of a Child, p. 3. 1 ^Cotton Mather, Help, pp. 8-9. Also see Cleaver, A Godlie Forme, pp. 60-61; Gouge, Of Domestical! Duties, pp. 259-60; John Robinson, "Of Children and their education," in New Essayes or Observations Divine andMorall (n.p., 1628), p. 306. 18see, for example, Richard Mather, A Farwell Exhortation to the Church and People of Dorchester in New-England (Cambridge, Mass.: S. Green, 1657), p. 11; Cotton Mather, Cares about the Nurseries (Boston: n.p., 1702), pp. 4-8; Benjamin Bass, Parents and Children Advised and Exhorted to their Duty (Newport: James Franklin, 1730). l^One now obscure edition of The Mother's Cefec/iMm-possibly not by Willison but by Richard Baxter-was printed in Boston in 1729. Puritan works written explicitly for fathers are numerous. A few examples are Deodat Lawson, The Duty & Property of a Religious Householder (Boston: B. Green, 1693); Cotton Mather, A Family-Sacrifice (Boston: B. Green and J. Allen, 1703); Joseph Buckminister, Heads of Families, to resolve for their Households, no less than for themselves, that they will serve the Lord (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1759). 20 Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (London: Robert White, 1673), p. 548; Richard Mather, A Farewel Exhortation, p. 13; Cotton Mather, Cares, pp. 44-45. 21 Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, pp. 486-87. Also see Foxcroft, A Sermon, pp. 8,18. 22 Morgan, Puritan Family, pp. 75-79, and Demos, Little Commonwealth, pp. 70-75. 23 Morgan, Puritan Family, pp. 117-18. For servants' responsibilities to children, see

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Cotton Mather, Corderius Americanus (Boston: J. Allen, 1708), pp. 12-13. 24()n women in the colonial economy, see especially Dexter, Colonial Women. She, however, exaggerates the extent and autonomy of women engaged in nondomestic work. See Mary Beth Norton, "Eighteenth-Century American Women in Peace and War: The Case of the Loyalists," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser. 33 (July 1976): 386-409. 25Gusti Wiesenfeld Frankel, "Between Parent and Child in Colonial New England: Analysis of the Religious Child-Oriented Literature and Selected Children's Works" (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Minnesota, 1977). I am indebted to Gusti Wisenfeld Frankel of the Hebrew University for conversation and tips on other aspects of this paper as well. 26Hugh Smith, Letters to Married Women, on Nursing and the Management of Children (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1792), p. 121; Elizabeth Griffiths, "Letters to Ladies-Married and Single. With Useful Advice," New York Weekly Magazine I (September 1795), p. 92; Clark Brown, The Importance of the early and proper education of children (Newbedfora: John Spooner, 1795), p. 17; Enos Hitchcock, A Discourse on Education (Providence: Bennett Wheeler, 1785), p. 6. This evolving perspective on child psychology owed much to the long-term influence of such philosophers as Locke and Rousseau, although much of their work did not circulate widely in eighteenthcentury America. See David Lundberg and Henry F. May, "The Enlightened Reader in America: 1700 to 1813," American (Quarterly 28 (Summer 1976): 262-71 and appendix. 27cieaver, A Godlie Forme, p. 237, is the only example 1 know of a work read in America using the "humour" theory. Others explicitly dismissed it. See Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives (London: George Sawbridge, 1675), pp. 152-60, and Hume, An Exhortation, p. 120. 28Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1790) I: 79. 29Mary Watkins, Maternal Solicitude, or, Lady's Manual, &c. (New York: H. C. Southwick, 1809), pp. 9-10. 31 Henry Home (Lord Karnes), Sketches of the History of Man (Edinburgh: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1778), p. 92; Smith, Letters to Married Women, p. 51. Smith, Letters to Married Women, p. 51; William Buchan, Domestic Medicine (Boston: Joseph Bumstead, 1793), pp. 3, 23-35; The Maternal Physician (New York: Isaac Riley, 1811; reprint ed., New York: Amo Press, 1972), p. 14. 32"The Advantage of Maternal Nurture," The Weekly Visitor, or. Ladies' Miscellany II (May 1804): 260-61. Also see Richard Polwhele, "On the Domestic Character of Women," The New York Magazine, or, Literary Repository 7 (November 1796): 600602; Henry Home, Loose Hints upon Education (Edinburgh: John Bell, 1782), p. 44; Watkins, Maternal Solicitude, pp. 8-9. 33 Smith, Letters to Married Women, p. 60. 34This paragraph is drawn from numerous pieces of medical literature printed (or reprinted) in America. Salient examples include: Dr. Willich, "Method of Treating that Excruciating Complaint incident to Married Ladies,-Sore Nipples," The Weekly Visitor, or, Ladies Miscellany II (March 1804): 196; George Wallis, The Art of Preventing Disease, and Restoring Health (New York: Samuel Campbell, 1794), pp. 114-28; Michael Underwood, A Treatise on the Diseases of Children with General Directions for the Management of Infants from the Birth (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1793), pp. 327-404; William Cadogan, An Essay upon Nursing and the Management of Children (Boston: Cox and Berry, 1772), pp. 10-49; Alexander Hamilton, Management of Female Complaints, and of Children in Early Infancy (Philadelphia: A. Bar tram, 1806), pp. 225-42; William Buchan, Advice to Mothers (Philadelphia: J. Bioren, 1804); Buchan, Domestic·, Smith, Letters to Married Women; Samuel Kennedy Jennings, Married Lady's Companion, or Poor Man's Friend (Richmond, Va.: T. Nichol-

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son, 1804); Watkins, Maternal Solicitude, pp. 7-18; anon. Maternal Physician, pp. 5-28, 93-135. The last three are American. Many of these prescriptions were also in Locke's Some Thoughts concerning Education and were taken up in other, nonmedical, books such as Richardson's Pamela and Enos Hitchcock's Memoirs. 3$Cadogan, An Essay upon Nursing, pp. 3-5; Underwood, A Treatise on Diseases, pp. 1-2, 335-37; Buchan, Domestic, pp. 4-5. Anon., Maternal Physician, p. 7. 37 Buchan, Advice, p. 294. 38 George Strebeck, A Sermon on the Character of the Virtuous Woman (New York: n.p. 1800), p. 23; John Burton, Lectures on Female Education and Manners (Elizabethtown, N.J.: S. Kollock, 1799), p. 54; Griffiths, "Letters to Ladies," pp. 91-92, 99-100; Thomas Barnard, A Sermon preached before the Salem Female Charitable Society (Salem: William Carlton, 1803), p. 13; Hitchcock, Memoirs, I: 47-48. 39jesse Appleton, A Discourse delivered before the members of the Portsmouth Female Asylum (Portsmouth: S. Whidden, 1806), p. 15. 4ÜA&ide from the medical literature noted above, see, for example, anon., Advice to the Fair Sex (Philadelphia: Robert Cochran, 1803), pp. 121-33; Jane West, Letters to a Young Lady (Troy, N.Y.: O. Penniman & Co., 1806), pp. 406-41; [Judith Sargeant Murray], "On the Domestic Education of Children," The Massachusetts Magazine 2 (June 1790): 275-77. 4 1 Anon., The Mother's Gift (Worcester: Isaiah Thomas, 1787). 42Eiizabeth Helme, Maternal Instruction, or Family Conversations (New York: James Oram, 1804). 43 Anon., Early Christian Instructions in the form of a Diagloue between a Mother and Child (Philadelphia: James P. Parke, 1807); Priscilla Wakefield, Domestic Recreation (Philadelphia: Jacob Johnson, 1803); [Mary Jane Kilner], Familiar Dialogues for the Instruction and Amusement of Children of four and five (Boston: Hall and Hiller, 1804). On mothers in Quaker literature, see J. William Frost, The Quaker Family in Colonial America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), p. 85. 44 After one American edition in 1729, it went into 14 new editions between 1783 and 1811. 45See, for example, Helme, Maternal Instruction; Wakefield, Domestic Recreation; Kilner, Familiar Dialogues; Griffiths, "Letters to Ladies"; anon, The Mother's Remarks on A Set of Cuts for Children (Philadelphia: Jacob Johnson, 1803). 46 John Cosens Ogden, The Female Guide (Concord: George Hough, 1793), p. 8. 4 ?Burton, Lectures on Female Education, p. 55. 4 8jennings, Married Ladies, pp. 123-25; anon., The Parent's Friend (Philadelphia: Jane Aitken, 1803), pp. xi-xiii. 4 ^Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, pp. 48-50. On changes in class composition see Lawrence W. Towner, " Ά Fondness for Freedom': Servant Protest in Puritan Society," William and Mary Quarterly 3rd set. 19 (April 1962): 213-15. 50θη parental role differentiation due to fathers leaving home to work, see Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, epsecially p. 46. This phenomenon has received more extended analysis in its relation to the Industrial Revolution, which in America occurred only later. See especially Neil J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 180-312. 51θη home manufacturing in America, see Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, pp. 19-62. For England, see Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1919); Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, rev. ed. (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1969). 52lan Watt makes this argument in The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), pp. 43-45. Ann Douglas, in Feminization, also makes this case for a later period in America. On literacy, see Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colo-

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27

nialNew England (New York: Norton, 1974), pp. 38-42. Note especially the Boston figures. 53See, for example, Smith, Letters to Married Women, p. 129; Buchan, Advice, p. 4; Jennings, Married Lady's Companion, p. 5; Maternal Physician, p. 278. 5 4 Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, pp. 85-86, 147-48; Douglas, Feminization, passim. 5 5 William Lyman, A Virtuous Woman the Bond of Domestic Union (New London: S. Green, 1802), p. 22. 5Barnard, A Sermon, p. 14. 57 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London, 1792; reprint ed., New York: Norton, 1967), p. 280. S^New England clergymen now frequently stressed such female virtues. For a more complete discussion and listing of such clerical writings, see Cott, Bonds of Womanhood. pp. 126-59, and her bibliography. In addition, numerous secular comparative histories and biographies of women began to appear that emphasized these'qualities. ^'Examples are numeious. A few are: "Scheme for encreasing the power of the Fair Sex," The Baltimore Weekly Magazine I (April 1801): 241-42; The Female Advocate (New Haven: Thomas Green and Son, 1801), p. 14; "On the Influence of Women," The Literary Magazine and American Register V (June 1806): 403-408; Thomas Branegan, The Excellency of the Female Character Vindicated (New York: Samuel Wood, 1807), pp. 61-62,111-12. 60 See, for example, Samuel Worcester, Ferrule Love to Christ (Salem: Pool and Palfray, 1809), p. 14; Daniel Dm*, A Discourse delivered May 22,1804, before the Members of the Female Charitable Society of Newburyport (Newburyport: Edmund M. Blunt, 1804), pp. 15-19; Timothy Woodbridge, A Sermon, preached April 20th, 1813, in compliance with a request of the Gloucester Female Society (Boston: Samuel T. Armstrong, 1813), pp. 18-19; Daniel Chaplin, Λ Discourse delivered before the Charitable Female Society in Groton (Andover: Flagg and Gould, 1814), pp. 8-10. 61 See, for example, anon., The Mother's Gift; Griffiths, "Leiters to Ladies," (Murray], "On Domestic Education," pp. 275-77; Worcester, Female Lovfi, p. 7. 62 "A Mothers Address," The Weekly Visitor, or, Ladies Miscellany 2 (August 1804): 344; "Sweet Infant," The Lady's Weekly Miscellany 8 (November 1808): 63; "The Mother to her Child," The Lady's Weekly Miscellany 7 (May 1808): 64. 63 Anon., Family-Religion Revived (New Haven: James Parker, 1775), p. 96. Also Smith, Letters to Married Women, p. 123. ^Examples of sentimentalized paternal foundness are: Mason Locke Weems, Hymen's recruiting sergeant (Philadelphia: R. Cochran, 1802); "On the Happiness of Domestic Life," The American Museum 1 (February 1787): 156-58; for examples of tyrannical fathers, see "Honour Eclipsed by Love," The Boston Magazine 2 (August 1785): 293-95; M. Imbert, "The Power of Love and Filial Duty," The New-York Magazine; or. Literary Repository 2 (August 1791): 468-75; "On Parental Authority," The Ladies Magazine 1 (October 1792): 237-41. Anon., Sketches of the History, Disposition, Accomplishments, Employments, Customs and Importance of the Fair Sex (Philadelphia: Samuel Samson, 1797), pp. 103-104. 66 Judith Sargeant Murray, The Gleaner (Boston: I. Thomas and Ε. T. Andrews, 1798) 3: 223-24; [Murray], "On Domestic Education"; anon., "Maternal Affection: Extract from the Beauties of Wollstoncraft [sic]," The Lady's Weekly Miscellany 7 (April 1808): 14-15; William Boyd, Woman: A poem (Boston: John W. Folsom, 1796), p. 9; The Female Character Vindicated (Leominster: Charles Prentiss, 1796), p. 10; anon., Female Advocate, pp. 33-34. 67 See Kerbet, "Daughters of Columbia," and "Republican Mother," Contrary to Kerber's impression, however, still only a small minority of those advocating improved female education stressed the responsibilities of mothers. Prospects of improvement in

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the quality of women's companionship, personal fulfillment, and even intellectual contributions to society were still more often invoked. 6 8 a few outstanding examples are: Wollstonecraft, Vindication, pp. 32-33, 280; Murray, Gleaner, 2: 6-7, 3: 188-224; Female Advocate, pp. 33-34; "Oration upon Female Education," in The American Preceptor, ed. Caleb Bingham (Boston: Manning and Loring, 1813), pp. 47-51; "Plan for the Emancipation of the Fair Sex," Lady's Magazine and Musical Repository 3 (January 1802): 43-44; "Present Mode of Female Education Considered," The Lady's Weekly Miscellany 7 (June 1808): 43-44; "On the Supposed Superiority of the Masculine Understanding," The Columbian Magazine and the Universal Asylum 7 (July 1791): 11. ^Benjamin Rush, "Thoughts upon Female Education," in Essays on Education in the Early Republic, ed. Frederick Rudolph (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 25-40. Also see Noah Webster, "On the Education of Youth," A Collection of Essays and Fugitiv Writings (Boston: I. Thomas and Ε. T. Andrews, 1790), pp. 27-30; Hitchcock, Memoirs, 2: 23-94, 289-300. Hitchcock drew from Rousseau in his stress on female domesticity, but, like other Americans in this period, thought more highly of female intellect. 70Hannah More, Strictures on the Modem Ssytem of Female Education (London: R. CadeU and W. Davies, 1799) 1: 97-98, 2: 2. Hannah More, "Essays for Young Ladies," in The Lady's Pocket Library (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1792), p. 67. '^Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 153-304, passim. ^Douglas, Feminization, passim. She, however, wrongly associates such views with northeastern liberal (later Unitarian) Protestants alone. Most of the religious figures cited in this paper were decidedly evangelical (either English Low Church Anglicans or American "moderate" revivalist Calvinists in the Congregational or Presbyterian Churches). Significantly, some of the next-generation Victorian "liberals" featured in Douglas' book, such as the Beecher siblings, came from strong evangelical backgrounds. ?4See especially Timothy Dwight, as "Morpheus," New-England Palladium, March 15, 1802. As cited in Kerber, "Daughters of Columbia," p. 52. 75see especially Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Many essays by Talcott Parsons have also drawn this connection. Fred Weinstein and Gerald M. Piatt's The Wish to be Free (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) is a historical work largely organized in these terms, but it focuses on male personality. 76 Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, pp. 160-96.

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK

To Earn Her Daily Bread: Housework and Antebellum Working-Class Subsistence Jeanne Boydston In 1845, in a volume entitled The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York, former city health inspector John H. Griscom published his observations on the health of New York City's working poor. He sketched a bleak scene. Forced into crowded, tinderbox tenements that lacked adequate light or ventilation, and subjected daily to the waste that leached in from streets, outhouses, and animal yards, the laboring classes seemed to Griscom bound for extinction.1 Middle-class reformers like Griscom tended to raise these spectres as a way of deploring the alleged sloth and intemperance of the poor, rather than as a means of examining the economy that created the poverty.2 Nevertheless, the conditions they so vividly documented have remained a subject of special interest to American historians. For these were the transitional generations—the households that lived the lurching transformations toward wage dependency. By the late 1870s, the number of people working solely for wages in manufacturing, construction, and transportation alone was almost equivalent to the size of the entire population in 1790.3 The strategies that enabled working-class households to survive the intervening period tell us much, not only about the making of

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES the American working classes, but equally important, about the making of American industrial capitalism itself. Historians have generally described the coming of industrialization in terms of changes in paid work. The transformation has been framed as one from a community of comparatively independent producers to a class of wage-workers, forced for their survival to sell labor as a commodity on the capitalist market. This approach defines the problem of antebellum working-class subsistence as a question of pay. Wages are taken to correspond to "means of support" along the lines of Paul Faler's conclusion that by 1830 Lynn shoemakers " . . . were full time wage earners with no important means of support other than . . . their income from shoemaking. " 4 Certainly, this emphasis reflects the way in which paid workers themselves formulated the problem of household survival. When the Philadelphia cordwainers complained in 1805 that the "pittance of subsistence" they received in wages was inadequate to provide "a fair and just support for our families," 5 they expressed a conflation of "subsistence" and "wages" that was common among antebellum wage-earners. The clearest and most consistent statement of that conflation was in the growing insistence upon a "family wage." A demand for a wage for husbands high enough to eliminate the need for daughters and wives to work for pay, the "family wage" was based on an assumption that cash income constituted the entirety of the family subsistence: a "family wage" to the male head would, workingmen insisted, permit the mechanic to provide " . . . a livelihood for himself and [his family]" from his "earnings" alone. 6 Nevertheless, recent work in American social history suggests that this strict equation of wages with "means of support" does not accurately describe the range of strategies through which the nineteenth-century working classes pieced together their livelihoods. Christine Stansell has pointed to the importance of casual labor—"peddling, scavenging, and the shadier arts of theft and prostitution"—in "making ends meet" in the households of the laboring poor in mid-nineteenth-century New York City.7 Judith E. Smith has noted the dense networks of resource-sharing (including the sharing of food) that existed among immigrant families in turnof-the-century Providence, Rhode Island. 8 Examining the grassroots politics of socialism in early twentieth-century New York City, Dana Frank has demonstrated the power of housewives, in their work as shoppers, to force down food prices through communitybased boycotts. 9 Each of these studies offers a vision of a survival economy based, not solely on the cash income of waged labor, but on a far larger and more intricate fabric of resources. In this essay, I will argue that the antebellum working classes did indeed rely for their subsistence upon means of support other

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK than their wages. Among the key economic resources of antebellum working-class households was housework itself—the unwaged (although not always unremunerated) labor that wives performed within their own families. Working-class women understood their obligations as mothers and wives to extend from such unpaid labor as childrearing, cooking, and cleaning to such casualized forms of cash-earning as taking in boarders and vending. In the course of this work, their labor represented a substantial economic benefit— both to their families and to the employers who paid their husbands' wages. Within the household, wives' labor produced as much as half of the family subsistence. Beyond the household, the value of housework accrued to the owners of mills and factories and shops, who were able to pay "subsistence" wages at levels which in fact represented only a fraction of the real price of workers' survival. The distinctive value of housewives' labor lies largely unrecognized in the traditional Marxist analysis which has informed so much of the study of working-class history. This results from the way in which Marx formulated the concept of "means of subsistence." Marx defined "subsistence" as "the labour-time necessary for the production [and reproduction] of labour-power" — that is, the labor-time required to insure the survival of the wage-earner both from day to day and from generation to generation. 10 But Marx assumed that the working class bought its entire subsistence on the market, with cash. In his discussion of the sale of labor-power, for example, he identified "the means of subsistence" as "articles" that "must be bought or paid for," some "every day, others every week, others every quarter and so on." 1 1 He mentioned food, fuel, clothing, and furniture as examples. Having thus conceptually limited "subsistence" to what had to be purchased with income, Marx made a parallel limitation of the concept of "necessary labour-time" to labor-time that earned money. Limiting the definition of subsistence to that which had to be purchased with cash was a convenience for Marx, whose focus was on the potential of money to obscure inequalities in the buying and selling of labor. He reasoned that the price of labor, the wage, represented very different values to the worker and to the capitalist. The worker received the cost of subsistence; the capitalist purchased all that labor could produce in a given period of time. As the capitalist was able to increase the value labor produced over the cost of keeping labor alive, he gained for himself a "surplus value" which was the origin of new capital. Formulated in this way, the cash exchange— money, with its "inherent" "possibility . . . of a quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value" — became key to Marx's analysis.12 Marx was not entirely consistent in this formulation, however.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES One sometimes glimpses in Capital his own acknowledgement of the limitations of his analysis. His original definition of the value of labor-power as "the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction" of labor in no way excludes the labor-time required to search the docks or borrow food in a period of shortage, for example. 13 At one point, moreover, he defined "subsistence" as the variety of resources "physically indispensable" to survival.14 This definition might well include the labor of processing food into a digestible state, of nursing the sick back to health, and of tending small children—all of this routine in the labor of working-class housework. Finally, in his analysis of surplus value, Marx acknowledged that the wage might not always represent the value öf subsistence. The capitalist could increase his margin of surplus value "by pushing the wage of the worker down below the value of his labour-power"—that is, below subsistence level.15 This was not a mere hypothetical possibility for Marx, who acknowledged "the important part which this method plays in practice. . . . " But he found himself "excluded from considering it here by our assumption that all commodities, including labour-power, are bought and sold at their full value." 16 Housework, however, was not bought and sold at its full value. Indeed, it was not bought and sold at all, but rather was exchanged directly for subsistence, in the manner of barter, within the family. Nonetheless, the cooking and cleaning, scavenging and borrowing, nursing and mending and child-rearing which made up housework clearly was necessary to produce a husband's labor-power. In other words, it was constituent in the total labor-time represented by the commodity—labor power—the husband would sell on the market. At one point in his discussion of money, Marx noted that the quantitative contradiction expressed by the price could also become a qualitative one—that "a thing can, formally speaking, have a price without having a value." 17 The history of housework had left this labor in just the opposite position: it had a value without having a price. This distinguished housework from the forms of labor Marx was examining, but it did not exclude it from the process through which the surplus value of industrial capitalism was realized. Indeed, for the northeastern United States at least, evidence suggests that the denial of the economic worth of housework was a historical process integral to the development of industrial capitalism.18 The Europeans who settled the region in the seventeenth century appear to have recognized the economic contribution of wives' work. A largely subsistence-oriented people, New England Puritans defined the household as the "economical society"19 and understood that family survival required the wife's work in the garden, the barnyard, and the larder as much as it required the

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK husband's work in the fields and meadows and barn. Court records bear testimony to the perceived importance of wives' labor, in the form of actions to overturn a husband's will when magistrates concluded that the wife's share did not accurately reflect her "diligence and industry" in "the getting of the Estate." 20 At the same time, colonial society contained the ideological foundations for a later denial of the economic worth of wives' labor. As ministers reminded women, husbands — not wives — were the public representatives of the household: "Our Ribs were not ordained to be our Rulers." 21 Wives' subordination was embedded in the English common law that the Puritans brought with them to New England. As feme covert, a wife's legal identity was subsumed under that of her husband, who was recognized as the owner of her labor-time, the products of that labor-time, and any cash realized from the sale of either the labor or its products. However much individual males acknowledged individual wives' economic worth, the tradition of law identified that worth with the husband. Thus, Marx's assumption, throughout Capital, that the "possessor" of labor-power and "the person whose labour-power it is" were one and the same person was historically inaccurate for housework in America from the beginning of English settlement. 22 Mediated early on by the local nature of economic activity, wives' coverture became a more critical factor in the history of housework during the eighteenth century. Over the course of that century, the elaboration of cash markets and the growing competition among males for wages and property served to enhance the importance of money as a primary socially-recognized index of economic worth. In public discussions of the economy, that is to say, industriousness was increasingly associated with money-making, while work that did not bring cash payment came scarcely to be recognized as work at all. This changing perception applied even to discussions of farming, still a largely subsistence-oriented activity. As Jared Eliot contended, the absence of a cash market " . . . tends to enervate and abate the Vigor and Zeal" of the farmer and "renders him Indolent." 23 Working for the most part without prospect of payment, and unable to lay legal claim to payment even when it was made, the prototype of the free worker who labored outside of the cash marketplace was the wife. This is not to say that wives never sold their labor, or the products of their labor, directly for cash. 24 But wives' formal relationship to the market remained ambiguous at best—as men's was not. Over the course of the eighteenth century, as the importance of cash markets increased, the absence of a formal relationship with those markets rendered women as a group less visible as participants in and contributors to the economy. Remunerated or not, their labor

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES was conceptually subsumed under the labor of the person who owned it, their husbands. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has suggested that by the mid-eighteenth century, the husband who would acknowledge the individuality of his wife's paid labor (as distinct from his own claim as head of household) was a rare exception. 25 The growing equation of cash with economic value created for women palpable contradictions between experience and ideology. At a time when even the comparatively prosperous Esther Edwards Burr numbered among her labors cooking, cleaning, baking, seeing to her family's provision of vegetables, fruits, beverages, and dairy produce, white-washing walls, spinning, raising two children, covering chair bottoms, and making, re-making, and mending clothes, 26 colonial newspapers taunted that wives "want[ed] sense, and every kind of duty" and spent their time "more trifling than a baby." 27 From merely "owning" the family labor pool, husbands had now been ideologically identified as the whole of the family labor pool. But the growing cultural invisibility of the economic value of the wife's labor in the family was not limited to the well-off. Indeed, by the end of the eighteenth century, the material conditions of survival in poor households provided a solid foundation, within the experience of working-class families themselves, for this new conception of the relation of men's paid labor to household support. As Ruth Schwartz Cowan has argued, one of the first effects of the coming of industrialization was the removal of men's labor from the household. 28 As poorer families could no longer provide land to their sons and as the growing power of masters and retailing middlemen undercut the traditional lines of advancement for journeymen in the trades, men experienced a dislocation in their ability to provide their share of the household maintenance. Under economic siege in the provision of their traditional portion of the family's subsistence, working-class men responded by conflating that part with the whole of the family economy. Certainly, this conflation was made easier by the general and growing invisibility of the economic value of housework among the middle classes. But working-class men appear to have first expressed the conflation in the course of attempting to articulate and protest changes in the nature and status of their own labor. Like the Philadelphia cordwainers, early nineteenth-century journeymen hatters complained that the erosion of the apprenticeship system was preventing them from "gain[ing] an honest livelihood for themselves and families. . . ," and the seamen who gathered at New York's City Hall to protest the Embargo Act in 1808 sought "wages which may enable them to support their families. . . ." 2 9 Similarly, it was in this context that the demand for the family

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK wage was forged; as Martha May has observed, workingmen recognized that under existing conditions, "the working-class family would be unable to maintain a tolerable standard of living or retain its customs and traditions." 30 But in the context of a society in which men's "ownership" of the family labor-time had already been transformed into a perception that men were the only laborers in the family economy, the "family wage" ideal worked to reinforce the invisibility of the wife's contribution. As workingmen searched for a language through which to express concretely the brutalization of the paid workplace and the deterioration of their standard of living, the "family wage" ideal incorporated an ideal of female domesticity, including a distinction between women's household activities and economic labor. Workingmen's newspapers contrasted the "odious, cruel, unjust and tyrannical system" of the factory to the rejuvenative powers of the home. 31 The Northern Star and Freeman's Advocate agreed that, "It is in the calm and quiet retreat of domestic life that relaxation from toil is obtained. . . ," 32 Early trade unionist William Sylvis waxed sentimental about the charm of women's mission 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. 33

In working-class as well as middle-class representations, counsel, comfort, and consolation had become the products of women's labor in the home. Behind the rhetoric of female domesticity, however, antebellum working-class wives continued to engage in a complex array of subsistence-producing labor. They worked primarily as unpaid laborers in the family, where their work was of two general types. On the first level, wives (as well as children) were responsible for finding ways to increase the household provisions without spending cash. The most common form of this labor was scavenging—for food, for discarded clothing, for household implements, and for fuel. On the outskirts of cities and in smaller communities, wives and daughters collected bullrushes (which could be used to make chair bottoms), cattails (which could be used to stuff mattresses), and broom straw.34 In the cities, women of the laboring poor haunted docks and wharves in search of damaged goods and examined the refuse of the streets and marketplaces for food, cloth, or furniture which would be useful to their families. Often carried out as an entirely legal enterprise, in practice the work of scavenging sometimes shaded into theft, another of the

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES strategies through which families of the laboring poor added to their larders. 35 Throughout the antebellum period, both black and white women appeared in court to face charges of the theft of common and basic household implements: washtubs, frying pans, kettles, clothing, and other items that seem destined, not for resale, but for immediate consumption. When Mary Brennan stole a threedollar pair of shoes from Percy S. White in 1841, "[s]he assigned her great destitution as the sole cause of the theft." 36 Among more prosperous working-class families, shopping, household manufacturing, and gardening also functioned as means of avoiding cash outlays. Food bought in quantity was cheaper; grown in a garden, it was virtually free. 37 While the labor of gardening was often shared among family members, by the antebellum period marketing (which men had often done in earlier times) was women's work. In addition, some women continued to manufacture their own candles and make their own soap, and most women manufactured mattresses, pillows, linen, curtains, and clothing, and repaired furniture and garments. Working-class wives worked not only to avoid spending money altogether, but also to reduce the size of necessary expenditures. Important for both of these ends was the maintenance of friendly contacts with neighbors, to whom one might turn for goods or services either as a regular supplement to one's own belongings or in periods of emergency. New to a building, neighborhood, or community, a woman depended upon her peers for information on the cheapest places to shop, the grocers least likely to cheat on weights and prices, and the likely spots for scavenging. 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. In the event of fire, women often found that it was neighboring females who "exerted themselves in removing goods and furniture, and also in passing water" through the bucket brigade. 38 A history of friendly relations motivated one woman to "[go] herself to Whitehall after a load [of wood provided as public support], and . . . to see it delivered" when her neighbor's family was in danger of going without heat. 39 Scarcity created tensions between cooperation and competition that required careful calculation. Boston's Mary Pepper complained that a neighbor had her run in as a drunk 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. 40 Pepper was a single mother, responsible for the entirety of the household economy. Perhaps she had not had time to develop the bonds of mutual aid and obligation that might have prompted her neighbors to protect rather than complain of her. On the other

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK hand, perhaps no amount of friendliness could have overridden a neighbor's need for her apartment. Indeed, Pepper herself may have acquired it by similar means. Working-class wives also provided the bulk of the labor necessary to transform raw materials into items that the family could consume. That is to say, they hauled coal and wood, laid fires, and cooked the raw corn meal, beans, onions, potatoes, and occasional meat that comprised the mainstay of working-class diets. Among working-class households able to afford cloth, wives made many of the family's garments and linens. Where clothing was scavenged and/or handed down, wives did the mending, the lengthening, the letting out and taking in. They lugged water into the dwelling — or else they carried laundry out—so that the family clothing could be washed. They carried the garbage from the building—or, more convenient and less back-breaking, sometimes simply threw it out a window onto the streets. Poverty simplified this labor. Since there was seldom enough money to buy food ahead or in large quantities, poorer wives spent relatively less time than middling wives in either food preparation or preservation. A table, a chair, some blankets and rags for mattresses, a cooking pot, and a few utensils might well constitute the sum of the household furnishings, requiring little of the general upkeep that occupied so much of the time of wives in wealthier families or even in more prosperous working-class households. Among the working poor, providing warmth, food, and clothing took precedence over providing a scrubbed and scoured environment. Moreover, exacting standards of cleanliness were to little avail in city tenant houses in which there were no outlets for the soot and fumes of cooking and into which water might run "at every storm." 41 It was not uncommon for working-class wives also to be responsible for bringing some cash into the household economy. The regularity of this labor varied from household to household, depending not only on the size but also on the reliability of the husband's wage packet. Facing systemic economic hardship, married black women were more likely to undertake regular outside work—as cooks, nurses, washerwomen, and maids. (Among whites, paid domestic service was commonly limited to single women.) Both black and white married women became seamstresses. Both sometimes became street vendors. If they lacked the 25-cent-a-day fee to rent a market stall, then from sidewalks and carts they hawked roots and herbs they had dug themselves, or fruits, vegetables, candy, eggs, peanuts, coffee or chocolate.42 Some women collected rags to sell to paper manufacturers, "poking into the gutters after rags before the stars go to bed. " 43 If their husbands had employment

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES building canals a n d railroads, wives sometimes took jobs for a season as cooks a n d laundresses for the entire work camp. 4 4 But much of the cash-earning of working-class wives was even less visible than these examples suggest. Virtually every wife whose husband worked in close proximity to the household (be he a tailor or a tavern-keeper) was expected to contribute labor as his assistant. In this capacity, her portion of the labor was seldom distinguished by a separate wage or fees paid directly in her name. Rather, her work was subsumed u n d e r her husband's pay, or absorbed into an enterprise identified as exclusively his. For example, it is only in the course of a criminal prosecution in 1841 that it becomes clear on the record that John Cronin's wife "generally tended the junk shop" that bore his name. 4 5 Equally invisible was the cash-earning that women performed by taking boarders into the household. In this instance, they exchanged their labor as cooks and maids, and sometimes as washerwomen and seamstresses, for a payment to the household. Virtually indistinguishable in nature from the labor they performed for free for their families, and enmeshed in that work in the course of the daily routine, boarding could nonetheless add as much as three or four dollars a week to the household budget.

Selling Hot Com on the Street (Harper's Weekly, September 12, 1868)

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK Through all of this, wives also took primary responsibility for nursing elderly or sick household members and for childrearing. In the conditions of the nineteenth-century city, the latter was a responsibility that brought special anxieties. The dangers of the city to children were legion — fires, horses running out of control, unmarked wells, unfenced piers, disease, as well as temptations to theft and prostitution as means of making some money. In families where the household economy required that the mother or children go out to work, or that the mother focus her attention on needlework, for example, within the household, close supervision was impossible. This is not to suggest, as did the middle-class reformers of the period, that these parents were negligent. Within the demand for the family wage, and for working-class female domesticity, was a demand for a household in which children could be protected and better cared for. Wage-earning men longed for the day when "'our wives, no longer doomed to servile labor, will be . . . the instructors of our children.'" 46 The distinction between "paid labor" and "housework" implied in working-class men's yearning for the domestic ideal persisted in later nineteenth-century analyses of women's unpaid labor and was eventually replicated in Capital. Because wives' work was largely unpaid, and because husbands came to the marketplace as the "possessors" of their wives' labor, Marx did not address the role of housework in the labor exchange that led to surplus value. Neither did he attend to the dynamics which permitted the husband to lay claim, in the price of his own labor, to the value of his wife's work. The exchange value of housework is elusive, but it is not impossible to calculate. Some of it was directly paid, even when done by a wife in the context of her family duties—vending and needlework, for example. But even that labor for which wives were not paid when they worked in the context of their own families was paid when performed in the context of someone else's family, that is, as domestic service. The equivalence was direct, for in the antebellum period paid domestic service and unpaid housework were the same labor often performed by the same woman, only in different locations and in different parts of her workday or workweek. Since paid domestic servants were customarily provided with room and board in addition to their wages, moreover, their earnings represented a price over and above food, shelter, and warmth, or, understood as an equivalent for housework, over and above the wife's basic maintenance. In northeastern cities in 1860, cooks (who frequently also did the laundry) earned between three and four dollars a week. Seamstresses averaged two-and-a-half dollars a week, and maids

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES made about the same amount. On the market, caring for children was at the lower end of the pay scale, commanding perhaps two dollars a week. Taken at an average, this puts the price of a wife's basic housework at about three dollars a week — or $150 dollars a year—excluding the value of her own maintenance. 47 To this should be added the value of goods a wife might make available within 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 fifty cents, 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. 48 When Mary Brennan stole the pair of shoes, she avoided a three dollar expenditure (or would have, had she been successful). 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. Not all working-class wives scavenged. In households with more cash, wives were likely to spend that labor-time in other forms of purchase-avoidance work. By shopping carefully, buying in bulk, and drying or salting extra food, a wife could save ten to fifty per cent on the family food budget, or about a dollar a week on an income of $250 a year. 49 Wives who kept kitchen gardens could, at the very least, produce and preserve potatoes worth a quarter a week, or some ten to fifteen dollars a year. 50 But there was also the cash that working-class wives brought into the household—in the form of needlework, vending, taking in boarders, running a grocery or a tavern from her kitchen, or working unpaid in her husband's trade. A boarder might pay four dollars a week into the family economy. Subtracting a dollar and a half for food and rent, the wife's labor-time represented $2.50 of that sum, or $130 a year.51 Needlewomen averaged about two dollars a week, or a hundred dollars a year. 52 Calculated on the basis of a "helper" in a trade, the wife's time working in her husband's occupation (for example, alongside her husband shoemaker, for the equivalent of a day a week) was worth some twenty dollars a year. 53 The particular labor performed by a given women depended on the size and resources of her household. In this way, housework remained entirely embedded within 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 childrearing, even in poor households another fifty dollars or so saved through scavenging and wise shopping, another fifty dollars 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

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in the neighborhood of $400 a year when the. price of a single woman's maintenance purchased on the market (about $170 a year) is included. In 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. The shift in the nature of and increase in the value of wives' work as a husband's income increased seems not to have been entirely lost on males, who advised young men that if they meant to get ahead, they should "get married." 5 4 This difference by income may also further explain the intersection of gender and economic interests which informed workingmen's ideal of female domesticity. Women's wages were low — kept that way in part by the rhetoric surrounding the family wage ideal. Given this, a wife working without pay at home may have been more valuable to the family maintenance than a wife working for pay — inside or outside the home. Similarly, the low levels of women's wages meant that few women could hope to earn the $170 a year necessary to purchase their maintenance on the market. This was true even for women in industrial work. While a full-time seamstress who earned $2.50 a week and was employed year-round would earn only $130 a year, an Irishwoman with ten years seniority in the Hamilton mills earned only about $2.90 a week in 1860, or about $150 a year. 55 Because of her need for access to cash, the wife's dependence on a wage-earner within 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: four dollars a week for room and board ($208 a year) and perhaps fifteen dollars a year for minimal clothing meant an outlay of almost $225 before laundry, medicines, and other occasional expenses. 5 6 Many working- class men did not earn $225 a year and for them access to the domestic labor of a wife might be the critical variable in achieving a maintenance. Even men who did earn this amount might find a clear advantage in marrying, for a wife saved money considerably over and above the cost she added for her own maintenance. Historians have frequently analyzed the working-class family as a collectivity, run according to a communal ethic. But by both law and custom the marital exchange was not an even one. Finally the husband owned not only the value of his own labor-time, but the value of his wife's as well—as expressed, for example, in cash or cooked food, manufactured or mended clothing, scavenged dishes or food, and in children raised to an age at which they, too, could contribute to the household economy. There is no evidence

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES that working-class males were prepared to give up the prerogatives of manhood. To the contrary, as we have seen, the rhetoric of the family wage suggests that they were engaged in a historical process of strengthening those claims. 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 prove the determining factor of subsistence or destitution if the household broke up. First, the husband possessed his own maintenance, and any improvements in it which became possible as a result of the labor of his wife and children. He also owned whatever furnishings the family had accumulated. Although a table, a chair, clothing, bedding, and a few dishes seem (and were) scant enough property, they were the stuff of which life and death transactions were made in the laboring classes; pawned overnight, for example, clothes were important "currency" to cover the rent until payday. The husband also owned the children his wife raised, and whose wages (when they reached their mid-teens) might amount to several hundred dollars a year—almost as much as his own. Even while they were quite young, children might be helpful in scavenging fuel and food. To be sure, wives commonly benefited from some or all of these sources of value, and both personal and community norms tended to restrain husbands from taking full advantage of their positions. Not only the affectional bonds of the family, but the expanding cultural emphasis on the husband as the "protector" and "provider" may have helped mediate emotionally the structural inequities of the household. At the same time, community norms did not prevent the expression of individual self-interest in marriage, and the stresses of material hardship were as likely to rend as to create mutualities of concern. The frequency of incidents in which a wife had her husband arrested for battery 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 antebellum period, and the relegation of barter largely to domestic transactions, had heightened that dynamic. A man could wear dirty clothes or look for cheaper accomodations or eat less to reduce his cash outlay, even if these choices might prove destructive in the long run. But the mariner's wife who stood with her four children on New York's docks, begging her husband for half of his wages, was in a far more extreme position of dependency. Her husband preferred to remain on board ship—with his wages. 57 Husbands were not the only ones to benefit from the economic

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value of housework and from its invisibility. Employers were enabled by the presence of this sizeable but uncounted labor in the home to pay both men and women wages which were, in fact, below the level of subsistence. At a time when the level of capital accumulation in the Northeast remained precariously low and when, as a result, most new mills did not survive ten years, the margin of profit available from sub-subsistence wages was crucial. Occasionally, mill owners acknowledged that the wages they paid did not cover maintenance. One agent admitted: . . .1 regard my work-people just as I regard my machinery. 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]ow they fare outside my walls I don't know, nor do I consider it my business to know. They must look out for themselves. . . , 5 8

More often, however, both capitalists and the political economists who rose in 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. In 1825, for example, John McVickar caused to be reprinted in the United States the Encyclopedia Britannica discussion of political economy, which asserted that "the cost of producing artificers, or labourers, regulates the wages they obtain. . . ." 5 9 Eleven years later, 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 to which the belief that wages represented subsistence could be put. Since "a little, a very little only" was required to maintain labor, 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. . . ," 6 0 Presumably, 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. Although there is no evidence that capitalists consciously thought of it in this way, it was clearly in the interests of capital for housework to remain invisible. Following the lines of Marx's analysis, some scholars have concluded that, since it was unwaged, housework could not have created surplus value—that there must be a discrete exchange of money for that process to occur. Marx recognized, though, that the nature of the individual transaction was less important than its part in the general movement of capital.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES In the case of housework, which Marx did not examine, it was the very unwaged character of the labor that made it so profitable to capital. Traded first to the husband for partial subsistence, it then existed in the husband's labor as an element of subsistence made available to capital for free. Indeed, housework had achieved just the reverse of the qualitative contradiction Marx predicted: it had a value without having a price. Excluding the cash that workingclass wives brought into the household, housework added several hundred dollars a year to the value of working-class subsistence — several hundred dollars which the employer did not have to pay as a part of the wage packet. Had the labor of housework been counted, wages would have soared to roughly twice their present levels. And as factory and mill owners knew well, "profits must vary inversely as wages, that is, they must fall as wages rise, and rise as wages fall." 61 It is important to recognize that employers were able to appropriate the value of housework in part because the people they were paying also appropriated it. Paid workers protested many things during the antebellum period — long hours, pay cuts, production speed-ups—but there is no evidence that they objected to the fiction that wages were meant to cover the full value of household maintenance. Indeed, to have questioned that premise would have been to question the very structure of the gender system and of the family as socially constituted in the history of the northeastern United States. In this way, capital's claim to the surplus value of the wife's labor existed through and was dependent upon the husband's claim to that same value. So long as husbands understood their status as men (and so as heads of households) to depend upon the belief that they were the primary, if not the sole, "providers" of the family, the value of housework would remain unacknowledged by—and profitable to—their employers. The history of industrialization — in the United States and elsewhere—has been written largely as a history of paid work. Housework, where it has been included at all, has been fitted into the historical scheme merely as an ancillary factor: family life felt the shock waves of industrialization, but the epicenter of the quake was elsewhere—in the realm of "productive" labor. Marx himself drew the distinction between "productive" and "reproductive" work. He realized, however, as historians since have tended to forget, that the lines between these spheres were artificial: ". . . every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction." 62 The case of women's unpaid labor in the antebellum northeastern United States suggests that the opposite is also accurate. Only when we make the changing conditions and relations of housework integral parts of the narrative of economic and social transformation will our telling of the story become complete.

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK Notes I would like to thank Betsy Blackmar, Carol Karlsen, Lori Ginzberg, Ileen De Vault, Nancy F. Cott and the Columbia Seminar on Working Class History for their helpful criticisms of various drafts of this article. I am also grateful to Rutgers University for its support, through the Henry Rutgers Research Fellowship. 1. John H. Griscom, The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York (New York: Arno Press, 1970; orig. pub. 1845), passim. 2. For discussions of the attitudes of middle-class reformers toward the poor in the antebellum period, see Carroll Smith Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement, 1872-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971) and Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). For a contemporary example, in addition to Griscom's, see Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work Among Them (New York: WynKoop and Hallenbeck, 1872). 3. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1975), Series A 6-8, p. 8 and Series D 167-181, p. 139. 4. Paul G. Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), p. 84. 5. "The Address to the Working Shoemakers of the City of Philadelphia to the Public," as quoted in John Commons et al. History of Labor in the United States, vol. I (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1918), pp. 141-42. 6. As quoted in Martha May, "Bread Before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions and the Family Wage" in Ruth Milkman, ed.. Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women's Labor History (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 3. 7. Christine Stansell, "Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets: Class and Gender Conflict in New York City, 1850-1869," Feminist Studies 8/2 (Summer 1982): 312-13. 8. Judith E. Smith, "Our Own Kind: Family and Community Networks in Providence," Radical History Review 17 (Spring 1978): 99-120. 9. Dana Frank, "Housewives, Socialists, and the Politics of Food: The 1917 New York Cost-of-Living Protests," Feminist Studies 11/2 (Summer 1985): 255-85. 10. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 1:274. 11. Marx, Capital, 1:276. 12. Marx, Capital, 1:196. 13. Marx, Capital, 1:274. 14. Marx, Capital, 1:277. 15. Marx, Capital, 1:431. 16. Marx, Capital, 1:431. 17. Marx, Capital, 1:197. 18. For a more detailed discussion of the transformation of housework as an aspect of industrialization, see: Jeanne Boydston, "Home and Work: The Industrialization of Housework in the Northeastern United States from the Colonial Period to the Civil War" (Unpublished dissertation, Yale University, 1984). 19. For example, William Perkins gave his 1631 sermon on "oeconomie" the subtitle, "Or, Household-Government: A Short Survey of the Right Manner of Erecting and Ordering a Family. . . . " 20. William Brigham, The Compact with the Charter and Laws of the Colony of New Plymouth (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1836), p. 281. 21. William Seeker, "A Wedding Ring for the Finger. . ." (Boston: Samuel Green, 1690), n.p. 22. See for example Marx's discussion of the sale of labor power in Capital, 1:271. 23. Jared Eliot, Essays Upon Field Husbandry in New England and Other Papers, 1748-1762, ed. Harry J. Carman and Rexford G. Tugwell (New York, 1942), as quoted

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES in Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1967), pp. 26-27. 24. See, for example, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, " Ά Friendly Neighbor': Social Dimensions of Daily Work in Northern Colonial New England," Feminist Studies 6/2 (Summer 1980): 392-405, and Joan M. Jensen, "Cloth, Butter and Boarders: Women's Household Production for the Market," The Review of Radical Political Economics 12/2 (Summer 1980): 14-24. 25. Ulrich, " Ά Friendly Neighbor,'" pp. 394-95. 26. Carol F. Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker, eds., The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr, 1754-1757 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), passim. 27. "A-La-Mode, for the Year 1756," Boston Evening Post, Supplement, March 8, 1756; "By the Ranger," Boston Evening Post, October 16, 1758. 28. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1983), pp. 63-67. 29. American State Papers, 1789-1815, vol. 2: Finance (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832), p.257; George Daitman, "Labor and the 'Welfare State' in Early New York," Labor History 4 (Fall 1963): 252. 30. May, "Bread before Roses," p. 4. 31. The Man, May 13, 1835, as quoted in Commons, History of Labor, p. 388. 32. The Northern Star and Freeman's Advocate, January 2, 1843. 33. James C. Sylvis, ed., Life, Speeches, Labors, and Essays of William H. Sylvis (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen, and Haffelfinger, 1872), p. 120. 34. Susan May Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982), p. 18. 35. For an excellent discussion of the uses of theft as an economic tool among the antebellum laboring poor, see Stansell, "Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets," passim. 36. For examples, see the New York Tribune, April 12, 14, 19 and 20, 1841, and May 17, 1841. The quotation is from April 20, 1841. 37. See below, n. 48. 38. Boston Evening Transcript, September 20, 1830. 39. Ezra Stiles Ely, Visits of Mercy, I (6th ed.; Philadelphia: S. F. Bradford, 1829), p. 88. 40. Boston Evening Transcript, July 27, 1830. 41. Griscom, Sanitary Condition, p. 9. 42. See, for example, Solon Robinson, Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated (New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1854), p. 31, and 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 Franklin, 1862), p. 370. 43. Robinson, Hot Corn, p. 198. 44. DeVoe, The Market Book, p. 463; Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825-1863 (New York: King's Crown Press, 1949), p. 66. 45. New York Tribune, April 22, 1841. 46. William English, as quoted in Martha May, "Bread Before Roses," p. 5. 47. Wages are from Edgar W. Martin, The Standard of Living in 1860: American Consumption Levels on the Eve of the Civil War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 177, and Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), p. 149 48. This is calculated on the basis of an average weekly budget for a workingclass family of five, as itemized in the New York Tribune in 1851. According to that budget, flour could be bought in bulk at five dollars 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), 1 have increased the cost by thirty per cent. See Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860: The Reaction of American Industrial Society to the Advance of the Industrial Revolution (New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Company, 1974), p. 33. On savings from buying in bulk, see Griscom, Sanitary Condition, p. 8. Other cash values are found in Martin, Standard of Lii'ing, p. 122, and in Richard

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK Osborn Cummings, The American and His Food: A History of Food Habits in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), p. 75. 49. See above, n. 48. 50. Based on figures provided in Ware, The Industrial Worker, p. 33. 51. Martin, Standard of Living, p. 168. 52. Martin, Standard of Living, p. 177. 53. This calculation is based on wages in Carroll D. Wright, Comparative Wages, Prices, and Cost of Living (Boston: Wright and Potter Printing Company, 1889), pp. 47 and 55. It provides a very conservative index for wives' work; wives frequently had skills far beyond the "helper" level. 54. Grant Thorburn, Sketches from the Note-book of Lurie Todd (New York: D. Fanshaw, 1847), 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. 55. Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), Table 11:12, p. 197. 56. 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. 57. Ely, Visits of Mercy, p. 194. 58. Quoted in Ware, The Industrial Worker, p. 77. Emphasis mine. 59. John McVickar, Outlines of Political Economy (New York: Wilder and Campbell, 1825), p. 107. 60. Theodore Sedgwick, Public and Private Economy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), pp. 30 and 225. 61. McVickar, Outlines, p. 144. 62. Marx, Capital, I: 711.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

BARBARA W E L T E R Hunter College

The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860 THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN M A N WAS A BUSY BUILDER O F BRIDGES

and railroads, at work long hours in a materialistic society. The religious values of his forebears were neglected in practice if not in intent, and he occasionally felt some guilt that he had turned this new land, this temple of the chosen people, into one vast countinghouse. But he could salve his conscience by reflecting that he had left behind a hostage, not only to fortune, but to all the values which he held so dear and treated so lightly. Woman, in the cult o£ True Womanhood' presented by the women's magazines, gift annuals and religious literature of the nineteenth century, was the hostage in the home. 2 In a society where values changed fre1 Authors who addressed themselves to the subject of women in tue mid-nineteenth century used this phrase as frequently as writers on religion mentioned God. Neither group felt it necessary to define their favorite terms; they simply assumed—with tome justification—that readers would intuitively understand exactly what they meant. Frequently what people of one era take for granted is most striking and revealing to the student from another. In a sense this analysis of the ideal woman of the midnineteenth century is an examination of what writers of that period actually meant when they used so confidently the vague phrase True Womanhood. 2 The conclusions reached in this article are based on a survey of almost all of the women's magazines published for more than three years during the period 1820-60 and a sampling of those published for less than three years; all the gift books cited in Ralph Thompson, American Literary Annuals and Gift Books, 1825-1865 (New York, 1936) deposited in the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, Columbia University Special Collections, Library of the City College of the University of New York, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Public Library, Fruitlands Museum Library, the Smithsonian Institution and the Wisconsin Historical Society; hundreds of religious tracts and sermons in the American Unitarian Society and the Galatea Collection of the Boston Public Library; and the large collection of nineteenth-century cookbooks in the New York Public Library and the Academy of Medicine of New York. Corroborative evidence not cited in this article was found in women's diaries, memoirs, autobiographies and personal papers, as well as in all the novels by women which sold over 75,000 copies during this period, as cited in Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Bett Sellers in the United States (New York, 1947) and H. R. Brown, The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (DuTham, N. C., 1940). This latter information also indicated the effect of the cult of True Womanhood on those most directly concerned.

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quently, where fortunes rose and fell with frightening rapidity, where social and economic mobility provided instability as well as hope, one thing at least remained the same—a true woman was a true woman wherever she was found. If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex of virtues which made up True Womanhood, he was damned immediately as an enemy of God, of civilization and of the Republic It was a fearful obligation, a solemn responsibility, which the nineteenthcentury American woman had—to uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand. The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society could be divided into four cardinal virtues—piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister wife—woman. Without them, no matter whether there was fame, achievement or wealth, all was ashes. With them she was promised happiness and power. Religion or piety was the core of woman's virtue, the source of her strength. Young men looking for a mate were cautioned to search first for piety, for if that were there, all else would follow.8 Religion belonged to woman by divine right, a gift of God and nature. This "peculiar susceptibility" to religion was given her for a reason: "the vestal flame of piety, lighted up by Heaven in the breast of woman" would throw its beams into the naughty world of men. 4 So far would its candle power reach that the "Universe might be Enlightened, Improved, and Harmonized by WOMAN!!" 6 She would be another, better Eve, working in cooperation with the Redeemer, bringing the world back "from its revolt and sin."® The world would be reclaimed for God through her suffering, for "God increased the cares and sorrows of woman, that she might be sooner constrained to accept the terms of salvation." 7 A popular poem by Mrs. Frances Osgood, "The Triumph of the Spiritual Over the Sensual" ex3 As in "The Bachelor'« Dream," in The Lady's Gift: Souvenir for All Seasons (Nashua, Ν. H., 1849), p. 57. ·» The Young Ladies' Class Book: A Selection of Lessons for Reading in Prose and Verse, ed. Ebenezer Bailey, Principal of Young Ladies' High School, Boston (Boston, 1831), p. 168. BA Lady of Philadelphia, The World Enlightened, Improved, and Harmonized by WOMANI I 1 A lecture, delivered in the City of New York, before the Young Ladies' Society for Mutual Improvement, on the following question, proposed by the society, with the offer of $100 for the best lecture that should be read before them on the subject proposed;—What is the power and influence of woman in moulding the mannen, morals and habits of civil society? (Philadelphia, 1840), p. 1. β The Young Lady's Book: A Manual of Elegant Recreations, Exercises, and Pursuits (Boston, 1850), p. 29. τ Woman As She Was, Is, and Should Be (New York, 1849), p. 206.

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pressed just this sentiment, woman's purifying passionless love bringing an erring man back to Christ.8 Dr. Charles Meigs, explaining to a graduating class of medical students why women were naturally religious, said that "hers is a pious mind. Her confiding nature leads her more readily than men to accept the proffered grace of the Gospel." β Caleb Atwater, Esq., writing in The Ladies' Repository, saw the hand of the Lord in female piety: "Religion is exactly what a woman needs, for it gives her that dignity that best suits her dependence."10 And Mrs. John Sandford, who had no very high opinion of her sex, agreed thoroughly: "Religion is just what woman needs. Without it she is ever restless or unhappy. . . . " u Mrs. Sandford and the others did not speak only of that restlessness of the human heart, which St. Augustine notes, that can only find its peace in God. They spoke rather of religion as a kind of tranquilizer for the many undefined longings which swept even the most pious young girl, and about which it was better to pray than to think. One reason religion was valued was that it did not take a woman away from her "proper sphere," her home. Unlike participation in other societies or movements, church work would not make her less domestic or submissive, less a True Woman. In religious vineyards, said the Young Ladies' Literary and Missionary Report, "you may labor without the apprehension of detracting from the charms of feminine delicacy." Mrs. S. L. Dagg, writing from her chapter of the Society in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was equally reassuring: "As no sensible woman will suffer her intellectual pursuits to clash with her domestic duties" she should concentrate on religious work "which promotes these very duties." 12 The women's seminaries aimed at aiding women to be religious, as well as accomplished. Mt. Holyoke's catalogue promised to make female education "a handmaid to the Gospel and an efficient auxiliary in the great task of renovating the world." 13 The Young Ladies' Seminary at Bordentown, New Jersey, declared its most important function to be "the fonn8 "The Triumph of the Spiritual Over the Sensual: An Allegory," in Ladies' Companion: A Monthly Magazine Embracing Every Department of Literature, Embellished With Original Engravings and Music, XVII (New York) (1842), 67. β Lecture on Some of the Distinctive Characteristics of the Female, delivered before the class of the Jefferson Medical College, Jan. 1847 (Philadelphia, 1847), p. 13. 10 "Female Education," Ladies' Repository and Gatherings of the West: A Monthly Periodical Devoted to Literature and Religion, I (Cincinnati), 12. 11 Woman, in Her Social and Domestic Character (Boston, 1842), pp. 41-42. 12 Second Annual Report of the Young Ladies' Literary and Missionary Association of the Philadelphia Collegiate Institution (Philadelphia, 1840), pp. 20, 26. 18 Mt, Holyoke Female Seminary: Female Education. Tendencies of the Principles Embraced, and the System Adopted in the Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary (Botton, 1839), p. 3.

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ing of a sound and virtuous character." 11 In Keene, New Hampshire, the Seminary tried to instill a "consistent and useful character" in its students, to enable them in this life to be "a good friend, wife and mother" but more important, to qualify them for "the enjoyment of Celestial Happiness in the life to come." 15 And Joseph M' D. Mathews, Principal of Oakland Female Seminary in Hillsborough, Ohio, believed that "fe. male education should be preeminently religious." 19 If religion was so vital to a woman, irreligion was almost too awful to contemplate. Women were warned not to let their literary or intellectual pursuits take them away from God. Sarah Josepha Hale spoke darkly of those who, like Margaret Fuller, threw away the "One True Book" for others, open to error. Mrs. Hale used the unfortunate Miss Fuller as fateful proof that "the greater the intellectual force, the greater and more fatal the errors into which women fall who wander from the Rock of Salvation, Christ the Saviour. . . ," 1 7 One gentleman, writing on "Female Irreligion" reminded his readers that "Man may make himself a brute, and does so very often, but can woman brutify herself to his level—the lowest level of human nature— without exerting special wonder?" Fanny Wright, because she was godless, "was no woman, mother though she be." A few years ago, he recalls, such women would have been whipped. In any case, "woman never looks lovelier than in her reverence for religion" and, conversely, "female irreligion is the most revolting feature in human character." 18 Purity was as essential as piety to a young woman, its absence as unnatural and unfeminine. Without it she was, in fact, no woman at all, but a member of some lower order. A "fallen woman" was a "fallen angel," unworthy of the celestial company of her sex. T o contemplate the loss of purity brought tears; to be guilty of such a crime, in the women's magazines at least, brought madness or death. £ven the language of the flowers had bitter words for it: a dried white rose symbolized "Death Preferable to Loss of Innocence." 19 T h e marriage night was the single great event of a woman's life, when she bestowed her greatest treasure upon her husι * Prospectus of the Young Ladies' Seminary at Bordentown, New Jersey (Bordentown, 1836), p. 7. is Catalogue of the Young Ladies' Seminary in Keene, Neu) Hampshire (n.p., 1832), p. 20. ie "Report to the College of Teachers, Cincinnati, October, 1840" in Ladies' Repository, I (1841), 50. IT Woman's Record: or Sketches of All Distinguished Women from 'The Beginning Till A. D. 1850 (New York, 1853), pp. 665, 669. 18 "Female Irreligion," Ladies' Companion, X I I I (May-Oct. 1840), 111. 1» The Lady's Book of Flowers and Poetry, ed. Lucy Hooper (New York, 1842), has a "Floral Dictionary" giving the symbolic meaning of floral tribute».

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band, and from that time on was completely dependent upon him, an empty vessel,20 without legal or emotional existence of her own.21 Therefore all True Women were urged, in the strongest possible terms, to maintain their virtue, although men, being by nature more sensual than they, would try to assault it. Thomas Branagan admitted in The Excellency of the Female Character Vindicated that his sex would sin and sin again, they could not help it, but woman, stronger and purer, must not give in and let man "take liberties incompatible with her delicacy." "If you do," Branagan addressed his gentle reader, "You will be left in silent sadness to bewail your credulity, imbecility, duplicity, and premature prostitution."22 Mrs. Eliza Farrar, in The Young Lady's Friend, gave practical logistics to avoid trouble: "Sit not with another in a place that is too narrow; read not out of the same book; let not your eagerness to see anything induce' you to place your head close to another person's."23 If such good advice was ignored the consequences were terrible and inexorable. In Girlhood and Womanhood: Or Sketches of My Schoolmates, by Mrs. A. J. Graves (a kind of mid-nineteenth-century The Group), the bad ends of a boarding school class of girls are scrupulously recorded. The worst end of all is reserved for "Amelia Dorrington: The Lost One." Amelia died in the almshouse "the wretched victim of depravity and intemperance" and all because her mother had let her be "high-spirited not prudent." These girlish high spirits had been misinterpreted by a young man, with disastrous results. Amelia's "thoughtless levity" was "followed by a total loss of virtuous principle" and Mrs. Graves editorializes that "the coldest reserve is more admirable in a woman a man wishes to make his wife, than the least approach to undue familiarity."24 A popular and often-reprinted story by Fanny Forester told the sad tale of "Lucy Dutton." Lucy "with the seal of innocence upon her heart, and a rose-leaf on her cheek" came out of her vine-covered cottage and ran 20 See, for example, Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (Boston, 1852), p. 71, in which Zenobia says: "How can she be happy, after discovering that fate has assigned her but one single event, which she must contrive to make the substance of her whole life? Λ man has his choice of innumerable events." 21 Mary R. Beard, Woman As Force in History (New York, 1946) makes this point at some length. According to common law, a woman had no legal existence once she was married and therefore could not manage property, sue in court, etc. In the 1840s and 1850s laws were passed in several states to remedy this condition. 22 Excellency of the Female Character Vindicated: Being an Investigation Relative to the Cause and Effects on the Encroachments of Men Upon the Rights of Women, and the Too Frequent Degradation and Consequent Misfortunes of The Fair Sex (New York, 1807), pp. 277, 278. 23 By a Lady (Eliza Ware Rotch Farrar), The Young Lady's Friend (Boston, 1837), p. 293. 24 Girlhood and Womanhood: or, Sketches of My Schoolmates (Boston, 1844), p. 140.

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into a city slicker. "And Lucy was beautiful and trusting, and thoughtless: and he was gay, selfish and profligate. Needs the stoiy to be told? . . . Nay, censor, Lucy was a child—consider how young, how very untaught—ohl her innocence was no match for the sophistry of a gay, city youth! Spring came and shame was stamped upon the cottage at the foot of the hill." The baby died; Lucy went mad at the funeral and finally died herself. "Poor, poor Lucy DuttonI T h e grave is a blessed couch and pillow to the wretched. Rest thee there, poor Lucyl" 25 T h e frequency with which derangement follows loss of virtue suggests the exquisite sensibility of woman, and the possibility that, in the women's magazines at least, her intellect was geared to her hymen, not her brain. If, however, a woman managed to withstand man's assaults on her virtue, she demonstrated her superiority and her power over him. Eliza Farnham, trying to prove this female superiority, concluded smugly that "the purity of women is the everlasting barrier against which the tides of man's sensual nature surge."2® A story in The Lady's Amaranth illustrates this dominance. It is set, improbably, in Sicily, where two lovers, Bianca and Tebaldo, have been separated because her family insisted she marry a rich old man. By some strange circumstance the two are in a shipwreck and cast on a desert island, the only survivors. Even here, however, the rigid standards of True Womanhood prevail. Tebaldo unfortunately forgets himself slightly, so that Bianca must warn him: "We may not indeed gratify our fondness by caresses, but it is still something to bestow our kindest language, and looks and prayers, and all lawful and honest attentions on each other." Something, perhaps, but not enough, and Bianca must further remonstrate: "It is true that another man is my husband, but you are my guardian angel." When even that does not work she says in a voice of sweet reason, passive and proper to the end, that she wishes he wouldn't but "still, if you insist, I will become what you wish; but I beseech you to consider, ere that decision, that debasement which I must suffer in your esteem." This appeal to his own double standards holds the beast in him at bay. They are rescued, discover that the old husband is dead, and after "mourning a decent season" Bianca finally gives in, legally.27 Men could be counted on to be grateful when women thus saved them from themselves. William Alcott, guiding young men in their relations with the opposite sex, told them that "Nothing is better calculated to 25 Emily Chubbuck, Alderbrook (Boston, 1847), 2nd. ed., II, 121, 127. 26 Woman and Her Era (New York, 1864), p. 95. 27 "The Two Lovers of Sicily," The Lady's Amaranth: A Journal of Tales, Essays, Excerpts—Historical and Biographical Sketches, Poetry and Literature in General (Philadelphia), II (Jan. 1839), 17.

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preserve a young man from contamination of low pleasures and pursuits than frequent intercourse with the more refined and virtuous of the other sex." And he added, one assumes in equal innocence, that youths should "observe and learn to admire, that purity and ignorance of evil which is the characteristic of well-educated young ladies, and which, when we are near them, raises us above those sordid and sensual considerations which hold such sway over men in their intercourse with each other."28 The Rev. Jonathan F. Stearns was also impressed by female chastity in the face of male passion, and warned woman never to compromise the source of her power: "Let her lay aside delicacy, and her influence over our sex is gone."29 Women themselves accepted, with pride but suitable modesty, this priceless virtue. The Ladies? Wreath, in "Woman the Creature of God and the Manufacturer of Society" saw purity as her greatest gift and chief means of discharging her duty to save the world: "Purity is the highest beauty—the true pole-star which is to guide humanity aright in its long, varied, and perilous voyage."80 Sometimes, however, a woman did not see the dangers to her treasure. In that case, they must be pointed out to her, usually by a male. In the nineteenth century any form of social change was tantamount to an attack on woman's virtue, if only it was correctly understood. For example, dress reform seemed innocuous enough and the bloomers worn by the lady of that name and her followers were certainly modest attire. Such was the reasoning only of the ignorant. In another issue of The Ladies' Wreath a young lady is represented in dialogue with her "Professor." The girl expresses admiration for the bloomer costume—it gives freedom of motion, is healthful and attractive. The "Professor" sets her straight. Trousers, he explains, are "only one of the many manifestations of that wild spirit of socialism and agrarian radicalism which is at present so rife in our land." The young lady recants immediately: "If this dress has any connexion with Fourierism or Socialism, or fanaticism in any shape whatever, I have no disposition to wear it at all . . . no true woman would so far compromise her delicacy as to espouse, however unwittingly, such a cause."®1 America could boast that her daughters were particularly innocent. In a poem on "The American Girl" the author wrote proudly: 28 The Young Man's Guide (Boston, 1853), pp. 229, 231. 2® Female Influence: and the True Christian Mode of Its Exercise; a Discourse De· livered in the First Presbyterian Church in New bury port, July 30, 18)7 (Newburyport, 1837), p. 18. sow. Tolle», "Woman The Creature of God and the Manufacturer of Society," Ladies' Wreath (New York), HI (1852), 205. 31 Prof. William M. Heim, "The Bloomer Drese," Ladies' Wreath, III (1852), 247.

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Her eye of light is the diamond bright, Her innocence the pearl, And these are ever the bridal gems That are worn by the American girl. 32 Lydia Maria Child, giving advice to mothers, aimed at preserving that spirit of innocence. She regretted that "want of confidence between mothers and daughters on delicate subjects" and suggested a woman tell her daughter a few facts when she reached the age of twelve to "set her mind at rest." Then Mrs. Child confidently hoped that a young lady's "instinctive modesty" would "prevent her from dwelling on the information until she was called upon to use it." 3 3 In the same vein, a book of advice to the newly-married was titled WhispcT to a Bride?* As far as intimate information was concerned, there was no need to whisper, since the book contained none at all. A masculine summary of this virtue was expressed in a poem "Female Charms": I would have her as pure as the snow on the mount— As true as the smile that to infamy's given— As pure as the wave of the crystalline fount, Yet as warm in the heart as the sunlight of heaven. With a mind cultivated, not boastingly wise, I could gaze on such beauty, with exquisite bliss; With her heart on her lips and her soul in her eyes— What more could I wish in dear woman than this.35 Man might, in fact, ask no more than this in woman, but she was beginning to ask more of herself, and in the asking was threatening the third powerful and necessary virtue, submission. Purity, considered as a moral imperative, set up a dilemma which was hard to resolve. Woman must preserve her virtue until marriage and marriage was necessary for her happiness. Yet marriage was, literally, an end to innocence. She was told not to question this dilemma, but simply to accept it. Submission was perhaps the most feminine virtue expected of women. Men were supposed to be religious, although they rarely had time for it, 32 The Young Lady's Offering: or Gems of Prose and Poetry (BoUoo, 1853), p. 283. The American girl, whose innocence was often connected with ignorance, wan the spiritual ancestress of the Henry James heroine. Daisy Miller, like Lucy Dutton, saw innocence lead to tragedy. 33 The Mother's Book (Boston, 1831), pp. 151, 152. 34 Mrs. L. H. Sigourney, Whisper to a Bride (Hartford, 1851), in which Mrs. Sigourney's approach is summed up in this quotation: "Hömel Blessed bride, thou art about to enter this sanctuary, and to become a priestess at its altar!," p. 44. 35 S. R. R., "Female Charms," Codey's Magazine and Lady's Book (Philadelphia), XXXIII (1846), 52.

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and supposed to be pure, although it came awfully hard to them, but men were the movers, the doers, the actors. Women were the passive, submissive responders. T h e order of dialogue was, of course, fixed in Heaven. Man was "woman's superior by God's appointment, if not in intellectual dowry, at least by official decree." Therefore, as Charles Elliott argued in The Ladies' Repository, she should submit to him "for the sake of good order at least." 36 In The Ladies Companion a young wife was quoted approvingly as saying that she did not think woman should "feel and act for herself because "When, next to God, her husband is not the tribunal to which her heart and intellect appeals—the golden bowl of affection is broken."37 Women were warned that if they tampered with this quality they tampered with the order of the Universe. The Young Lady's Book summarized the necessity of the passive virtues in its readers' lives: "It is, however, certain, that in whatever situation of life a woman is placed from her cradle to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind, are required from her." 38 Woman understood her position if she was the right kind of woman, a true woman. "She feels herself weak and timid. She needs a protector," declared George Burnap, in his lectures on The Sphere and Duties of Woman. "She is in a measure dependent. She asks for wisdom, constancy,! firmness, perseverance, and she is willing to repay it all by the surrender of the full treasure of her affections. Woman despises in man every thing like herself except a tender heart. It is enough that she is effeminate and weak; she does not want another like herself." 39 Or put even more strongly by Mrs. Sandford: "A really sensible woman feels her dependence. She does what she can, but she is conscious of inferiority, and therefore grateful for support." 40 Mrs. Sigourney, however, assured young ladies that although they were separate, they were equal. This difference of the sexes did not imply inferiority, for it was part of that same order of Nature established by Him "who bids the oak brave the fury of the tempest, and the alpine flower lean its cheek on the bosom of eternal snows."41 Dr. Meigs had a different analogy to make the same point, contrasting the anatomy of the Apollo of the Belvedere (illustrating the male principle) with the Venus de Medici (illustrating the female principle). "Woman," said the physician, 36 Charles Elliott, "Arguing With Females." Ladies' Repository, I (1841), 25. 37 Ladies' Companion, VIII (Jan. 1838), 147. 38 The Young Lady's Book (New York, 1830), American edition, p. 28. (This is a different book than the one of the same title and date of publication cited in note 6.) 89 Sphere and Duties of Woman (5th ed., Baltimore, 1854), p. 47. r ( " T h e Family as Factory: Shoemaking in the North Shore District of Massachusetts, 1750-1850," paper read at the American Historical Association, Dcccmber 1980). Outwork brought women into direct contact with an employer outside of the family and with the economic relations of the marketplace. Christopher Clark saw the market, capitalist production, and the rural household in New England interacting initially to preserve family life and the values of rural s Barbara Welter. "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860," American Quarterly, 18 (Summer 1966). 151-74. esp. 152; Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963).

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And Welter concluded that American women of the nineteenth century, saddled with a stereotype so encouraging and yet so constraining, experiencing "guilt and confusion in the midst of opportunity," had been as much bemused by ideology as Friedan's (and Welter's) troubled contemporaries.4 Unlike Tocqueville's, Welter's judgment of the separate sphere was a negative one. Separation denigrated women, kept them subordinate. The choice of the word "cult" was pejorative. Welter's essay—thoughtful, subtle, witty—was much cited and often reprinted; the phrase "cult of true womanhood" became an essential part of the vocabulary of women's history. Less than two years later, Kraditor published Up from the Pedestal, still a striking anthology of documents. Considering what Kraditor called "the primitive state of historiography" in 1968, her introduction was pathbreaking. In it she identified what she called "the question of'spheres'" as central to an understanding of American feminism. She contrasted "autonomy" with "women's proper sphere": "Strictly speaking," she wrote, "men have never had a 'proper sphere', since their sphere has been the world and all its activities." She proposed that the separation of spheres was somehow linked to the Industrial Revolution, which "broadened the distinctions between men's and women's occupations and certainly provoked new thinking about the significance and permanence of their respective 'spheres."' And she noted the persistent description of home as refuge in antifeminist literature, a refuge that had somehow become vulnerable long before Christopher Lasch coined the phrase "haven in a heartless world."' Three years later, Lerner used the social history of women as a base for hypotheses about general political and economic questions in an important essay, "The Lady and the Mill Girl." Introducing class into the analysis and extending the link to the Industrial Revolution, Lerner argued that "American industrialization, which occurred in an underdeveloped economy with a shortage of labor, depended on the labor of women and children" and that one "result of industrialization was in increasing differences in life styles between women of different classes. . . . As class distinctions sharpened, social attitudes toward women became polarized." Welter's "cult of true womanhood" was interpreted by Lerner as a vehicle by which middleclass women elevated their own status. "It is no accident," Lerner wrote in 1969, "that the slogan 'woman's place is in the home' took on a certain aggressiveness and shrillness precisely at the time when increasing numbers of poorer women left their homes to become factory workers."6 4

Welter, "Cult of "Due Womanhood," 162, 174. > Aileen S. Kraditor. ed.. Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism (Chicago. 1968). 9. 14, 10; Christopher Lasch. Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York. 1977). ' Gerda Lernet. "The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson," Midcontinent American Studies Journal, 10 (Spring 1969), 5-15. esp. 10-12. Lemer also observed that Friedan's "feminine mystique" is the continuation of the old myth of woman's proper sphere. With no reference to Lerner, Neil McKendrick made much the same argument for England: the literature of separate spheres was an effort of middle-class women to maintain the difference between themselves and working-class women. McKendrick also noted men's resentment of the new purchasing power of working women; the language of separate spheres expressed their view of the new earnings "as a threat to male authority, a temptation tofemaleluxury and indulgence, and an incitement

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The careful reader of Kraditor and Lerner could hardly fail to notice that their description of women's sphere as separate from, and subordinate to, that of men was congruent with Marxist argument. For Lerner and Kraditor, the metaphor of sphere related not only to Tocqueville, but to Friedrich Engels's conceptualization of a dichotomy between public and private modes of life. Tracing the development of gender relations, Engels had argued that the "world-historical defeat of the female sex" had been accompanied by a shift in control of space: "The man took command in the home also." Engels gave classic expression to the concept of a public/private split, a split in which the most important psychic locus was the home, understood to be a woman's place, but ultimately controlled by man. "With . . . the single monogamous family . . . household management lost its public character. . . . It became a private service!'1 Rhetorically, Engels identified a psychological and legal shift (from matrilocality to patrilocaiity) and gave it a physical context: the nuclear family's home. (Perhaps because this cultural shift had been accomplished long before his own time and had already come to seem the common sense of the matter, Engels did not feel the need to make explicit or defend the equivalencies he identified.) His strategy was to link private-home-woman and then to speak in synecdoche; any part of the triad could stand for any other part. He did so despite his explicit statement that the home was also a locus of men's behavior; indeed for Engels and for Karl Marx, the home is the locus of struggle between the sexes. Awareness of the socially constructed division between public and private, often expressed through the image of sphere, gave energy to much Marxist-feminist writing in the late sixties and early seventies. "The contemporary family," wrote Juliet Mitchell, "can be seen as a triptych of sexual, reproductive and socializatory functions (the woman's world) embraced by production (the man's world)— precisely a structure which in the final instance is determined by the economy. The exclusion of women from production . . . is the root cause of the contemporary social definition of women as natural beings." At the end of her powerfully argued Woman's Estate, Mitchell reiterated that the central problem for women was their relegation to the home during their child-bearing years, "the period of adult psychic and political formation." Bourgeois and working-class women alike were deprived of the opportunity to learn from any but the most limited experience. "The spider's web is dense as well as intricate . . . come into my parlour and be a true woman," Mitchell concludes. "In the home the social function and the psychic identity of women as a group is found."8 of female independence." Neil McKendrick, "Home Demand and Economic Growth: Λ New View of the Role of Women and Children in the industrial Revolution." in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb, cd. Neil McKendrick (London, 1974), 152-210. esp.. 164-67. ' Friedrich Engels. The Origin of the Family, Private Property end the State, ed. Eleanor Buike Leacock (New York. 1972), 120. 137. •Juliet Mitchell. Woman's Estate (New York. 1971), 148. 182. See also Karen Sacks, "Engels Revisited: Women, the Organization of Production, and Private Property," in Women, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford. 1974), 207-22; and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Placing Women's History in History," New Left Review (May-June 1982), 5-29.

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The great power of the Marxist interpretation was that it not only described a separation of spheres, but also offered an explanation of the way in which that separation served the interests of the dominant classes. Separate spheres were due neither to cultural accident nor to biological determinism. They were social constructions, camouflaging social and economic service, a service whose benefits were unequally shared. The idea of separate spheres, as enunciated by Welter, Kraditor, Ltrner, and Mitchell, took on a life of its own. Women's historians of the mid-1960s had inherited a subject that had been, with only few conspicuous exceptions, descriptive and anecdotal. Books like Alice Morse Earle's Home Life in Colonial Days loomed large.' When earlier historians of women had turned to politics, a Whiggish progressivism had' infused much of their work, suggesting that the central theme in women's history was an inexorable march toward the suffrage. The concepts of separate spheres and of a public/private dichotomy offered ways of addressing women's history that employed social and cultural, as well as political, material. Historians who did not think of themselves as Marxists were nevertheless deeply indebted to Marxist analysis. Social theory enabled women's historians to introduce categories, hypotheticals, and analytical devices by which they could escape the confines of accounts of "great ladies" or of "the progress of women." Still —whether handled by Erikson, who grounded the separation of spheres in what he took to be permanent psychological verities; Welter, who grounded it in culture; or socialist feminists (including Lerner and Kraditor), who grounded it in property relations —in the early 1970s separation was generally associated with subordination, deteriorating status, and the victimization of women by men.10 In 1975 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg offered a striking reinterpretation of the possibilities of separation in her pathbreaking essay "The Female World of Love and Ritual." Several years later she recalled: "I began with a question. How can we understand the nature of the emotionally intense and erotic friendships between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century married women and society's benign approval of such relationships?" Smith-Rosenberg maintained that separation could make possible psychologically sustaining and strengthening relationships among women. Victorians did not make rigid distinctions, as we do, between heterosexuality and homosexuality. A culture of separate spheres was not simply an ancestral culture differing from our own primarily in the extent of industrialization; it was, SmithRosenberg argued, a dramatically different culture in which boundaries were differently marked, anxieties differently expressed. Nineteenth-century women had available sources of psychological support that had eroded in our own day. Smith-Rosenberg's work implied that there had existed a distinctive women's culture, in which women

» Alice Morse Earle, Home Life in Colonuü Days (New York, 1898). 10 See Barbara Sicherman et al., Recent United States Scholarship on the History of Women (Washington, 1980).

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assisted each other in childbirth, nurtured each other's children, and shared emotional and often erotic ties stronger than those with their husbands." Other work of the 1970s filled in details of the distinctive women's culture that Smith-Rosenberg had identified. In "Female Support Networks and Political Activism," Blanche Wiesen Cook focused on four women who had significant political careers in the late nineteenth a n d early twentieth centuries. Cook dealt with the probability of homosexual relationships a m o n g some of her subjects, arguing that politically activist women were sustained by complex and powerful friendships with other women. She maintained that such friendships were part of the history historians sought to trace and that, instead of ignoring them as irrelevant, historians should address t h e m frankly, understanding that the "sisterhood" of which so many women spoke included female friendships that ran the gamut from acquaintance to long-sustained sexual relationships. Kathryn Kish Sklar's biography of Catharine Beecher analyzed the woman who did most to define the ingredients of the traditional women's sphere: domesticity, nurture, and education. Beecher took the position that women's sphere did not encompass politics, notably in exchanges with Angelina Grimke. Significantly, Beecher addressed extensively the elements of the physical location of t h e women's sphere, not only in abstractions like "the classroom" or "the h o m e " but also in explicit and original physical plans for The American

Woman's Home.12 In The Bonds of Womanhood, Nancy F. Cott explored the way in which "the doctrine of woman's sphere" actually was practiced in early nineteenth-century New England. Cott f o u n d in middle-class women's diaries and letters a distinctive "orientation toward gender" that derived from shared patterns of work. She found in those writings an understanding of domesticity that placed it in direct opposition to ongoing "social and economic transformation" and that emphasized the complexity of the role of m o t h e r h o o d . Organized church groups became one of the few institutional contexts in which women could "connect purposefully" to the community, and such groups, in turn, set a "pattern of reliance on female friendships for emotional expression a n d security." Cott ended by proposing that the feminist political movement of the nineteenth century had grown out of the separation of spheres and taken its distinctive shape a n d interests from t h a t separation. For Cott the "ideology of woman's sphere f o r m e d a necessary stage in . . . softening the hierarchical relationship of marriage." Although the idea of women's sphere was not necessarily protofeminist, domesticity

" Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in NineteenthCentury America," Signs. 1 (Autumn 1975), 1-29- Her later observations appeared in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. "Politics and Culture in Women's History: A Symposium," Feminin Studies. 6 (Spring 1980). 55-64, esp. 60. See also her collected essays. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York. 1985). 11 Blanche Wiesen Cook. "Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald. Chrystal Eastman. Emma Goldman." Chrysalis (no. 3, 1977), 43-61: Kathryn Kish Sklar. Catharine Beecher A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven. 1973). In Catharine E. Bcccher. A Treatise on Domestic Economy (Boston. 1842). 26-36. Beecher quoted Tocqueville at length and with admiration.

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and feminism were linked by "women's perception of 'womanhood'" as an allsufficient definition and of sisterhood as implicit in it. That consciousness, Cott argued, was a necessary precondition for feminism, even though in opening up certain avenues to women because of their sex it barricaded all others.15 Like others before her, Cott sought an economic base for the social transformation she discerned. E. P. Thompson had argued that the crucial psychological change of the early stages of the Industrial Revolution was a shift from the task orientation of traditional artisan work patterns to the time discipline associated with modernity. Con added the thought that married women's work became less like men's work in the early nineteenth century, as men's work was subjected to modern time discipline while women's work remained task oriented. Work patterns reinforced women's sense that their lives were defined differently from men's. Domesticity could even embody "a protest against that advance of exploitation and pecuniary values. . . . by upholding a 'separate sphere' of comfort and compensation. . . . The literature of domesticity . . . enlisted women in their domestic roles to absorb, palliate, and even to redeem the strain of social and economic transformation."14 Perhaps the historian to use the concept of separate spheres most energetically was Carl N. Degler, whose book At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present was published in 1980. For Degler, the definition of separate spheres was an important nineteenth-century development that accompanied and made possible the replacement of patriarchal family relationships by companionate ones. Drawing on the work of Daniel Scott Smith, he suggested that women's political autonomy in the public world had been preceded by a form of sexual autonomy, or at least assertiveness, in the private world, and he pointed to the declining birth rate in the nineteenth century as evidence that women were able to exercise a growing degree of control in their sexual relations. Domesticity offered advantages as well as disadvantages to women, smoothing the way to popular acceptance of extrafamilial activities by women. "Separate spheres" deflected conflict; the very language anticipated negotiation. The metaphor of separate spheres helped Degler establish order among issues as disparate as abortion, suffrage, literacy, and friendship. Reference to the omnipresent ideology became a useful guide, enabling the historian to anticipate which changes Americans could be expected to support (for example, the entry of women into the teaching profession) and which they would resist (for example, suffrage, because it could not be accommodated to the concept of separate spheres). At Odds, a wide-ranging, fluent, and thoughtful

'» Nancy F. Cott. Tie Bonds of Womanhood: "Women's Sphere" in New England, 1780-183) (New Haven. 1977). 200. 125, 70, 173, 197, 200, 205. M E. P. Thompson. Tunc. Wark-Discipline. and Industrial Capitalism," But and Present (Dec 1967). 56-97; Con, Bonds of Womanhood, 58. 68-70. In 1964. David M. Patter had observed, "Tbe profound differences between the patterns of men's work and women's work are seldom understood by most men, and perhaps even by most women." He noted that middle-class women's lives remained task-oriented deep into the twentieth century. David M. Potter. "American Women and the American Character," in History end American Society: Essays of David AL Potter, ed. Don E. Fchrenbacher (New York, 197}). 277-303, esp. 287.

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survey of women's history and family history may well represent the high-water mark of reliance on separate spheres as an organizing device." The first stage of the development of the metaphor —in the late 1960s and early 1970s—was marked by an effort to identify separate spheres as a theme central to women's historical experience, locating the ideology in the context of antebellum American society. The second stage —in the later 1970s —encompassed an effort to refine the definition and identify complexities, introducing the liberating possibilities of a "women's culture." By 1980 historians had devised a prism through which to view the diaries, letters, and organization records that had been freshly discovered and whose analytical potential was freshly appreciated. But the language of separate spheres was vulnerable to sloppy use. Above all, it was loosely metaphorical. Those who spoke of "cult" did not, after all, mean a voluntary organization based on commitment to explicit ideological or theological tenets; by "sphere" they did not mean a three-dimensional surface, all points of which are equidistant from a fixed point. When they used the metaphor of separate spheres, historians referred, often interchangeably, to an ideology imposed on women, a culture created by women, a set of boundaries expected to be observed by women. Moreover, the metaphor helped historians avoid thinking about race; virtually all discussion of the subject until very recently has focused on the experience of white women, mostly of the middle class.16 In response to this problem. Feminist Studies published an exchange in which five historians—Lerner, Smith-Rosenberg, Temma Kaplan, Man Jo Buhle, and Ellen DuBois—discussed the problems of usage inherent in the terms "women's sphere" and "women's culture." The Feminist Studies symposium of 1980 conveniently marks the opening of a third stage, in which historians have sought to embed women's experience in the main course of human development and to unpack the metaphor of "separate spheres." In this stage, historians have undertaken a conscious criticism of their own rhetorical constructions. The comments of the symposium contributors showed that the word "cult" had virtually dropped out of professional historians' usage, although its challenge—that we allocate how much was prescribed for women and how much created by women—remained. DuBois warned that pride in the possibilities of a distinct women's culture might blind historians to the facts of women's oppression. Her respondents tended to caution against conflating the terms "women's sphere," which they took to express a limiting ideology, and " Carl N. Degler. At Odds: Women and the family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New Ybrk, 1980). 9. 298. See also ibid., 26-29, 50-54, 189. 283-98. 302-8, 317,429. Daniel Scon Smith, "Family Limitation. Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America," in Clio's Consciousness Raised, ed. Maty S. Hartman and Lois W. Banner (New York. 1974). 119-36. '* Note, however. Elizabeth Fm-Genovese. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, forthcoming), which addresses with subtlety the intersection of the spheres of slaveholding and enslaved women; and see Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 198)); and Jacqueline Jones. Labor of Love. Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the family from Slavery to the Present (New York. 1985).

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"women's culture," a term which embraced creativity in the domestic arts, distinctive forms of labor, and particular patterns of social relationships.17 The need to break out of the restrictive dualism of an oppressive term (women's sphere) and a liberating term (women's culture) has propelled what I think is a third stage in the development of the metaphor of separate spheres. Taking an interactive view of social processes, historians now seek to show how women's allegedly "separate sphere" was affected by what men did, and how activities defined by women in their own sphere influenced and even set constraints and limitations on what men might choose to do —how, in short, that sphere was socially constructed both for and by women. The first major characteristic of the third stage of understanding is the application of the concept to the entire chronology of human experience, rather than to the discussion of antebellum society where, perhaps by accident, perhaps thanks to Tocqueville, historians first encountered it. A great deal of recent work has made it clear that the separation of spheres was not limited to a single generation or a single civilization. Surveys of the history of political thought have shown that the habit of contrasting the "worlds" of men and of women, the allocation of the public sector to men and the private sector (still under men's control) to women is older than western civilization. In The Creation of Patriarchy, Lerner locates the crucial moment in a prehistoric shift from hunting and gathering societies to agricultural ones and an accompanying intertribal "exchange of women" in the Neolithic period. "Women themselves became a resource, acquired by men much as the land was acquired by men. . . . It was only after men had learned how to enslave the women of groups who could be defined as strangers, that they learned how to enslave men of those groups and, later, subordinates from within their own societies."1β The distinction between the private and the public was deeply embedded in classical Greek thought. As Hannah Arendt lucidly explained, the Greeks distinguished between the private realm, defined by the "limitation[s] imposed upon us by the needs of biological life," which preclude choice, and the public realm of action and choice. Women, "who with their bodies guarantee the physical survival of the species," were understood to live wholly on the private sector; in Greece they were confined to the large family household and did not mingle, promiscuously, with people on the streets. They were understood to lack the civic virtue that enabled men to function as independent moral beings. Men were advantaged; they lived in both the private and the public mode; men realized themselves most fully in the activities of the polis. For Aristotle, "the sophrosyne (strength of character) " Ellen DuBois, Mali Jo Buhle, Temma Kaplan, Gerda Lernet, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Politics and Culture in TOxnen's History: A Symposium." feminist Studies, 6 (Spring 1980), 26-64. 11 Getda Lemer, Tie Creation ofPutrwnbj (New York, 1986), 212-13. Italia added. "For nearly four thousand years women have shaped their lives and acted under the umbrella of patriarchy," Lernet continues. "The dominated exchange submission for protection, unpaid labor for maintenance. . . . It was a rational choice for women, under conditions of public powerlessness and economic dependency, to choose strong protectors for themselves and their children." Ibid.. 217-18. See also ibid.. 27-28.

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of a man and of a woman, or the couragc and justice of a man and of a woman are n o t . . . the same; the courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying." In the ancient formulation, the separate world of women was located securely in a larger patriarchal social context. Classical assumptions about the appropriate relationship between men and women have been attacked only sporadically until recent times. Except for socialist writers. Western political theorists have treated women in what Susan Moller Okin has called a "functionalist" mode, which assumes that women cannot be dissociated from their function in the family." When Europeans ventured to the New World, they brought with them the longstanding Western assumptions about women's separate world. Colonial American culture made firm distinctions about what was appropriate for each sex to do and took for granted the subordination of women. Whether viewed skeptically or sympathetically, English colonists in North America appear to have done little questioning of inherited role definitions. From northern New England to the Carolinas there stretched a society in which a woman was defined by her family life and acted in response to relatives' and neighbors' claims on her. The Christian faith of the immigrants ratified both distinctive roles and a subordinate status for women. "Of all the Orders which are unequals," wrote the Congregational minister Samuel Willard, " . . . [husband and wife] do come nearest to an Equality, and in several respects they stand upon even ground. . . . Nevertheless, God hath also made an imparity between them, in the Order prescribed in His Word, and for that reason there is a Subordination, and they are ranked among unequals." Recent studies of witchcraft have suggested that women at risk for accusation included those who pressed at the boundaries of expected women's behavior, intentionally or unintentionally. One of the major factors in the colonists' perception of Indians as uncivilized was the Indians' tendency to define gender relations differently than did Europeans. ξΜοpeans were particularly dismayed when Indian women played roles that were not subordinate or when Indian societies did not display a separation of spheres as Europeans understood them. (For example, Europeans found matrilocality indecipherable.)» Hannah Arendi. The Human Condition (New York. 1958). 22-78, esp. 24. 72. Aristotle. Politics, trans. Benjamin Joeett (New York, 1943), 77 (1260a). I am grateful to Judith F. Hallett for this reference. Susan Moller Okin. Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, 1979), 9-11, 233. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Women: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton. 1981), builds on a similar dichotomy, although Elshtain ends by decrying contemporary feminists for permitting the intrusion of politics into the private sector. See also Ruth H. Bloch, "Untangling the Roots of Modem Sex Roles: Λ Survey of Four Centuries of Change," Signs. 4 (Winter 1978). 237-52. » Samuel Willard. A Complete Body of Divinity in Two Hundred and fifty Expository Lectures (Boston, 1726), 609-12, quoted in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, "Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1688-1735," American Quarterly, 28 (Spring 1976), 20-40, esp. 30. For skeptical views, see Lyle Kochler, A Search for Power. The "Weaker Sex" in Seventeenth-Century New England (Urbana, 1980). Laurel Thatcher Ulrich describes a social order in which men's and women's life roles were sharply distinct, overlapping, however, in the role of "deputy husband," which enabled women to act in the public sector if authorized by husbands and fathers. Sec Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 16}0-17}0 (New York, 1982). Even Ulrich, however, represents a drastic revision of the generalizations about early American life made in the 1950s. Sec Daniel J. Boorsrin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York, 1958), 186-87. For the boundaries of witchcraft, see John Putnam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York, 1982), 281-83 (the maps of relationships between alleged witches

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As the American Revolution began to impinge on white middle-class women, what Mary Beth Norton has called the "circle of domestic concerns" bounded their lives: the choice of husband (an especially important decision in a virtually divorceless society), the nurture of children, the management or service of the household. The Revolution shook old assumptions about women's place and suggested new possibilities; guerrilla war made few concessions to alleged frailty, and many women, whether Loyalist or Patriot, were involuntarily given an accelerated course in politics and independence. By the end of the war, the domestic roles of women could no longer be taken for granted; such roles now required defensive ideological articulation. Thus emerged the antebellum prescriptive literature we have come to know.21 As I have argued elsewhere, the ideology of republican womanhood was an effort to bring the older version of the separation of spheres into rough conformity with the new politics that valued autonomy and individualism. Issues of sexual asymmetry dominated public discourse to an unprecedented extent as people tried to define a place for women in postrevolutionary society. Even as Americans enlarged the scope, resonance, and power of republicanism they simultaneously discounted and weakened the force of patriarchy. They recoded the values of women's sphere, validating women's moral influence on their husbands and lovers, ascribing worldhistorical importance to women's maternal role, and claiming for women a nature less sexual and more self-controlled than the nature of men. The ideology of republican womanhood recognized that women's choices and women's work did serve large social and political purposes, and that recognition was enough to draw the traditional women's "sphere" somewhat closer to men's "world." But to use the language of domesticity was also to make a conservative political choice among alternative options, rejecting the frankly feminist option, articulated by Mary Wollstonecraft in England and Etta Palm in France, that claimed for women direct connection with replublican political life. Indeed, I believe that the American Revolution was kept from spinning on an outwardly expansive and radical track in part by the general refusal to entertain proposals for redefining the relationship between women and the Republic. By contrast, major changes in women's political life were associated with the radical stages of the French Revolution, and erasure of those changes was associated with the retreat from radicalism." and their accusers); and Carol F. Karlsen. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York. 1987). On European attitudes toward sex roles in Indian societies, see James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York, 198)). For an example of Europeans who observed intensely, but rarely understood, Indian culture, sec Paul Le Jeunc, Relation of What Occurred in New fronet m the Year 16}} in The Jesuit Relations and AUitd Documents, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (7) wis., Cleveland, 1896-1901), V-VI. William Ptno was a major exception to this rule. Sec, for example. "Letter to the Free Society of Traden," Aug. 16,1683, in William Pen η and the Founding of Pennsylvania. 1680-1684: A Documentary History, ed. Jean R. Soderlund (Philadelphia. 1983). 308-19. u Mary Beth Norton, liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 17)0-1800 (Boston, 1980), 298. Norton found reference to women's sphere in the late colonial period. Samuel Quincy wrote to Robert Treat Paine in 1756, fearing that women want "to obtain the other's Sphere of Action, it become Men," but hoped "they will again return to the wonted Paths of true Politeness, & shine most in the proper Sphere of domestick Life." Ibid., 8. See also Linda K. Kerber, "Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic, 1787-180)." in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, ed. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKi trick (New York. 1974). 36-59. » Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill,

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The second major characteristic of the current stage of understanding is that we are giving more attention to questions about the social relations of the sexes and treating the language of separate spheres itself as a rhetorical construction that responded to changing social and economic reality. Tocqueville's visit occurred at the end of more than a half century during which one variant of the separation of spheres and the patriarchal culture in which it was embedded had been undermined by commercial, political, and industrial revolutions. Adam Smith had given voice to the great commercial transformation, the founders at Philadelphia had articulated the political one, and new technology embodied the industrial one. In each realm the world maintained itself by the spinning gyroscope of successive decision and choice. Political rules, like economic ones, had been written anew. In a world from which familiar boundaries had been erased, new relationships had to be defined, new turf had to be measured, and in Thomas L Haskell's phrase, new "spheres of competition" had to be freshly aligned. In a system of laissez-faire, which relied on the dynamic force of self-interest in commerce and in politics, the "sphere of competition" was everywhere. In a Tocquevillean world of equality, where all the old barriers had been removed, little was left that was not vulnerable. Marvin Meyers discerned many years ago that Tocqueville's American Man was characteristically anxious, as well he might be in a world in which so little seemed reliably fixed.23 The capitalist revolution also had deeply unsealing implications for women. As patriarchy eroded, social reality involved unattached individuals, freely negotiating with each other in an expansive market. The patriarchal variant of separate spheres was not congruent with capitalist social relations; capitalism required that men's and women's economic relations be renegotiated. A capitalist system tended to undermine an older scheme of property relations that, by keeping a woman's property under the control of the men to whom she was entrusted, could also keep it out of the marketplace, for example, when dower property was shielded from seizure for debt. Capitalism had the potential to enhance the position of women by loosening patriarchal control of property and removing factors that shielded property from the pressures of the marketplace. The revised understanding of the relationship between women and the marketplace was embodied in the married women's property acts, devised state by state in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Such statutes gave married women the right to hold and manipulate their own earnings and property. The statutes created a vast new group of property-holding, but unenfranchised, citizens; married women's property acts unintentionally but inexorably created an 1980), 185-231. See also Linda K. Kerber. "The Republican Mother Wimen and the Enlightenment—An American Perspective," American Quarterly, 28 (Summer 1976), 187-20). For France, see Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson, IVomen m Revolutionary Peris, 1789-179}: Selected Documents Translated with Notes and Commentary (Urbana. 1979). On sexuality, see Nancy F. Co«. "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology. 1790-1850," Signs, 4 (Winter 1978), 219-36. For the implications of republican ideology for the relations b a w n u women and men, sec Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic," William and Mary Quarterly, 44 (Oct. 1987), 689-721. u Marvin Meyers. Thejacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief (Stanford, 1957), 4). Thomas L Haskell used the phrase in a letter to me in May 1984.

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internally contradictory situation that was ultimately resolved by granting the vote —and with it, service on juries and the opportunity to hold public office. The franchise acknowledged women's connection to the political community as the law of property had acknowledged their entry into the marketplace. As the patriarchal corporate economy broke down, the traditional version of the separate sphere was destabilized. One plausible way to read nineteenth-century defenses of separate spheres, not least among them Tocqueville's, is to single out the theme of breakdown; the noise we hear about separate spheres may be the shattering of an old order and the realignment of its fragments.24 But the old order, like the parson's one-horse shay, took a long time breaking down. Patched up and reconstructed, it continued to rattle along for a long time. The first wave of married women's property acts did not seem to usher in a new era; they protected only property given or willed to women, expressing fathers' distrust of irresponsible sons-in-law. In protecting gift property from seizure for debts contracted by husbands, married women's property acts were debtor relief acts that directly benefited men. The new property acts expressed a relationship between men —as well as a revised relationship among men, women, and the marketplace. Only at the stage of revision —1835 in Michigan, 1860 in New York, later elsewhere — did the new statutes spec ifically protect married women's earnings and their right to manage their own property. Not until 1911 did Michigan law permit a married woman to define the full use of her own earnings; until then her husband had the right to decide whether or not a woman could work for wages.2' Thus the older property relations between husbands and wives persisted long after limited elements of those relations had been modified by statute. Studying nineteenth-century Michigan women's correspondence, Marilyn Ferris Motz has argued for the continuing instrumental usefulness of the separate female sphere as "a system of human relations" that provided a "cushion" against a legal system whose rules privileged the authority of husbands and fathers over married women's property relations during a lengthy transitional period. Because the early versions of married women's property acts protected only inherited and gift property, they created a paradox in which a woman exercised much more control over property she inherited from her parents than over property she had helped build —on a farm or in a family business —in the course of her marriage. In such a legal context. Motz argues, there was good economic reason for women to work energetically to establish and maintain networks of female kin. "Women attempted to balance their lack of authority within the nuclear family with the collective moral, social, and financial " On fathers in commercial settings willing real estate to daughters, see Toby L Ditz, Property and Kinship: Inheritance in Early Connecticut, UiO-1820 (Princeton. 1986). For the anomalies of the impact of capitalism on the status of women, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Gcnovcse. fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York. 1983), esp. 299—336. For a succinct review of these developments, see Norma Bäsch, "Equity vs. Equality: Emerging Concepts of Women's Political Status in the Age of Jackson." Journal of the Early Republic. 3 (Fall 1983), 297-318. ejp. 305. " Bäsch, "Equity vs. Equality." See also Norma Bäsch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca. 1982); and Suzanne O. Lebsock, "Radical Reconstruction and the Property Rights of Southern Women," Journal of Southern History, 43 (May 1977), 195-216.

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pressure of their kin networks," Motz observes, " . . . from whom [they] could inherit and to whom [they] could turn for alternative support." In an era when alimony was rare, women who wished to divorce their husbands leaned on female kin for support. A woman who faced early death in childbirth counted on her sisters to protect her children from mistreatment by possible future stepmothers. Young widows turned to their female kin to sustain them and their children; elderly widows counted on their daughters and daughters-in-law to nurse them in reciprocity for earlier care. Motz draws an analogy between the social dynamics that sustained the separate sphere of middle-class nineteenth-century Michigan women and the patterns of service and reciprocity traced by Carol B. Stack among twentieth-century working-class women. She argues forcefully that the "women's culture" and "women's values" of the separate sphere rested on long-term economic and psychological self-interest. 26 In Motz's Michigan, as in Cott's New England, the work patterns of men deviated ever farther from those of women, perhaps reinforcing the need to maintain the boundaries of the separate women's sphere. But as Tamara Κ. Hareven observed in 1976, members of families might be drawn into capitalist ways at different rates. When women worked in factories and taught in schools, their work was modernized and forced into the new time-bound, clock-measured matrix to which E. P. Thompson has given classical formulation. For the first time in history, substantial numbers of women could earn substantial amounts of cash. In a careful reading of the letters of Lowell mill women, Thomas Dublin criticizes the older assumption that mill women remained embedded in the traditional family economy. "Work in the mills," he writes, "functioned for women rather like migration did for young men. . . . the mills offered individual self-support." Perhaps the clearest expression of that position comes in a letter written by a father on a farm to a foster daughter in the mills: "You now feel & enjoy independence trusting to your own ability to procure whatever you want, leaning on no one no one depending on you."27 How are we to find our way through the confusions of local idiosyncrasy, sometimes providing dependence, sometimes independence? Two important books, published in the early 1980s, both community studies built on demographic and quantitative research in documents revealing economic relationships, offer complex but carefully nuanced analyses. Together they testify to the dramatic force of capitalist pressures on women's sphere.

» Marilyn Ferris Motz, True Sisterhood: Michigan Women an J Their Kin. 1820-1920 (Albany. 1983). 29. 33-35. 121-25, 155-56. 168; Carol B. Stack. All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York, 1974). " Tamara Κ. Hareven. "Modernization and Family History: Perspectives on Social Change," Signs, 2 (Autumn 1976), 190-206; McKendrick, "Home Demand and Economic Growth," 164-67; Thomas Dublin, ed.. From Farm to Factory: Women's Letters, 1830-1860 (New York, 1981), 22-23, 166. Class, race, ethnicity, location, and time all affected the psychological impact of work outside the home. Leslie Woodcock Tender found that factory women in early twentieth-century Boston. New York. Philadelphia, and Chicago not only continued to think of themselves as embedded in the family economy, but also found in the workplace other young women who reinforced this traditional understanding. Leslie Woodcock Tender, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States. 1900-1930 (New York, 1979). See also Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et iL. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill, 1987).

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In antebellum Petersburg, Virginia, the language of domesticity and the deferential separation of spheres escaped explicit public challenge. But Suzanne Lebsock can unambivalently conclude from her intensive analysis of public records that "women in Petersburg experienced increasing autonomy, autonomy in the sense of freedom from utter dependence on particular men. Relatively speaking, fewer women were married, more women found work for wages, and more married women acquired separate estates." The changes occurred largely without the assistance of a politically oriented discourse. Separate estates—a legal device that deflected coverture and assured married women control over property—provided a shelter against family bankruptcy and an apolitical response to repeated economic panics. "It stands to reason," Lebsock writes, "that an ideology that tried to fix the boundaries of women's sphere should have become pervasive and urgent just as women began to exercise a few choices. . . . As women acquired new degrees of power and autonomy in the private sphere, they were confronted with new forms of subordination in the public sphere.28 The character of the women's sphere of the mid-nineteenth century as distinctive social construction is elaborately developed and richly argued in Mary P. Ryan's important study of Oneida County, New York, Cradle of the Middle Class. Stressing the connections between public and private realms, Ryan begins by describing the patriarchal assumptions of the traditional early modern domestic economy. In her reading, many aspects of patriarchy broke down in the early nineteenth century, under blows from an increasingly commercial economy that made unentailed estates and liquid inheritance advantageous to heirs. Instead of the language of separate spheres, Ryan speaks of the changing interests of families as a whole. Ryan interprets the retreat to the private conjugal family as a way of mobilizing private resources for upward social mobility. Over a half century, from 1810 to 1855, the number of children per family dropped sharply, from 5.8 to 3.6, permitting more attention to each child. At the same time, the language of domesticity, which emphasized the role of mothers in raising children, was congruent with increased psychological investment in child nurture and education and, most important, with keeping sons out of the work force in order to extend their education and improve their chances for upward mobility. One major surprise is Ryan's finding that as boys were kept out of the work force, middle-class women and daughters were increasingly apt to work for pay—for example, by keeping boarders, or serving as domestics. Women's energy was used "to maintain or advance the status of men in their families."1» In Ryan's account, women's "separate sphere" was deeply paradoxical. The concept clearly served the interests of the men with whom women lived. Yet, women also claimed it for their own, defining their own interests as inextricably linked to the upward mobility of their families, repressing claims for their own autonomy. » York, » Eng..

Suzanne Lebsock. The free Women ofPetersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town. 1784-1860 (New 1984), xv, 234. Mary P. Ryan. Cradle ofthe Middle Class: The family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-186} (Cambridge, 1981), esp. 56. 185.

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Α ΗΑΓΡΥ FAMILY.

Authorities promoted the ideology of domesticity and separate spheres to southern blacks, even when most still lived in slave cabins. Reproduced from Clinton B. Fisk, Plain Counsel for the Freedmen (1866). Courtesy Library of Congress.

When women went to work for pay, they entered a severely segregated work force (the white-collar jobs of clerks were still reserved for their sons and brothers). The diaries of their friendships show them circulating in a world of women. The logic of their situation drove a very few to political feminism, but for most, the "female world of love and ritual" and the ideology of domesticity that purported to explain it remained powerful and persuasive. Black families were not immune to the ideology of separate spheres, and recent

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work by James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Dorothy Sterling, Jacqueline Jones, and Deborah Gray White has been particularly shrewd in tracing their ambivalent responses to it.30 The American ideology was to some limited extent congruent with African traditions of matrilocality, of women's clear responsibilities for child support and child raising, and of a sex-linked division for child support and child raising, and of a sex-linked division of labor. Enslaved men lacked the economic power that white men exercised over their families; the nuances of relationships between slave men and women are debated by historians. It is clear that directly after the Civil War, prescriptive literature addressed to recently freed slaves, people living in hovels with dirt floors, counseled delicacy among women and a clear division of their work from men's work, implicitly promising that adoption of the ideology would ensure elevation to the middle class." The ideology of separate spheres could be both instrumental and prescriptive; its double character has made it difficult for historians to work with. In the first mode, it was an ideology women found useful and emotionally sustaining, a familiar link between the older patriarchal culture and the new bourgeois experience. This aspect could be particularly welcome as a hedge against secularization; religious women of virtually all persuasions sustained a pattern of separateness both in their religious activism and in their own religiosity.52 It could also, as Gerda Lerner discerned, protect the interests of one class of women in a time of change. But in its prescriptive mode, the ideology of separate spheres required constant attention if it were to be maintained. In Beyond Separate Spheres, Rosalind Rosenberg has located the beginnings of modern studies of sex differences in the Progressive Era. Two generations of brilliant social scientists, among them Helen Thompson, Jessie Taft, W. I. Thomas, Franz Boas, and Elsie Clews Parsons, established the foundation for a "fundamental shift that took place in the way women viewed themselves and their place in society." By the early twentieth century at least some psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists were coming to understand that many sex differences were the result of socialization, not biology. Finally it became possible to imagine a culture that was not divided into separate spheres. Our own ideas about sex differences still rely heavily on their work." Yet the real world took its time catching up with what academics believed they w J a m « Oliver Horton and Loii E. Horton, Black Bostonusns: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York. 1979); Dorothy Sterling. td.We Are Your Sitters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1984); Jones. Labor of Love. Labor of Sorrow, White. Ar'n't I Α Vornan? 1 am indebted to the interpretations of Evelyn Brooks. "The Problem of Race in Women's History," in Radical Ends and Impossible Means: Feminism/Theory/Politics, ed. Elizabeth Weed (forthcoming). » Sterling, We Are Your Sisters. 519-20. M Tamara Κ. Hareven's point that the rate of modernization may be different for men and women even within the same family applies to secularization as well. Nineteenth-century American Protestant women sustained a pattern of separateness in their religious activism and in their own religiosity. See Barbara Welter. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens. 1976). 83-102; and Joan Jacobs Brum berg, "Zenanas and Girlless Villages: The Ethnology of American Evangelical Women, 1870-1910." Journal of American History. 69 (Sept. 1982), 347-71. " Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven. 1982)

xiv.

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knew. Quite as much energy, male and female, has gone to maintain boundaries as to break them down. One result of the traditional assumption that what women have done is trivial is that historians have severely underestimated the extent of the energy—psychological, political, and legal —thus expended. Writing of rural communities in the nineteenth-century Midwest, John Mack Faragher describes the dynamics of the process: "the regulation of the sexual division of labor was achieved through the perpetuation of a hierarchical and male-dominant family structure, linked to a public world from which women were excluded. . . . Men were free to pursue the work of the public world precisely because the inequitable division of labor at home made them the beneficiaries of women's and children's labor."34 Examples of the energy put into maintaining boundaries abound. Thus Mary Kelley's Private Woman, Public Stage is in part an extended accounting of the price paid in pain and anguish by the first generation of professional women writers who sought to break their traditional intellectual isolation, and the "deprivation and devastation of spirit," the "subversion of intellect," to which the tradition of separate spheres had consigned them. Degler and Kraditor have emphasized the energy that antisuffiragists dedicated to maintaining the boundaries of the separate spheres as they knew them. Cindy Sondik Aron's important study of the continuing negotiation of manners and reciprocal obligations in the mid-nineteenth-century civil service, the fust large-scale labor force that was genuinely mixed in gender, shows that the ideology of separate spheres—like all ideology—is not frozen in time but is in a constant state of refinement until it fits reality so badly that a paradigm shift in conceptualization is unavoidable. Margaret W. Rossiter's Women Scientists in America provides, among many other things, a case study in the strategies of boundary maintenance and renegotiation. As women scientists successfully met the traditional markers of professional accomplishment, the standards themselves were redefined so as to enclose a sector of the population that was male.35 Feminist historians of the Progressive Era have been particularly sensitive to the force of opposition that women met when they sought public influence. The years 1870-1920 may be the high-water mark of women's public influence: through voluntary organizations, lobbying, trade unions, professional education, and professional activity. But women also met unprecedented hostility and resistance that seems disproportionate, even in the no-holds-barred political arena: When she opposed United States intervention in World War I, Jane Addams was attacked as '"a silly, vain, impertinent old maid' who had better leave the fighting to the men." * John Mack Faragher. "History from the Inside-Out: Writing the History of Women in Rural America," American Quarterly, 33 (Winter 1981), 537-57. esp. 550. Faragher proceeded to write a history that demonstrated the gendered nature of community formation and the uneven allocation of work and power. See John Mack Faragher. Sugar Creek Life on the lUinots Prairie (New Haven, 1986). » Mary Kelley, Private Woman. Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1984), 187. 100; Cindy Sondik Aron, Ladies and Gentlemen ofthe CM Service: Middle-Class Workers in Victorian America (New York. 1987); Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore, 1982). Carl Degler pointed to the paradox that woman suffrage met severe resistance while other barriers to suffrage — property and race requirements for men—were being removed. He suggested that the resistance was in part due to the psychological investment that many women, as well as men, had in the status quo. Degler. At Odds. 340—61.

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Barbara Sicherman asks, "Why did the Anti-Saloon League replace the WCTU as the leading temperance organization? Why were women's organizations especially subject to red-baiting in the 1920s?" We might add other examples from the 1920s and later: the extraordinary bitterness of the American Medical Association's campaign against the modest recommendations of the Sheppard-Towner Act; the bitterly vindictive, personal attacks on Eleanor Roosevelt throughout her life; the marginahzation and isolation of political women like Oveta Culp Hobby in the 1950s; the rich resources of advertising used in the 1920s to redefine the housewife and again in the 1950s to sustain that definition. The evidence that the woman's sphere is a social construction lies in part in the hard and constant work required to build and repair its boundaries.36 In the last decade historians of working women have made it abundantly clear that the phrase "separate spheres" is a metaphor for complex power relations in social and economic contexts. Capitalist social relations from the late eighteenth century until now have balanced precariously on the fictions that women "help" rather than work, that their true "place" is in the home, that when they venture "out" of the home they are best suited to doing work that replicates housework. Such work is "unskilled," interruptible, nurturing, and appropriately rewarded primarily by love and secondarily by a segregated marketplace that consistently values women's work less than men's. The point is not only that the marketplace is segregated by gender; it is also that the segregation has been constantly under negotiation and constantly reaffirmed. That these broad patterns are worldwide and cross-cultural was made clear in a special issue of Signs in 1977.37 The particulars of the American experience have been the target of sustained investigation by social historians who have developed a powerful feminist critique of Marxism for its conflation of the situation and interests of working-class men and working-class women. In Out to Work, published in 1982, Alice Kessler-Harris offered an important history of women's labor force participation. For KesslerHarris, the dynamics of the marketplace and the ideology of separate spheres were interdependent, together defining a gender-segregated workplace, while forcing working-class women to live with the depressing ironies inherent in their situation as physically exhausted workers who were regarded as not really at work. Mary H. Blewett's studies of the work culture of shoemakers in preindustrial New England reveal that women were assigned the single task of binding the uppers of the shoes, a task housewives did in their kitchens, isolated from the shop, in a setting that denied them access to other aspects of the craft or to the collective experience of working with colleagues. Thus the industrial work culture of the nineteenth century inherited, writes Blewett, "gender categories [that) made it difficult for male artisans * Barbara Sicherman, "Separate Spheres as Historical Paradigm: Limiting Metaphor or Useful Construct?" comment delivered at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Los Angeles. April 1984 (in Barbara Sicherman's possession); Cynthia Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Polities of Women's Issues, 1945-1968 (Berkeley, 1988). Elaine Tyler May. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, forthcoming). " "Women and National Development: The Complexities of Change." Signs, 3 (Autumn 1977). 1-338.

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New technologies were almost immediately segregated by gender. Switchboards, Cortland Exchange, c. 1890. Courtesy Library Company of Philadelphia.

to regard women as fellow workers, include them in the ideology and politics based on their work culture, or see in the experience of working women what awaited all workers under industrialization." 3 · In the late nineteenth century, groups as disparate as the carpet weavers organized by the Knights of Labor, studied by Susan Levine; women socialists, studied by Man Jo Buhle; and the Women's Trade Union League, studied by Nancy Shrom Dye and Robin Jacoby were torn in various ways by simultaneous commitments to "equal rights" in the public sector, to a future in which women would "return" to their "natural" sphere of the home, and to an ugly reality in which working women labored in the public sector by day and returned to domestic chores by night. The result was to make the segregation of women in unskilled jobs a permanent feature » Alice Kessler-Huris. Out to Work: A History of Vage-Earning Women in the United States (New Yoik. 1982). The argument is developed forcefully in Alice Kessler-Harris. "The Just Price, the Free Market and the Value of Women." paper delivered at the Seventh Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Weltesley, Mass.. June 1987 (in Alice Kessler-Harris's possession). Mary H. Blewett, "The Sexual Division of Labor and the Artisan Tradition in Early Industrial Capitalism: The Case of New England Shoemaking, 1780-1860." in 'To Toil the Lhebng Day ": America s Women At Work. 1780-1980. ed. Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton (Ithaca. 1987), 35-46, «p. 36.

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of the American industrial scene. The boundaries of gender segregation were maintained by enormous efforts undertaken by elite owners of factories, middle-class managers, and unionized male workers. Judith McGaw has recently pressed the ironies further, arguing that the "unskilled" character of women's industrial work was itself a fiction that ensured a steady supply of cheap labor. The fiction devalued women's work because it was unmechanized, obscuring the extent to which unmechanized work could require a degree of skill too high for machines to replicate, and the fact that unmechanized work fulfilled functions essential to factory production." The dynamics have persisted. Sheila Tobias established male trade unionists' insistence on the exclusion of Rosie the Riveter from post-World War II factories, denying women who had joined the skilled work force during the war not only the jobs promised to returning veterans but their own earned seniority and thrusting a generation of working women into a pink-collar ghetto. Ruth Milkman has shown in convincing detail how even during World War II, unions and management cooperated to ensure that the work Rosie did was defined and redefined as women's work even if it involved skills and physical capacities previously understood to be male. Myra H. Strober has been demonstrating how in our own time, the new computer technology was quickly and emphatically assigned a gendered identity.40 Historians of working women have thus had especially good reason to understand that the language of separate spheres has been a language enabling contemporaries to explain to themselves the social situation—with all its ironies and contradictions—in which they understood themselves to be living. "Separate spheres" was a trope that hid its instrumentality even from those who employed it; in that sense it was deeply ambiguous. In the ambiguity, perhaps, lay its appeal. 41 A third major characteristic of recent work, one whose potential is at last being ** Susan Levine, Labor's True Woman: Carpet Weavers. Industrialization. and Labor Reform in the Gilded Age (Philadelphia. 1984). 10. 148; Mari J o Buhle. Women and American Socialism. 1870-1920 (Urbana. 1981); Nancy Schrom Dye, As Equals and As Sisters: Feminism, the Labor Motement. and the Women 's Trade Union League of New York (Columbia. 1980); Robin Miller Jacoby, "The Women's Trade Union League and American Feminism." Feminist Studies. 3 (Fall 1975). 126-40; Judith A. McGaw. Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Paper Making, 1801-188i (Princeton, 1987), 335-74. Judith A. McGaw. "No Passive Victims. No Separate Spheres: A Feminist Perspective on Technology's History," in In Context: History and the History of Technology-Essays in Honor ofMel Kranzberg. ed. Stephen Cutliffe and Roben W. Post (Bethlehem. Pa.. 1988). argues that a transformation of housework preceded the Industrial Revolution and made many of its characteristics possible. " Sheila Tobias and Ruth Milkman. Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana, 1987); Myra Strober and Carolyn L Arnold, "Integrated Circuits/Segregated Labor Women in Computer-Related Occupations and High-Tech Industries," in Computer Chips and Paper Clips: Technology and Women's Employment, ed. Heidi Hartmann, Roben Ε. Kraut, and Louise Tilly (Washington, 1986), 136-82. For important studies of the "tipping" of an occupation from male to female, see Myra H. Strober, "Toward a General Theory of Occupational Sex Segregation: The Case of Public School Teaching," in Sex Segregation in the Workplace: Trends, Explanations, Remedies, ed. Barbara F. Reskin (Washington, 1984). 144-56; and Myra H. Strober and David Tyack, "Why Do Women Teach and Men Manage? A Report on Research on Schools." Signs 5 (Spring 1980), 494-503. 41 "When we seek to make sense of such problematical topics as human nature, culture, society, and history, we never say precisely what we wish to say or mean precisely what we say," warns Hayden White. "Our discourse always tends to slip away from our data towards the structures of consciousness with which we are trying to grasp t h e m . . . the data always resist the coherency of the image which we are trying to fashion of them." Hayden White. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, 1978), 1.

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vigorously tapped, is the use of "sphere" in a literal sense. Historians are paying considerable attention to the physical spaces to which women were assigned, those in which they lived, and those they chose for themselves. Stressing the interplay between the metaphorical and the literal, historians in the 1980s may be on their way toward a resolution of the paradoxes of women's politics/women's culture with which the symposiasts of Feminist Studies wrestled. Historians are finding it worthwhile to treat "sphere" not only as metaphor but also as descriptor, to use it to refer to domain in the most obvious and explicit sense. In adopting that approach historians have learned much from anthropologists, who have long understood the need to scrutinize separate men's and women's spaces. Men's places were often clearly defined; menstruating women were often excluded from them. Men's space normally included the central community meeting place and the fields; that is, as Lucienne Roubin writes, the village government "tends to juxtapose and to fuse male space with public space." Women's space, by definition, is what is left: sleeping enclosures, gardens. In the mid-1970s historians found Woman, Culture, and Society, an anthology edited by anthropologists Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, deeply resonant for its analyses of the significance of women's behavior in domestic settings.42 As we have seen, historians who examined sex roles were likely to link physical separation with social subordination. That was particularly true for historians of early America: as Lyle Koehler observed, "Puritan society was organized in a way that explicitly affirmed the belief in sex segregation as a reminder of men's and women's different destinies." In a 1978 essay, Mary Maples Dunn reversed the argument. In a brilliant examination of the way control of physical space could affect public behavior, Dunn argued that the spiritual equality that Quaker theology offered women was confirmed and authenticated by the device of separate women's meetings. Women's meetings enabled women to control their own agenda, to allocate their own funds, and to exercise disciplinary control over their members, especially by validating marriages. Those roles were reinforced by Quaker women's control over their physical space, in meetinghouses with sliding partitions in the center that provided "women and men with separate spaces for the conduct of their separate business." Women of no other denomination claimed such control over their space and their record keeping, and Dunn suggests that the elements of physical control were central to women's more autonomous spiritual role in the Quaker community.43 u Lucienne Roubin, "Male Space and Female Space within the Provin;al Community," in Rural Society in France: Selections from the Annales: Economies, Societies, Gvilisations. ed. Roben Ferner and Ore» Ran um, trans. Elborg Förster and Patricia M. Ran um (Baltimore, 1977). 1)2-80, esp. 1)). See also Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, "Women, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview," in Women, Culture, and Society, ed. Rosaldo and Lamphere, 17-42: Sherry B. Ortner, "Is Female to Male As Nature b to Culture?" ibid., 67-87; and Louise Lamphere, "Strategies. Cooperation, and Conflict in Domestic Groups," ibid., 97-112. Also important is Rayna R. Reiter, ed.. Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York. 1975), especially Reiter's own essay, Rayna R. Reiter. "Men and Women in the South of France: Public and Private Domains," ibid., 2)2-82 (her description of the "sexual geography" of a village). 41 Koehler, Search for Power, 41; Mary Maples Dunn. "Saints and Sisters: Congregational and Quaker Women in the Early Colonial Period," in Women in American Religion, ed. Janet Wilson James (Philadelphia. 1980).

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In 1979, Estelle Freedman published an important essay, "Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism, 1870-1930." In it she sought to overcome the simplifications of the traditional male-public/female-private hieraxchy by a construction that bridged the two categories: the "public female sphere." By that she referred to the " 'female institution building' which emerged from the middle-class women's culture of the nineteenth century." She had in mind women's clubs (like Sorosis, which was initiated when the New York Press Club excluded women journalists in 1868); women's colleges; women's settlement houses, most notably Hull House; women's political organizations; women's trade unions; even the women's buildings at the International Centennial Exposition in 1876 and the World's Columbian Exposition in 1892. In each case, the refusal to merge their groups into male-dominated institutions gave women not only crucial practical and political experience but also a place where they could rest the levers with which they hoped to effect social change. The space that Freedman ended by recommending to women was in part metaphorical: women needed their own networks, and they needed to nurture their own culture. Embedded in her essay, however, was also the observation that feminists had been most successful when they had commanded actual physical space of their own, which they could define and control.44 If we imagine Freedman as staking out an empty shelf in the bookcase of women's history in 1979, we could now say that the shelf is crowded with books and articles that illustrate her point. New studies of the history of domesticity have understood domesticity to be an ideology whose objective correlative is the physical space of the household. The "material feminist" reformers of Dolores Hayden's The Grand Domestic Revolution, who flourished between 1870 and 1930, sought to reappropriate that space and to redesign it to socialize domestic work. Central kitchens, cooked food delivery, professionalized home cleaning, and other efforts to reconstruct women's work within the domestic sphere severely challenged the traditional social order. Such inventions were squelched. Powerful interest groups countered them with home mortgage policies that privileged male-headed households, highway construction that encouraged diffuse suburban development, and urban design that stressed single-family homes lacking central services. Hayden's book was followed by detailed histories by Susan Strasser and Ruth Schwartz Cowan, which tracked the development of housework and household technology. Cowan argued that the definition of the home as women's sphere was accompanied by a change in household technology with the result that men —excused from chopping wood for fire, pounding meal, and other household tasks—found the home a place of leisure, a "haven in a heartless world" while it retained its character as a place of 27-46, esp. 45; originally published in American Quarterly, 50 (Winter 1978). 582-601, esp. 600. About the most clearly bounded women's religious social space —the convent—in know little. In the colonial period there was a convcnt in Montreal, but we have no studies of its internal dynamics, though we know that some American women captives chose to stay there rather than be repatriated. See Axtell. Invasion Within 302-27. On the general problem, sec Elizabeth Kolmer, "Catholic Women Religious and Women's History: A Survey of the Literature." in IVomen in American Religion, ed. James, 127-3944 Estelle Freedman, "Separatism as Strategy: Female Institution Building and American Feminism. 1870-1930." Feminist Studies 5 (Fall 1979). 512-29. esp. 513.

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Jane Addams in Hull House dining room with staff and guests, c. 1930. Men are invited to women's space.- Facing camera: Ida Lovett (smoking a cigarette), Robert Morss Lovett, Alice Hamilton (face hidden), Addams; back to camera: Edith de Nancrede. Rachelle Yarros. I am grateful to Mary Lynn McCree Bryan for the identifications. Courtesy Swarthmore College Peace Collection.

labor for women. The work of Faye E. Dudden on household service shows that women's domestic space was pervaded by class considerations; the home was a theater, in which the mistress of the house claimed her space and assigned to the servant the space she might occupy.4' The philosophy and ideology of other institutions are increasingly understood to be embedded in their arrangement of physical space. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz has traced the complex relationships between the visions that women's college " Dolores Hayden. The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities (Cambridge. Mass.. 1981): Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York, 1982); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More I f o r i for Mother The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York. 1983); Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, 1983).

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Hillsted Street view of Hull House, c. 1915. Although its name suggested the cozy family home that was its original core, at its height Hull House included twelve buildings and filled two city blocks. Courtesy Jane Addams Memorial Collection, Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.

founders had for their institutions and the architecture that they commissioned. In her work, even intellectual history is understood to be deeply affected by its physical context. And a rich outpouring of work on the women of the Hull House community has made it increasingly clear that having control of the physical institution of Hull House—which at its height included thirteen large structures spaced over two square blocks—provided an institutional base permitting women reformers, in Kathryn Kish Sklar's words, to "enter realms of reality dominated by men, where, for better or for worse, they competed with men for control over the distribution of social resources." Hull House was many things, not least among them a physical space in which the divorced Florence Kelley could find housing, community, and child care while she went to law school. Hull House's communal dining room was an innovative solution to the practical problems of self-maintenance for single

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Plan of the Hull House buildings, c. 1963. Courtesy Jane Addams Memorial Collection, Special Collections, University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago.

professional women, a vigorous testimony to the advice of the material feminists whose work was chronicled by Hayden.4* 4 4 Helen Lefkowiu Horowitz, Alma Mater Design and Experience in the ifbmen's Colleges from Tbeir Ninteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1950s (New York 1984); Kathryn Kish Sldar, "Hull House in the 1390s: Λ Community of Women Reformers," Signs, 10 (Summer 1985), 658-77, esp. 659.

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Hull House was also a physical spacc in which women whose closest relationships were with other women could live comfortably in a world that increasingly scorned their relationships and their values. In this aspect of its services, the walls of Hull House were of enormous significance in marking an enclosure within which women could define the terms of their most private relationships and defend themselves against social criticism. In her memoir of her early days at Hull House^Kelley emphasized the significance of crossing the threshold into Hull House—"a threshold no less metaphorical because it was also literal. Jane Addams was reticent about the psychological service Hull House performed for its residents; in Twenty Yean at Hull House she reprinted, with apology, her classic essay on "The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements" and then turned almost exclusively to an account of what the residents did for their neighbors. Only occasionally—"the fine old house responded kindly to repairs"—did her sense of the house as having a life of its own slip through her careful prose.47 The residents of Hull House understood that a city was not a single, unified entity. It was not merely that a city was perceived differently by each observer; the single city was many cities, selectively constructed. They would have understood Christine Stansell's coinage "City of Women," a phrase evoking her vision of public space as inhabited on different terms by men and by women, "a city of women with its own economic relations and cultural forms, a female city concealed within the larger metropolis." The first major publication project of Hull House, after all, was Hull-House Maps and Papers, an innovative study in social geography that plotted the neighborhood around Hull House to make it plain that the Chicago appearing on the usual maps was not the Chicago Hull House residents knew. In remapping their neighborhood, they located the philosophical construction that was Hull House squarely in physical space. Moreover, the residents understood that the experience of the city varied with gender, that working girls were particularly vulnerable in its public spaces. One of the earliest Hull House projects was a small but significant effort to claim city space for single women by establishing a cooperative residence for working girls. By establishing the Jane Club, Hull House residents announced their recognition that the physical spaces of the city were inhospitable to single women and suggested a practical model for redrawing that space.4* In City of Women, Stansell has given voice to a sweeping reformulation of social relations in urban places; the story she tells is of antebellum New York, but its point of view and its understanding of how geography can serve social analysis are of formidably broad applicability. The city of women has its own political economy, its own patterns of sociability, its own uses of the streets. It varies by class: the world of working-class women has not been the same as the world of middle-class women but neither has it been the same as the world of working-class men. « Florence Kelley, "I Go to Work," Survey. June 1. 1927, pp. 271-74. 301; Jane Addams. Twenty Yean at Hull House, with Autobiographical Notes (New York, 1910). 93. « Christine StuutXi. City of Women: Sex artä Class in New York. 1739-1860 (New York. 1986). ri; Residents of Hull-House. Hull-House Maps an J Papers (New %rk. 1895). For the Jane Club, see Mary Kenny's reminiscence in Allen F. Davis and Mary Lynn McCree. eds., Eighty Years at Hull-House (Chicago, 1969), 34-35.

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201

In Stansell's work, in Joanne Meyerowitz's study of the construction of space for working women in Progressive Era Chicago, and in work in progress by Patricia Cline Cohen on efforts to assure women's safety in travel and in other public spaces in the nineteenth century, and by Mary Ryan on the nineteenth-century urban creation of formal public spheres, one assigned to women, the other to men, whose boundaries shifted and overlapped, our understanding of the "separate sphere" is becoming both simpler and more complex.49 It is simpler because the separate women's sphere can be understood to denote the physical space in which women lived, but more complex because even that apparently simple physical space was complexly structured by an ideology of gender, as well as by class and race. Courtrooms in which women appear singly as plaintiffs, defendants, or witnesses are male spaces; streets on which women are afraid to walk are male spaces; universities that women enter only at male invitation are male spaces. When Susan B. Anthony led a delegation of woman's rights activists to disrupt the public ceremonies celebrating the centennial of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, they challenged both male control of public space and an anthropocentric interpretation of American rights and values. When the delegation of women marched to the other side of Carpenters' Hall, there to hear Anthony declaim her own centennial address, which called for the impeachment of all officers of government because they had been false to the values of the declaration (notably, "no taxation without representation"), they both asserted their own claim to public space and implicitly rejected a politics based on the separation of spheres.' 0 Tocqueville had discerned "two clearly distinct lines of action" for the two sexes. Actually he was reporting the discourse of separate spheres, which in his day was increasing in shrillness, perhaps to cover the renegotiation of gender relations then underway. But the task of the historiographer is to comment on historians more than to evaluate actual phenomena, and from the historiographer's perspective "separate spheres" was at least in part a strategy that enabled historians to move the history of women out of the realm of the trivial and anecdotal into the realm of analytic social history. Making it possible to proceed past Mary R. Beard's generalization that women have been a force in history, the concept of separate spheres proposed a dynamic by which that force was manifest.' 1 But if our predecessors were constrained by dualisms—home versus market, public versus private, household versus state—we need no longer be so constrained. In an important essay written late in her tragically abbreviated life, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, who had made her reputation exploring the contrasts between the public and the private, nature and culture, argued forcefully that it was time to «Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago. 1880-1930 (Chicago, 1988); Mary P. Ryan, "Women in Public: Explorations of Gender in Three American Cities. 1823-1880," forthcoming; Patricia Cline Cohen. "Safety and Danger Sexual Peril in Public, 1790-1850," forthcoming. M Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, cds. History of Woman Suffrage (6 vols.. Rochester. 1881-1922), III. 3-36. " Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II. 212; Mary R. Beard, Woman as Force m History: A Study of Traditions andReaiities (New York. 1946).

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Men and women sit separately in a physics lecture room at the University of Michigan, c. 1890. Courtesy University of Michigan Medical School Collection, Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Historical Library.

m o v e o n to m o r e c o m p l e x analyses. " T h e m o s t serious deficiency o f a m o d e l based u p o n t w o o p p o s e d s p h e r e s , " s h e w r o t e , " a p p e a r s . . . i n its a l l i a n c e w i t h t h e d u a l i s m s o f t h e p a s t , d i c h o t o m i e s w h i c h t e a c h t h a t w o m e n m u s t b e u n d e r s t o o d n o t in t e r m s o f relationship—with other w o m e n and with m e n — b u t o f difference a n d apartness." A p p r o a c h e s t h a t a t t e m p t t o l o c a t e " w o m e n ' s ' p r o b l e m ' i n a d o m a i n a p a r t . . . . fail t o h e l p u s u n d e r s t a n d h o w m e n a n d w o m e n b o t h p a r t i c i p a t e i n a n d h e l p t o r e p r o d u c e t h e i n s t i t u t i o n a l f o r m s that m a y o p p r e s s , liberate, join or d i v i d e t h e m . " ' 2 To c o n t i n u e

t o u s e t h e l a n g u a g e o f s e p a r a t e s p h e r e s is t o d e n y

the

reciprocity b e t w e e n g e n d e r a n d society, a n d to i m p o s e a static m o d e l o n d y n a m i c relationships.

" M. Z. Rosaldo, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-cultural Understanding." Signs. 5 (Spring 1980). 389-417, « p . 409. 417. See also the important essay. Joan Kelly. "The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory: A Postscript to the 'Woman and Power' Conference." Feminist Studies, } (Spring 1979), 216-27. "Woman's place is not a separate sphere or domain of existence bur a position within social existence generally." Ibid., 221. Jeanne Boydston is a historian who understands this point. See Jeanne Boydston, "To Earn Her Daily Bread: Housework and Antebellum Working-Class Subsistence." Radical History Renew, (no. 35, 1986). 7-2); and Jeanne Boydston, "Home and Work: The Industrialization of Housework in the Northeastern United States from the Colonial Period to the Civil Wai" (Ph.D. diss.. Yale University, 1984).

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As we discuss the concept of separate spheres, we are tiptoeing on the boundary between politics and ideology, between sociology and rhetoric. We have entered the realm of hermeneutics; our task—insofar as it involves the analysis and demystification of a series of binary opposites — is essentially one of deconstrucuon. What are we to make of this polarity between the household and the world, an opposition as fundamental as the opposition between the raw and the cooked, the day and the night, the sun and the moon? We do not yet fully understand why feminists of every generation —the 1830s, the 1880s, the 1960s—have needed to define their enemy in this distinctively geographical way. Why speak of worlds, of spheres, or of realms at all? What is it in our culture that has made feminists think of themselves, in Mary Woilstonecraft's words, "as immured in their households, groping in the dark"?" The metaphor remains resonant because it retains some superficial vitality. For all our vaunted modernity, for all that men's "spheres" and women's "spheres" now overlap, vast areas of our experience and our consciousness do not overlap. The boundaries may be fuzzier, but our private spaces and our public spaces are still in many important senses gendered. The reconstruction of gender relations, and of the spaces that men and women may claim, is one of the most compelling contemporary social tasks. It is related to major social questions: the feminization of poverty, equal access to education and the professions, relations of power and abuses of power in the public sector and in the family. On a wider stage, the reconstruction of gender relations is related to major issues of power, for we live in a world in which authority has traditionally validated itself by its distance from the feminine and from what is understood to be effeminate.54 Little is left of Tocqueville except what he left to implication: that political systems and systems of gender relations are reciprocal social constructions. The purpose of constant analysis of language is to assure that we give power no place to hide." But the remnants of "separate spheres" that still persist are symptoms, not cause, of a particular and historically located gender system. One day we will understand the idea of separate spheres as primarily a trope, employed by people in the past to characterize power relations for which they had no other words and that they could not acknowledge because they could not name, and by historians in our own rimes as they groped for a device that might dispel the confusion of anecdote and impose narrative and analytical order on the anarchy of inherited evidence, the better to comprehend the world in which we live. " Mary Wolljtonecraft, A Vindication ofthe Rights of Woman, cd. Miriam Brady Kiamnkk (Harmondsworth. Eng.. 1975). 87. M On gender in Nazi ideology, see Renate BridcnthaJ. Atina Grossman, and Marion A. Kaplan, When Biology Became Deitinj: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York, 1984). On gendered language and birth images in contemporary strategic analysis, see Carol Cohn, "Sa and Death in the Rational Vbrid of Defense Intellectuals," Signs, 12 (Summer 1987), 687-718. " The reciprocal relationship of political and gender systems is developed far more explicitly throughout Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. Persian Letters, trans. C J. Bens (Harmondsworth. Eng. 1973). op. 270-81; and Baron de Montesquieu, Tie Spirit of the Laws. uans. Thomas Nugent (New York, 1949), 94-108. For a brilliant analysis, see Joan W. Scott, "Gender Λ Useful Category of Historical Analysis," Amenta» Historical Rewiew, 91 (Dec. 1986), 1053-75. And sec Michael J. Shapiro. "The Political Responsibilities of the Scholar." in lie Rhetoric of the Human Sciences: Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, ed. John Nelson. Allan Megill. and Donald N. McCloskey (Madison, 1988), 380.

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Household Values, Women s Work, and Economic Growth 1800-1930 W. ELLIOT BROWNLEE This essay explores the state of economic knowledge regarding the development of household economic life in the United States since early industrialization by examining explanations for the low labor-force participation of middle-class married women prevailing until the 1940s. These explanations, including those emerging from fertility studies and resting on market forces, imprecisely specify the domestic roles of housewives. Interdisciplinary specification of these roles, drawing o n social and cultural historians, and rigorous measurement of time allocation within the household would help resolve the various interpretations and assist in estimating the contribution of household work to social product.

O

NE of the liveliest topics in current historical study is that of the development of women's roles and the related development of modern family life. Economic historians have begun to reexamine patterns of women's labor force participation, particularly those associated with the expansion of the marketplace during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 But until World War II women who were "gainfully employed" were always outnumbered by those, primarily married women, who worked only within their households. Their household work has received the recent attention of economic historians only incidentally in the course of studies of marital fertility. Very little research has treated the diverse economic activities which married women have performed within the household and, more generally, the entire range of transactions that occurred within households, outside the marketplace. This paper suggests some approaches that economic historians might pursue to expand knowledge of the development of the economic life of married women in the United States, particularly white, middle-class women, in the period between early industrialization and the Great Depression. In so doing, the paper assesses the state of economic knowledge of the development of the household in the United States since the nineteenth century and suggests intersections of the work of economic historians with that of historians interested primarily in the cultural and social aspects of family life. Journal of Economic History, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1 (March 1979). ©The Economic History Association. AU rights reserved. ISSN 0022-0307. The author is Associate Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara. He wishes to dunk Mary M. Brownlee, Patricia Cline Cohen, Robert Kelley, David Rock, Elyce J. Rotella, and Charles Spaulding for their assistance in writing this essay. ' See, for example, Claudia Goldin, "Female Labor Force Participation: The Origin of Black and White Differences, 1870 and 1880," this JOURNAL, 37 (March 1977), 87-112; and Elyce Rotella, "Women's Labor Force Participation and the Growth of Clerical Employment in the United States, 1170-1930" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1977).

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I

One problem that offers fruitful avenues for interdisciplinary research is the explanation of why the marketplace participation of middle-class married women remained so low until the 1940s. As late as 1920, only slightly more than six percent of married women who were either "native white" or "native white with foreign-born parents" were in the conventional labor force (see Table 1). The growth in these participation rates was rapid between 1890 and 1920, but a set of concurrent long-term developments could have been expected to produce even greater rates of increase.2 One such development was the continuous increase in the wages of women between the early nineteenth century and the Great Depression. Moreover, women's wages often appear to have increased more rapidly than men's.3 A most critical trend was a decline in the rate of marital fertility, a decline that appears to have been especially marked for the period 1890-1920.4 And it was during this period that the country witnessed a TABLE L LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION RATES OF MARRIED

WOMEN

(in percent)

All Native White Native White with Foreign-Born Parent(s) Foreign-Born Negro

1890

1900

1920

4.6 2.2 2.7 3.0 22.7

5.6 3.0 3.1 3.6 26.0

9.0 6.3 6.3 7.2 32.5

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census, The Report on Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census, 1890, Vol. 1, Part 2 (Washington, D. C , 1897), pp. 414, 417, 420, 423, and 426; idem. Statistics of Women at Work: 1900 (Washington, D. C., 1907), pp. 176-77; Joseph A. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, 1870 to 1920, Census Monographs IX (Washington, D. C„ 1929), pp. 244-47. 2 The dimensions of the problem may be understated. Because the jobs that married women accepted between 1890 and 1920 tended to be increasingly unskilled, it is likely that middle-class women participated in the economy at rates actually lower in 1920 than a generation earlier. In any event, because of variations in census definitions, it is risky to look closely at decennial trends in components of the female labor-force data, especially when such trends involve relatively small numbers. 3 The question of the relative rates of increase requires much further analysis. But, when one uses teachers' salaries as an indicator, the relative wages of rural women increased between the 1840s and the 1880s, and the relative wages for urban women increased between the late 1890s and World War I. See W. Randolph Burgess, Trends of School Costs (New York, 1920), pp. 32-33. 4 Peter R. Uhlenberg finds the most significant decline in marital fertility among Massachusetts native-American women took place in the 1870 birth-cohort. See "A Study of Cohort Life Cycles: Cohorts of Native Born Massachusetts Women, 1830-1920," Population Studies, 23 (Nov. 1969), 407-20.

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technological revolution in the household. As early as the 1870s, well before the electrification of the home which began during the 1910s, an array of consumer durable goods (including washing machines, wringers, and sewing machines) proliferated to lighten household chores. In addition, other consumer goods (especially clothing) and services (for example, laundry and meal preparation) were increasingly available outside {he household at lower relative prices, thereby reducing the pressure on housewives' time and easing the need for the employment of servants. Other trends, such as improvements in public health that resulted from massive urban investments in sewers and fresh-water systems, reduced the time demanded of married women for nursing and related services. Finally, household manufacturing as an employment for women declined in significance, although the family farm and the sweatshop remained important well into the twentieth century. These long-term trends apparently created the potential for significantly greater labor force participation by married women. To explain why the potential remained largely undeveloped until the 1940s (and after) requires far more study of the internal economic history of the family, the changing status and roles of women both within and without the family, and the development of the role of the family in modern society. This study must draw on a wide range of historical approaches, some of which are largely undeveloped.

II

The limited participation has been discussed by economists and we have some market explanations for it. One well-known explanation, suggested first in 1899 by Thorstein Veblen, is that as income per family increased, the consumption of leisure, like that of all ordinary goods, increased and, consequently, the hours of work decreased. Accordingly, rising levels of family income tended to reduce the labor-force participation of married women—especially those of middle-class status. Stated more specifically, in Veblen's terms, rising incomes allowed families to enhance social status by keeping wives at home, specializing in maintaining a higher standard of living. 5 This interpretation has encountered some empirical problems, especially that posed by the dramatic increases in married women's participation during the last generation. Even the indirect reinforcement provided by the "consumer choice" explanation of the Victorian decline in marital fertility has not offered much help. The 'Thoistein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Boston, 1973), p. 126.

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"consumer choice" explanation, advanced by J. A. Banks and stated most rigorously by Richard Easterlin, has only a thin specification of the roles of women and the opportunity costs associated with those roles.6 For example, in his studies of fertility reduction among nineteenth-century rural families Easterlin assumes that farm wives in older areas lacked alternative employments, and disregards the part-time, nonfarm employment of farm wives in the older agricultural areas, where the fertility declines were most marked. 7 A second "marketplace" interpretation of the low participation rates of married women would emphasize the decisions of families to devote more of their time not to consumption and conspicuous displays of leisured women, but to childrearing—in effect, to the formation of human capital 8 This view receives indirect reinforcement from some of the studies that broaden the "consumer choice" explanation of fertility decline to capture the effect of shifts in social status and of "modernization" variables such as education and urbanization. 9 The "human capital" interpretations suggest that fertility declined because nineteenth-century families decided to raise the average level of investment of parents' time in their children. These studies do not probe the reasons for shifts in family decisions, however, and do not specify that families shifted the resources of women, or even of parents, into child rearing. Positing efforts to produce "higher quality" children, these interpretations call only for an increasing parental effort per child and not necessarily a redistribution of parental resources. Although these interpretations pay more attention to the role of the family in generating human capital than does the "consumer choice" explanation, they do not resolve the question of why married white women remained so powerfully attached to domestic life until the 1940s.

'Richard A. Easterlin, "On the Relation of Economic Factors to Recent and Projected Fertility Ganges," Demography, 3 (1966), 131-53; J. A. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood, A Study of Family Gaining among the Victorian Middle Classes (London, 1954). 7 Richard A. Easterlin, "Factors in the Decline of Farm Family Fertility in the United States: Some preliminary Research Results," Journal of American History, 63 (Dec. 1976), 600-14 and "Population Change and Farm Settlement in the Northern United States," this JOURNAL, 36 (March 1976), 45-75. * Most informative is the work of Peter Lindert, who assesses the inverse relationship between child quality and fertility on a macro-level. See Peter H. Lindert, Fertility and Scarcity in America (Princeton, 1978). For reinforcement of this interpretation by a cultural historian, see David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America, the Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, 1970), pp. 41-42. 9 For examples of proponents of "modernization" variables, see Alan Sweezy, "The Economic Explanation of Fertility Changes in the United States," Population Studies, 25 (July 1971), 255-67 and Maris A. Vinovskis, "Socioeconomic Determinants of Interstate Fertility Differentials in the United States in 1850 and 1860," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 6 (Winter 1976), 375-%.

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There is a third explanation of the low participation rate of married women, one which has received meager attention from economic historians. It is compatible with "modernization" models, but is broader and deeper because it draws on the work of numerous cultural and social historians who have studied family life. This explanation focuses attention not just on child rearing but on the entire range of personal services provided by the family itself—especially those that lacked marketplace equivalents. Although some home economists recognized the time required for such services, they did not analyze their significance. Margaret Reid, for example, treated only unpaid activities that could be "delegated to someone outside the household group," excluding, therefore, "elements of companionship, counsel, and training which exist solely because of personal relationship." The "new" home economists who have studied household behavior, while recognizing that the institution of marriage may provide certain satisfactions more efficiently than the market, have not clearly identified the functions of familial services.10 Cultural and social historians have been somewhat more specific, in effect describing the role of women within the family during the nineteenth century as one of increasing specialization in providing services that depended upon a personal relationship within the family. Many have tied this role to the "privatization" of the family: they see the family becoming on the one hand increasingly isolated from the marketplace but, on the other hand, increasingly important as an integrative institution that played an essential role in fostering and supporting behaviors appropriate to modern society, including an efficient marketplace. Within this "privatized" family, in which personal relationships became more important than narrow economic relationships, the mother became increasingly specialized in setting a moral example, in instructing both husband and children in altruistic behavior, and in providing altruistic solace and support for the employed members of the family." The "privatization" of the family, then, may have increased the claim of personal relationships on women's time and thereby retarded the participation of women in the labor force. 10

Margaret Reid, Economics of Household Production (New York, 1934), pp. 11-12. The most representative examples of the "new" home economics are found in Journal of Political Economy, 81 (March-April 1973) and 82 (March-April 1974). "For a useful summary of the elements of the "privatized" family, see Kennedy, Birth Control in Modem America, esp. pp. 38 ff. On the spread of the "privatized" family among the American middle class, see Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven, 1977).

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This "privatization" explanation has a clear developmental component—one neglected by economic historians. It hardly needs to be said that there is much evidence to the effect that the family was the central institution in shaping and transmitting the cultural norms governing economic life; social historians who have studied the family have almost all concluded that the family has generally been the most important vehicle for character formation and the setting of values. In nineteenth and early twentieth century industrialization, this was especially so. The force of organized religion and other integrative institutions was waning, and the power of modern bureaucratic organizations was largely unfelt in the determination of cultural norms.12 Moreover, the social arena was one of intense competition and rapid, often confusing change. There may have been a particularly strong economic need for training in cooperative habits—in altruism—for which the family was especially suited. As a promoter of family life put it in 1916, In the home . . . there is an unpremeditated coming together in order that the business of conducting life may be furthered with mutual advantage; in the home the lesson of how difficult it is to combine, can be learned without conscious tuition; in the home it can be realized, without the effort to put one's mind to the task, how essential it is that one be a «»operator. 15 IV

There is a fourth explanation of low participation rate of married women—an explanation, like the "privatization" interpretation, relying heavily on non-market forces. This explanation differs from the others in focusing on demand rather than supply conditions. It argues that women faced discrimination in the marketplace and that this discrimination increased the attractiveness of domestic work as an alternative to market employment. Thus, despite the increasing real wages earned by women, the labor market did not work efficiently to provide optimal levels of employment for women. A considerable body of impressionistic evidence points to the historic significance of sex-discrimination, primarily in the form of denial and especially stringent in the case of married women, in access to skilled employment.14 Specification and measurement of sex-dis12 For a case study of the attachment of the nineteenth-century middle class to the family as the most stable institution in the midst of the dramatic urban change, see Richard Sennett, Families Against the City. Middle-Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872-1890 (Cambridge, 1970). 13 Mary Wilcox Glenn, "The Significance of the Home," The Journal of Home Economics. 8 (Sept. 1916), 474. 14 For evidence that employers failed to offer women attractive apprenticeship programs, despite the comparative stability of older women in the labor force, see Women's Bureau, U.S. Department of Labor, Women in South Carolina Industries (Washington, D C., 1923), p. 76; Women in Alabama Industries (Washington, D C., 1923), pp. 62-63; Women in Missouri Industries (Washington, D.C.,

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crimination lies well within the realm of cliometrics but, as yet, there has been little exploration of its precise timing, locus, and impact.13 Even if economic historians are able to identify significant sex-discrimination, measure its strength over time, and connect discriminatory practices with the low marketplace participation of married women, much will remain to be explained. If discrimination is found to be increasingly powerful during the era of industrialization, economic historians will face a difficult question: why did the marketplace not operate through the shortage of skilled labor and the calculations of profit-maximizing employers to widen opportunities for women, especially employment opportunities for married women, and thus eliminate sustained discrimination? Here economic historians must recognize the limitations of their discipline and respect contributions of other historians to an understanding of the "non-economic" determinants of the cultural environment shaping economic change. One of the explanations for the supposed entrenchment of sex-discrimination during industrialization that is most popular among social historians asserts that industrialization created an increasing distinction between work and home—a distinction which intensified the traditional, pre-industrial division of labor between men and women and thereby strengthened sexual stereotypes inherited from pre-industrial times.16 Another explanation has a more positive view of the influence of market forces. It attributes increasing discrimination not to the fundamental workings of industrialization but to social aspects of industrialization highly specific to the American experience. This explanation suggests that the persistence over the entire period from the 1840s through the 1920s of massive immigration, unusual cultural heterogeneity, and exceptional disorganization of urban life led to a powerful preoccupation among the upper and middle classes with the value of the family as an integrative institution and the role of women as protectors of traditional values.17 The 1924), pp. 27-33; Women in New Jersey Industries (Washington, D.C., 1924), pp. 29-35. See, also, Caroline Manning, The Immigrant Woman and her Job, Bulletin of the Women's Bureau, No. 74 (Washington, D.C., 1930), pp. 92 ff. For evidence of discrimination based on marital status, see Mary N. Winslow, Married Women in Industry, Bulletin of the Women's Bureau, No. 38 (Washington, D.C., 1924); and Johanna Lobsenz, The Older Woman in Industry (New York, 1929). 15 An exception is the work of Pamela J. Nickless, "Changing Labor Productivity and the Utilization of Native Women Workers in the American Cotton Textile Industry, 1825-1860," this JOURNAL, 38 (March 1978), 287-88. "Perhaps best representing this line of argument is William H. Chafe, Women and Equality: Changing Patterns in American Culture (New York, 1977), esp. pp. 13-42. Marxist sociologists would phrase the argument in terms of the rise of capitalist modes of industrial relations, based on "exchange-value," undermining the value of household work and, thereby, the work of women. See, for example, Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974), p. 415. 17 See W. Elliot Brownlee and Mary M. Brownlee, Women in the American Economy: A Documentary History, 1675 to 1929 (New Haven, 1976), pp. 25 ff.

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resulting cultural climate could have largely offset whatever power the marketplace had to eradicate sex discrimination. These two explanations of discrimination contain rather different descriptions of women's work at home. The first tends to emphasize a devotion of middle-class wives to consumption and visible displays of affluence while the second stresses the personal services of mothers within "privatized" families. In a sense, then, these demand-side explanations for the limited market participation of married women correspond on the supply side to the "consumer-choice" and the "privatization" explanations. ν All of the various interpretations of women's work within the home, those emphasizing demand conditions as well as those stressing factors affecting supply, are imprecise with regard to the way in which families in general and mothers, in particular, spend their time at home. Yet the assumptions made on this point are central to their content. Thus it seems reasonable to suggest that economic historians can help resolve them by replacing the assumptions with measurement of the changing allocation of time spent on domestic work among family members and of the changing level and disposition of women's time within the household. Here economic historians can draw on social historians and "old" home economists for the specification of work activities, particularly those lacking market equivalents. And, they can mine the studies of household work produced by the first generation of home economists, especially during the 1920s.'8 This collection has been used in a tentative way but never exploited in full by modern students of the family. Such time studies need to be made in association with the development of a clearer history of the family as an economic unit—as an entity which allocates resources, including the time of its members, to competing activities in the home and marketplace to maximize satisfaction within a utility function. We need not only a careful description of the changing allocation of time but also an analysis of the changing relationship between that allocation and income and prices, particularly of substitutes for goods and services produced at home, as constrained by household technology. A fuller description of the internal economic history of the family cannot, of course, directly reveal the reasons for the changing patterns of women's life within the family. That requires a deeper knowledge of " F o r examples of such studies, see Reid, The Economics of Household Production, pp. 81 ff.

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power relationships within households and of how those relationships were shaped by the changing social environment. But the development of such knowledge of intrafamily decision-making would profit from improved information regarding the outcomes of that decision-making— outcomes measurable in part by the shifting allocation of time among household members. The enhancement of the internal history of the family through studies of time allocation can assist in refining the interpretations advanced for the slow increase of marketplace participation by married women; the inferences about the function of the domestic work of married women—inferences which are central to all these interpretations—can be made with greater certainty if the changing nature of that work is more clearly known. Moreover, better data reflecting upon the content of household work may suggest new interpretations of participation-rate trends. For example, it may be that the labor-saving effect of improvements in domestic technology before the electrification of the home was far more limited and the preoccupation with domestic manufacturing more extensive than commonly assumed. Also, it may be that the labor-saving provided by new household technology primarily affected the older daughters who were seeking more education or greater employment. vi The tasks of elucidating the nature of household work can contribute to analysis of an issue important to economic history: measurement in a more comprehensive way of the value of household work. Enhanced information on time allocation within the household, taken in conjunction with wage data revealing the opportunity costs of the housework of mothers and the imputed costs of hired housework, could reflect upon the changing value of women's time and the aggregate contribution of that time to social product. And, the same time-allocation data would be essential to a measurement of the aggregate costs of sex-discrimination. The value of housewives' time is not a new subject for historians. Like the allocation of their time, it has received attention, on the one hand, from students of the nineteenth-century fertility decline and, on the other, by students of the transformation of the family and of women's roles. The positions on the value of time, however, tend to be even more vague than those on the quantities of time. The fertility studies generally suggest that it cost families very little to devote more of women's time to child rearing. This is only an assumption, based primarily on the limited employment of married women outside the

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home before the 1940s and, secondarily, on the presumed effects of the decline of household production and the rise of the mechanization of the household.19 The primary justification lacks logical force, for the assumption does not hold if married women were receiving increasing wages from market employment or if their access to employment was growing. The result of such conditions would be a rise in the opportunity costs of women's time and the encouragement of a shift of family resources away from household economic life, despite the greater productivity of men in market employment. Participation rates of married women would be low because they and their families were willing to give up the increasingly greater amounts of pecuniary income which could be earned by married women in order for women to play roles at home that had come to be viewed as more valuable. The secondary justification requires more substantiation as well. After all, household manufacturing and family farm agriculture were significant into the twentieth century, and the extent to which such activity conflicted with "modern" child rearing is uncertain. Also, the impact of the spread of labor-saving devices in the home remains largely undefined. Thus, the economic contributions of married women through their household work may well have been substantially greater than one might infer from the fertility studies. In contrast to students of fertility trends, revisionist historians of women during the industrial era imply that women, in their work within the family sphere, made a contribution that was increasingly valuable in economic terms. These historians argue that middle-class wives, despite holding back from the labor force and remaining in a domestic world separate from that of men, achieved a growing degree of power, not only over children but over all family decisions, including fertility and perhaps even market decisions of their husbands.20 In recognition of their value to family and society, these women, it is suggested, enhanced their self-image and augmented their authority and experience, which in the long run COQ. tributed to building the women's movement and increased the potential' for greater independence outside the home. But because these social historians do not specify the changing character of employment opportunities for women, they cannot include market values in their discussion. "See, for example, Lindert, Fertility and Scarcity, pp. 42-43 and 115-21. For elements of this viewpoint see Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, 1973); Daniel Scott Smith, "Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America," in Mary S. Hartman and Lois W. Banner, eds., Clio's Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women (New York, 1974), pp. 119-36; Linda Gordon, "Voluntary Motherhood: The Beginnings of Feminist Birth Control Ideas in the United States," in ibid., pp. 54-71. 20

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Certainly it is difficult to impute market value to domestic labor. And such imputation may well fail to capture the full worth of such work if discrimination artificially reduced the wages through which market value would be estimated. But not to do so risks continued neglect of what may have been crucial components of social product. (Also, it is important to gauge the magnitude of the costs of sex-discrimination.) But the prevailing assumption of national income studies, that the value of household services has not changed significantly in its relationship to total output, may be inaccurate for those times when families devoted increasing resources to child rearing and other personal services. Along with the frail assumption embedded in fertility studies, this assumption has obscured the possibility that the family waxed in significance in the growth process during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And in any event, even if the market value of an average woman's work were small, as the fertility studies suggest, and further diminished by discrimination, the aggregate contribution of women to social product through domestic work may have been significant and growing. VII

In sum, analysis of the development of family life during industrialization that would involve economic historians as well as social and cultural historians offers the hope of better understanding the reciprocal relationship between economic development and the development of the household. We might well obtain a clearer understanding of the effect of market and non-market forces on the function of the household and the contribution of family life to economic development. The importance of the last problem to economic historians should be stressed. It is clear enough that historically the family has played an important role not only in reproducing the species but in inculcating cultural norms, in training in the division of labor, in educating both in altruism as well as competitive virtues, in providing for the intergenerational transfer of wealth, and in providing for the continuity of social order. All of these functions have obvious economic dimensions, and responsibility for them has rested heavily with women. Consequently, only with a wider examination of the development of households as economic units, with particular attention to the development of women's roles, can historians acquire a full understanding of the sources of modern economic life.

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AMERICAN W O M E N DOMESTIC CONSUMPTION,

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ANd 1800-1920:

FOUR INTERPRETIVE TNEMES JEAN GORCJON & JAN MCARTIIUR

In 1953 Betty Fricdan, searching for a cause for the perpetuation of what she termed the "feminine mystique" long after it should have become obsolete, found her answer in American business. "Why is it never said," she asked, "that the really crucial function, the really important role that women serve as housewives, is to buy more things for the house ... the perpetuation of housewifery, the growth of the feminine mystique, makes sense (and dollars) when one realizes that women are the chief customers of American business. Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the under-used, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives." 1 In this statement Friedan called attention to issues that were the theme of much scholarly writing in the 1960s and 1970s. It was agreed that America is a consumer society. It was also noted that much of our G N P was directed to providing Americans with elaborately furnished, single-family, detached suburban dwellings. T h e responsibility for equipping and maintaining these homes belonged to married women. For many it was their raison d'etre.2 How such a situation came about is less clearly understood. Historians have not given a great deal of attention to the specifics of American consumer behavior. In the colonial and early national periods

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES much that was consumed by families was also made by them. Economic and social historians have made thorough investigations of the mechanism of subsistence agriculture, domestic production and the pattern of life which these fostered in rural areas and small town communities. At the same time they have emphasized the fact that, from the first settlements in Virginia, many Americans were engaged in production for export and imported much of what they required. The habits of mind fostered by this commercial activity were given a tremendous impetus by the industrial revolution. By the 1880s and 90s domestic consumption had become the norm for most Americans. Although values associated with a simpler, small town way of life persisted, these were challenged by the mores of the newer, u r b a n , c o m m e r c i a l , secularized communities. In the 1920s mass production, popular culture and modern advertising had all but prevailed over rural values and traditional patterns of gentility. America was well launched into "the culture of consumption."' How all this affected women remains to be determined. So far historians have been content to point out in a general way the importance of women's ceasing to be domestic producers and becoming domestic consumers. 4 However, little has been written explaining in detail how this shift came about. It is important to establish for example when men abandoned the role of primary domestic consumer and women assumed that function. As women became the primary domestic consumers we need to know what their tastes and priorities in expenditure were. Related to this matter is what kinds of furnishings were present in households at different periods and how women managed these possessions. We d o have considerable i n f o r m a t i o n c o n c e r n i n g d o m e s t i c c o n s u m p t i o n for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Over the past

domes™ ideology and domes™ work ten years social historians, historical archeologists and historic preservationists have used excavated remains and inventories to determine in a quantifiable manner precisely what people owned at a given site or region at a particular time. 4 In addition, historic preservationists have documented in great detail the furnishings of particular nineteenth century homes. 6 However, with the advent of the industrial revolution, the quantity and variety of available goods has become too complex for easy tabulation. This fact and the abandonment of the practice of taking inventories have discouraged extending the quantifiable study of domestic material culture to the nineteenth and twentienth centuries. Scholars interested in the consuming habits of nineteenth and twentieth century Americans must rely, for the most part, on histories of the decorative arts, studies of folk art and histories of technology. 7 With the advent of sociology as a scholarly discipline, specific studies have been published concerning women's behavior as consumers. However, these are highly selective in the groups of women covered. Much remains to be learned with regard to women's opportunity to buy furnishings for the home as well as their priorities in spending the money available to them. 8 It is not the purpose of this study to attempt anything like the historical equivalent of a modem study of consumer behavior. Rather it is to suggest some general characteristics of the relationship of American women to their domestic possessions from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth century based on the authors' study of American material culture and popular books and magazines published during that period. These characteristics are not intended to be taken as definitive or even as the most important ones that could be identified. They are behavior patterns that we have found significant. We offer them in the hope that they may suggest further lines of research by other scholars working in related areas.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES We have chosen to discuss the consumption habits of American women within four categories. These are traditional consumption, consumption based on upper-class European models, rationalized consumption and consumption for personal gratification. Paralleling these four types of consumer behavior is a recognition of the difference between consumption that has as its goal the preservation of a stable way of life and consumption that is self-consciously upwardly mobile. In addition one must recognize differences in consumer habits based on ethnicity and social class. It should also be pointed out that the four categories of consumption we have identified do not take place in a clear chronology of historical progresssion. All four behavior patterns have existed throughout our history, sometimes two or more being exhibited in the same individual at a given time. However, in general, it can be said that traditional consumption grounded in a relatively stable way of life characterized America before 1830. Status seeking consumption based on upper-class European models persisted until the early twentieth century. Rationalized consumption was important in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As for consumption for personal gratification, it exists wherever there is enough wealth to support it. There are examples of what one writer refers to as "domestic sensualism" as early as the eighteenth century. However, buying for personal gratificication has been particularly prevalent since the 1920s.8 The primary characteristic of traditional consumption is that it takes place within clearly defined, stable classes and communities of people. Families seek to acquire what is appropriate for their class and group. Before the industrial revolution traditional consumption was marked by an economy of scarcity and few consumer choices were possible. Householders had to be content with what could be acquired from local craftsmen and

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK importers or purchased through overseas factors. Even after the industrial revolution when far more goods were available, traditional consumers were guided by what was thought suitable for their group. The most important fact concerning women's consumption behavior within a traditional context was that it was severely restricted. During the first two and a quarter centuries of our history most consumption decisions were made by men. Married women, legally subsumed by their husbands, were considered part of a man's household. If a wife had any influence in what was bought it was usually through persuasion rather than by exercising what was an acknowledged right. Unless a woman was acting as an agent for her husband or as a widow, most of her consumption choices were confined to her personal clothing. 10 It was not uncommon for either the husband or the father of the bride to provide a young wife with a completely furnished house. Caroline Gilman in Recollection of a Housekeeper described how a newlywed [very likely herself] was taken to a house in the North Square of Boston completely furnished with "new carpet, new chairs, new mahogany with its virgin hue, undimmed by wax and turpentine . . . . " Everything was provided, even the kitchen pots and pans and a fresh sanding of the kitchen floor.11 Only the wealthy could afford to provide brides with entirely new household furnishings. It was more common to make use of old possessions which in wealthier families could be considered heirlooms. This was particularly true of the South. John Pendleton Kennedy in Swallow Bam, a novel concerning a southside Virginia planter household of the early nineteenth century, describes the family's dining room which in its decoration and furnishings had remained virtually unchanged since the mid-eighteenth century. As other antebellum novels and reminiscences confirm, this kind of

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES conservatism was not at all unusual.12 Because household objects were scarce and passed on from generation to generation they could have multiple layers of meaning for the women who looked after them. The furniture and decorative objects in Mary Virginia Hawes Terhune's novels of the antebellum South communicate the same kind of personal association later generations would find in photograph albums. This attitude was also common in the North. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in The Pearl of Orr's Island, wrote of two old-maid sisters living in a Maine cottage in the early nineteenth century for whom "every plate, knife, fork, spoon, cup, or glass was as intimate . . . as instinct with home feeling, as if it had a soul." 15 In general the taste of America's traditional households tended to favor the plain.14 The absence of a rigid class structure forestalled the kind of "class appropriate" consumer behavior imposed on Europe's working and middle classes.15 Yet in earlier American communities, consumption took place in a relatively closed society and made any expenditure that differed too drastically from community taste unlikely. A Hanover, New Hampshire resident wrote in 1859, "Thirty years ago, a carpet in a farmer's house, or a piano, was everywhere spoken against as insufferable pride." However, he went on to admit, "Now both the carpet and the piano adorn many a parlör among the hills and valleys of this comparatively sterile country."16 Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, satirically related the reaction of Miss Ophelia's New England neighbors when the lady was given fifty dollars to buy a new wardrobe: As to the propriety of this extraordinary outlay, the public mind was divided,—some affirming that it was well enough, all things considered, (or once in one's life, and others stoutly affirming that the money had better have been sent to the missionaries; but all parties agreed that there had been no such parasol seen in those parts as had

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK been sent on from New York, and that she had one silk 17 dress that might (airly be trusted to stand alone

It was almost as if Miss Ophelia's clothes were common property. The most extreme example of traditional consumption, one in which virtually all family assets were employed by the male head of the household to further the joint family enterprise, was subsistence farming. T h e object of these precommercial farmers was to save as much currency as possible to buy more land." Even when commodities were available for purchase it was often preferable to make them or do without. Minimum consumption and recycling were a way of life. Lydia Maria Child in The Frugal Housewife advised: "Nothing should be thrown away so long as it is possible to make any use of it, however trifling that use may be." 19 When, in the 1850s commercial agriculture became the norm, farm families still consumed as a household unit dominated by the husband. First priority was given to increasing the farm's productivity. And, although farmers were willing to invest in labor-saving machinery for field or bam they were less inclined to spend money to ease the work of their wives. As Dr. W.W. Hall, in the first (1862) annual report of the Department of Agriculture wrote: In plain language, in the civilization of the latter half of the nineteenth century, a farmer's wife, as a general rule, is a laboring drudge It is safe to say, that on three farms out of four the wife works harder, endures more, than any other on the place; more than the husband, more than the 'farm hand,' more than the 'hired help' in the kitchen.'·

The conditions Dr. Hall denounced in a government document formed the theme of many late nineteenth-century women's magazine short stories. One example is Mary Wilkins Freeman's

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES "The Revolt of Mother"which tells how a normally patient wife, when she discovers that her husband has spent their life savings on a new barn instead of the long-wished-for new house, protests by moving the family and the furniture into the bam. T o Freeman the action of the farmer, which would have been regarded as perfectly normal a generation earlier, was now hopelessly out of step with the consideration shown by urban middle class husbands for their wives' desire for domestic comfort. 21 As late as the 1940s farm families lagged far behind the rest of the nation in terms of household modernization and in the housewife's opportunity to engage in domestic consumption to suit her needs and tastes.22 Another group of nineteenth century women who can be considered within the category of traditional consumers are the wives of artisans and working class men. In contrast to the households of early r u r a l A m e r i c a n s w h i c h have been painstakingly recreated at outdoor museums like Sturbridge Village and Cooperstown, New York, we know relatively little of the domestic environments of antebellum urban working-class Americans. However, on the basis of studies of traditional working-class culture we do know that the consumption habits of artisans and working-class Americans differed significantly from those of rural Americans. For one thing, working-class wives had more opportunities for consumption than rural women. Although many urban working-class families kept a small garden and a few domestic animals much of what the family needed had to be bought in the local market. Shopping for this was the responsibility of the wife.25 Among immigrant families, according to studies made at the end of the nineteenth century, it was customary for the husband to turn his paycheck over to his wife after he had taken out enough for his personal needs.24 One can assume that this was less likely to be true of native born artisans who had

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK started out as part-time farmers and only later moved on to full-time craft or factory work. Exactly what antebellum working-class wives bought for their homes remains to be determined. How much money was available for such expenditures depended not only on the husband's income but the family's life style. If an artisan lived in a more traditional manner, spending much of his free time in all male sociability—drinking at the tavern, playing sports or spending time at the hall of the voluntary fire department—it is reasonable to conjecture that less money would be allocated for household furnishings. 25 If, on the other hand, an artisan had middle class aspirations it would be reflected in a larger, more elaborately furnished house.*6 For the poorest working-class wives, according to the writers of nineteenth-century fiction, the only opportunity to demonstrate respectability was through scrupulously neat h o u s e k e e p i n g . A few c l a s s - a p p r o p r i a t e embellishments—a potted plant at the window or a pretty piece of china—were regarded as evidence of finer feelings.27 Popular writers agreed, however, that the working-class woman must not attempt a cheap approximation of the consumption habits of the affluent. Black wofhen who dressed with a picturesque flair were regarded as quaint or absurd and Irish girls, who tried to look like Broadway belles, were set down as ignorant or possibly immoral. 28 Mary Terhune in a serialized story published in Godey's Lady's Book in 1871 provides us with one of the few instances of a detailed description of a respectable working-class family home. A young couple has rented three rooms on the second floor of a house a mile from the factory where the husband works. Their superior taste is shown by the fact that they have moved beyond the smoky, squalid environs of the factory itself and that the wife has bought simple cottage furniture instead of the showy mahogany preferred by her sister and mother.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES In this story the wife's fault is that her taste is too good. When her husband prospers she uses her knack for buying the right thing, particularly fashionable clothes, to marry her daughter to a scion of one of the city's oldest families. But even though the daughter is accepted the mother is not. Her consumption tastes have cut her off from her own family but her working-class origins cause her to be snubbed by the fashionable families into which her daughter has married. Because of the daughter's false social success through consumption the mother has become a woman without a class.29 Most working-class women had neither the means, the knowledge, nor the desire to aspire to this kind of social metamorphosis. Their primary goal was to live comfortably among family and friends. 50 Because the husband's wages were usually insufficient to make this possible it was often necessary to use the home itself to make more money. Family funds might be allocated to taking in boarders with expenditures for extra beds, linens, tableware, etc. Or money might be spent on the tools of sweatshop production—for example, a sewing machine." Yet by the beginning of the twentieth century, according to social investigators, more prosperous working class wives were able to embellish their crowded flats and houses in a highly decorated manner with fancy wallpaper, lace curtains and cheap, ornamented furniture bought on the installment plan. Although social workers complained that such things were inappropriate and unsanitary—the wallpaper harbored bugs and the lace curtains dust—the working-class women were probably merely trying to achieve their own, albeit outdated version, of the taste for opulence displayed by the middle and upper classes a generation earlier.52 Our second category, an upwardly mobile consumption based on European, upper class models, was given an impetus with the great increase

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in manufactured goods that began in the nineteenth century. Mass production made available to middle and upper class families the styles of household furnishings originally designed for Europe's wealthy and aristocratic classes. 55 Men still controlled the purse strings in antebellum homes, but women's influence in purchasing became increasingly evident, particularly in such thriving commercial centers as New York City. Although a variety of styles of furnishings were available in the 1830s and 40s by far the most popular was the French. It was both aristocratic and feminine. Mrs. Trollope described New York interiors of the 1830s as resembling those of a "European petite maitresse." Little tables, looking and smelling like flower beds, portfolios, nick-nacks, bronzes, busts, cameos, and alabaster vases, illustrated copies of lady-like rhymes bound in silk, and, in short, all the pretty coxcomalities of the drawing-room scattered about with the same profuse and studied negligence as with us."

George William Curtis in The Potiphar Papers, wrote satirically of New York residences that were all just alike, each furnished by ambitious wives in the style of Louis Quatorze or Louis Quinze according to the advice of the "best upholsterers and fancy-men in town." 55 In Anna Cora Mowatt's play, "Fashion," it is Mrs. Tiffany, with the help of her French maid, who makes all the consumer choices. MY. Tiffany has become a mere income-earning appendage to domestic display. 56 Curtis and Mowatt were both critical of the new taste for French elegance, considering it a symptom of impersonal social climbing. As Curtis made his spokesman, Mr. Potiphar, say, "We have each got to re-furbish every few years, and, therefore, have no possible opportunity for attaching ourselves to the objects about us." 57

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Curtis was typical of many genteel Victorians in emphasizing the falseness and hypocrisy of lavish domestic expenditures.58 An additional concern was the effect of luxury on women. William Dean Howells expressed a general anxiety when he worried that the lack of meaningful work made middle-class women overly nervous and prone to depression.59 Recent historians have joined in the censure of women's expanded involvement in domestic consumption. 40 Many have also taken the position that women enjoyed a higher social status as domestic producers and that their status fell when they became consumers. This idea seems to have had its origin in two intellectual traditions. One is the nineteenthcentury Puritan-Jacksonian suspicion of luxury as leading to aristocratic privilege and self-indulgent sin. Antebellum women writers were in the habit of contrasting the selfish materialism of city women with the hard-working virtue of small town and rural housewives. Harriet Beecher Stowe, throughout her literary career, wrote admiringly of the heroic housekeeping skills of her grandmother's and mother's generations. In her House and Home Papers she expressed a wish "for the strength and ability to manage my household matters as my grandmother of notable memory managed hers . . . " but she feared "that those remarkable women of olden times are like the ancient painted glass,—the art of making them is lost; my mother was less than her mother, and I am less than my mother." 41 A second intellectual tradition to question the merits of consumerism was the socialist labor theory of value which considered making things to be of more social worth than buying them. Ann Douglas is a recent exponent of this view. In her Feminization of American Culture she accuses nineteenth-century women, particularly women writers, of falling victim to the blandishments of a second-rate culture of c o n s u m p t i o n w h i c h , with its tawdry

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK sentimentality, was greatly inferior to the plain living, tough-minded religiosity which preceded it.« But for nineteenth-century women, raised amidst austere surroundings and unceasing work and threatened with eternal damnation by a judgmental Calvinist God, domestic luxuries and a forgiving, if sentimental religion, came as a welcome change. Even Harriet Beecher Stowe was not willing to imitate the nun-like existence of her domestically efficient Aunt Esther. Instead she took an unabashed delight in pretty clothes, pretty china and handsome Episcopal churches. 45 Sarah Hale, similarly raised within the tradition of Calvinism, did not regard fine clothes as a lure of Satan. T o her, adoring the body was analogous to clothing the soul in grace. She agreed with the English that "only backward" cultures like the Hindusand the Chinese never changed their styles.44 The most extreme phase of consumption based on European upper class models came at the end of the nineteenth century. The year 1870 marked the highest per capita expenditure on furniture in America.45 Census figures for the same year indicate that one half of all women wage earners in the United States had been domestic servants. 46 Contemporary photographs of the period reveal an amazing proliferation of objects, even in fairly modest homes.47 For most Americans, the goal of this large commitment of money and time was to create an ideal environment for private middle class families. The unspoken assumption was that in a democratic society, virtuous families deserved the same kind of luxury previously available to the rich just as in a democracy, virtuous citizens were entitled to a share in public power which formerly had been the monopoly of the privileged. 48 This being the case, it was only natural that the most popular styles were princely. Kenneth Ames has said that when today's children visit a museum exhibit of Grand

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Rapids furniture made for the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876 they are sure it belonged to royalty.49 With the advent of the department store, shopping itself became an occasion to enjoy opulent surroundings. In the 1890s the largest department stores of Philadelphia, New York and Chicago were as grandly spacious as the Louvre. Although most women could afford only modest purchases, the message conveyed by these vast palaces of merchandise was that value was inexorably linked to both elaborate embellishment and to sheer quantity. 50 Still, no matter how ornate, most late nineteenth-century American interiors conveyed a sense of individuality and comfort. Except for the extremely ostentatious, American homes were for the private enjoyment of their owners, not for public display. As Henry James wrote of Olive Chancellor's Boston drawing-room, "he [Basil Ransom] had never felt himself in the presence of so much organized privacy or of so many objects that spoke of habits and tastes and he had never before seen so many accessories."51 Many of the accessories enjoyed by James' heroines came from Europe. In the post Civil War decades Europe became a great bazaar for American women. The Grand Tour was now well within reach of upper middle class school girls, brides and matrons. Wealthier women often maintained separate residences abroad. Men, preoccupied as they were with the postwar expansion of business, left buying and cultural matters to women. The generation of Edith Wharton agreed it was the duty of American men to make money and the right of American women to spend it. Yet as Wharton's heroine, Lily Bart, was ruefully aware, for a girl to have the chance to re-do the parlor she must first marry. 52 Those women who did marry well, Berthe Honore Palmer, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Louisine

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK Havemeyer, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, to name a few, furnished their houses on a scale worthy of royalty. Much of what they bought is now in museums. T o them belongs some of the finest e x a m p l e s of A m e r i c a n "conspicuous consumption." 53 The phrase, of course, is from Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. Yet as Vehlen admitted most turn of the century American women, even the more prosperous ones, were not leisured in the sense of being idle. It was just that the activity of rich women was often directed toward status seeking display. Veblen considered work as something that led to the production of necessities or of luxuries that were enjoyed as ends in themselves, not as a means of social climbing. 54 Even so, as recent historians have pointed out, a high level of domestic consumption, whether conspicuous or not, can be as labor intensive as the earlier domestic production. Although the industrial revolution eliminated major domestic tasks, others appeared to take their place. Ruth Schwartz Cowan in More Work for Mother demonstrates that each "labor saving" innovation brought with it higher expectations for the housewife. The manufacture of less expensive, factory-made cloth resulted in more clothes, table and bed linens. These in turn required more hours of sewing and laundry. The availability of milled white flour and refined sugar led families to expect an unceasing supply of cakes and pastries. Spacious Queen Anne houses crammed with furniture, rugs, curtains and decorative objects posed herculean housekeeping chores.55 John Kenneth Galbraith has dealt with this phenomenon in his book Economics and the Public Purpose. Consumables, to be of value, he pointed out, must be managed. Otherwise they become a burden. In the early years of the industrial revolution when goods became more abundant there was a parallel increase in the need for servants. But,

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES ironically, the same factories which produced more goods also provided jobs for the very people whose only previous work was domestic service. Eventually, when factory wages increased beyond the subsistence level, wbrking class wives became major domestic consumers in their own right. 56 However, before that transition could take place a situation existed full of frustration for the housewife and the women who worked for her. Mistresses, wishing to live at the highest possible level of consumption, were determined to extract as much work as possible from their servants. Servants retaliated by moving to another family or by leaving household service altogether. By the 1870s most maids were unskilled immigrants and blacks. Immigrants, once acclimated to American ways, usually left domestic service for other kinds of work or for marriage. Black women, having fewer options, continued to do housework even after marriage. Like women who worked as teachers they were often overqualified for the job. Unfortunately for housewives, with the exception of the South, there were not enough black servants to go around. A library could be compiled of the complaints of nineteenth and early twentieth century American housewives against transient servants. They could wreck havoc with a woman's most prized possessions. They disrupted family routine. Furthermore, by their presence they constituted a violation of the family's cherished privacy. It was clear to the more analytical that transient servants had to be banished from the household if the family was to be a complete world unto itself.5' The problem was how to minimize the need for servants and still maintain the style of consumption appropriate for a middle or upper class way of life. Housework, when performed by servants, was generally viewed as even more demeaning than factory work. 58 No middle class woman wanted to be thought of as a domestic drudge. Yet somehow the ever proliferating household tasks had to be

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK performed. As it turned out, American women were particularly resourceful in meeting the challenge. Women writers and scientists, with the help of advertisers, were able to instill in the popular mind the concept of home-making as an activity suitable for an educated, upper-class woman as distinct from housework that was arduous, repetitious and low in status. They achieved this metamorphosis within the parameters of our two remaining categories of consumption—rationalized consumption and consumption for personal gratification. Rationalized domestic consumption had its roots in the New England version of the Calvinist work ethic. New England housewives, the grandmothers so admiringly celebrated by Harriet Beecher Stowe, lacking servants and eager for a little free time to themselves, made a fetish of household efficiency. For farmers' wives these calculated work habits, known locally as "faculty," were essential just to get through everything that had to be done. Rural women had few resources with which to modify their work spaces and equipment. But small town and city women, with a little money to spare, could adopt labor saving household arrangements and appliances. Before the Civil War the motive of such women was often evangelical. It was Catherine Beecher's conviction that better designed, properly ventilated houses and more efficient work habits would permit the housewife to assume her proper role as spiritual guide, or as Beecher put it as "Christ's representative in the home." 59 Another reformer, Melusina Fay Peirce, was more efficiency oriented. During the Civil War, in a series of articles published in the Atlantic Monthly she urged the formation of women's cooperatives to provide both the services and the manufactured goods necessary for family life.60 It was not, however, until the 1880s and 90s when domestic consumption based on European styles reached its most full-blown development that

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES the newer w o m e n ' s m a g a z i n e s b e g a n to propagandize the program of the domestic rationalizers. The "homemaker," a newly coined term, was pictured as the domestic counterpart of the professional man. She was responsible for the proper management of her household as he was responsible for the direction of his business. She handled servants with the same impersonal authority with which he presided over his subordinates. She, like the professional man, was knowledgeable in all branches of her job. She knew which modem appliances were best suited to her family's needs. She was prepared to take responsibility for properly installed plumbing to avoid the menace of sewer gas. If she followed the advice of Ellen Swallow Richards, a pioneer of the Home Economics movement, she was willing to consider the entire community an extension of the domestic environment and rightfully under her purview. When, in the early twentieth century servants became scarce and expensive, experts like Christine Frederick, urged the housewife to rationalize herself as well as her house by adopting the techniques of industrial efficiency pioneered by Frederick Taylor. 61 Although decked out in the language of science, Frederick's recommendations were in many ways no more than an updated version of the New England housewife's step-saving "faculty." At the same time, home magazines popularized what may have been the first truly middle class aesthetic. In the mid-nineteenth century it had not been thought inappropriate for upper middle class families to furnish their homes in Louis Quinze or Renaissance Revival styles. Even Mark Twain, whose professional stock in trade was ridiculing the pretentious, saw nothing absurd in the grandiose furnishings of his Hartford, Connecticut, home.62 But when tenement dwellers began to gratify a taste for fussy lace curtains and heavily carved parlor pieces it was clear that domestic consumption based on aristocratic styles was on its way out. Middle and

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK upper class women were only too happy to move in the direction of simplicity. For the daring it might be the dark, jewel-like colors and geometric shapes of the Arts and Crafts movement. For the more conventional there was colonial revival furniture, white painted woodwork and chintz." Both styles complemented the rationalized approach to homemaking of plain living and informed thinking in which home making was conceptualized as the appropriate sphere of an up-to-date professional woman. At least that is how it was presented in the women's magazines.64 The actual experience of most tum-of-the-century women was undoubtedly much more diverse. It was, after all, one thing to read about rationalized methods of housework and quite another to implement them. Organizational techniques which made sense for business and factories could quickly become ludicrous when applied to the normal confusion of family life. One has only to look at contemporary photographs to realize what a hodge podge most houses were. In addition many women, particularly southerners and immigrants, considered the rationalization of housework both alien and undesirable—especially when its precepts were associated with self-righteous Yankees and meddling middle class do-gooders. 65 Domestic rationalization did not really come of age until the 1920s when it was thoroughly institutionalized in schools and colleges by the profession of home economics. By then it was no longer the boldly innovative movement it had once been with Catharine Beecher, Melusina Fay Peirce or Ellen S w a l l o w R i c h a r d s . I n s t e a d it complemented the goals of American industry. The ideal housewife, as defined by educational institutions and the media, was the informed but essentially passive consumer. She was to know where to go to find the best information, not only concerning domestic products but also domestic

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES skills and wisdom—how to buy appropriate furnishings, how to properly clothe, feed and take care of all the members of the family.®6 It was a far cry from Catharine Beecher's vision of the wife as an incarnation of Christ in the home or Ellen Swallow Richard's concept of women as guardians of the environment. One final category, consumption for personal gratification, is rather more elusive than the other three. It began to assume its modem character with the privatization of experience that accompanied the expansion of cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 87 The object of consumption for personal gratification was to acquire possessions which gave the owner pleasure or a sense of personal fulfillment. Such possessions might also carry the connotation of higher social status but this was not the primary reason for their acquisition. In fact, consumption for personal gratification was more likely to help the buyer put u p with the social status she occupied. One way of coming to terms with being a housewife was to make housekeeping seem more like a pleasurable avocation than demeaning drudgery. Consumption for personal gratification has had a long history. In the eighteenth century there were certain household tasks that were thought of as appropriate for ladies. These included fine needlework, the higher branches of cookery and washing the silver, crystal and fine china. 68 In the late nineteenth century when servants became more scarce, a logical strategy was to expand the categories of enjoyable, lady-like housework. Adeline Whitney, in a novel published in 1874, gives a fictional example of how this could be done. A family of young women decide they can do without a servant if household tasks are made more pleasant. Their first decision is to move the basement kitchen to the first floor dining room. Their second is to throw alway all the old, unsightly pots and pans used by the maid and replace them with aesthetically

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK pleasing new ones. In the refurbished dining room/kilchen they contrive to make the work itself aesthetically pleasing. As the author observed parenthetically, "Alady will no more make a jumble or litter in doing such things [cooking] than she would at her dressing table." 69 Although Whitney wrote at a time when the employment of household servants was at its height, her book correctly forecast future consumption priorities. As long as servants were available, most families spent minimal funds on making housework easy or attractive. Kitchens were located in the basement or in the back of the house. They were usually old fashioned in their appointments. Housewives preferred to spend money on rooms used by the family and their guests. Ironically, servants themselves might object to the introduction of labor saving devices regarding them as an unfair attempt to increase the work load.70 But when the housewife did her own cooking and cleaning all this changed. Cooking schools became popular to train women in all branches of cookery. Kitchens were moved upstairs where they were more centrally located. Their decor became almost as important as that of the more public rooms. Marion Harland in her 1905 novel The Distractions of Martha described how her heroine created an "art kitchen" in grey and blue with a monumental cast iron stove, satirically referred to as "the shrine." 71 By the 1920s kitchens illustrated in women's magazines combined the attributes of a sitting room, boudoir and a laboratory. They were presented under such titles as "The One Room Exclusively a Woman's." In fact, one might infer from the advertisements of this period that the house itself was the private preserve of women. Men, when shown at all, were depicted with the self-conscious politeness of guests rather than the relaxed informality of members of the family. 72 In reality, housework as a self-fulfilling activity was not plausible as long as it involved hard

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES physical drudgery. But in the 1920s with the widening availability of gas and electric appliances, chores like doing the dishes and cleaning the rugs could be made to seem, at least in advertisements, the delightful activities of a lady. Once manufacturers had developed appliances for the performance of such basic tasks as laundry, cooking and vacuuming they moved on to other devices like dishwashers and food processors whose time-saving capabilities might be marginal but which gave the housewife a sense of pampered affluence. As recent historians have demonstrated such appliances can actually increase work. They also reinforce the assumption that cooking and household maintenance are the responsibility of the housewife and should be carried out in the home. With home washing machines there is no need for commercial laundries. Expensively equipped kitchens eliminate the necessity of dining out." Concurrent with the proliferation of home appliances which began in the 1920s there was a shift in the kinds of people who represented models of desirable consumer behavior. In the nineteenth century such persons belonged to the genteel or aristocratic, European classes.74 By the 1920s trendsetters were more likely to be the new rich, celebrities and movie stars. Because the lifestyle of these persons was based on money, as opposed to inherited status, it was more accessible to upwardly mobile persons or people who merely wished to make their present status more pleasurable. In contrast to the consumption tastes of the genteel and aristocratic which often required a highly sophisticated education, those of the trend-setters could be learned through advertising. Advertisers, in the 1920s, responded accordingly. They invented a new kind of advertisement which appealed to the consumer's subjective desires and fears as opposed to his or her rational judgments." They also helped create a society in which people were defined, not by who

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK they were but by what they owned. As Daniel Boorstin pointed out, by the 1950s we had become a "Consumption Community." 76 In this society, domestic expenditures were awarded a high priority. When Nixon touted the blessings of American capitalism at the 1959 Moscow trade fair, he chose to illustrate the superiority of private enterprise, not by an achievement in science or art, or even the latest car from Detroit, but by a "state of the art" kitchen. 77 Given this official conservative endorsement of domestic expenditure, it is not surprising that Betty Friedan saw domestic consumption and the feminine mystique on which it was based as a trap imposed on women by capitalists in search of markets. However, that explanation is too simple. Domestic consumption in America began as an activity closely linked to community and class norms. When the industrial revolution caused these community and class ties to break down, the private family emerged as a major focus of economic and cultural life. As men left for work outside the home, women became the chief domestic consumers. It was a situation caused by industry which met industry's needs. But it was not the result of a self-conscious capitalist conspiracy. Nor has women's role as primary domestic consumer and family consumer manager been a static one. We have seen how these roles went through a series of changes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At present, women's role as domestic consumer is undergoing yet another change. Married women are now entering the job market in unprecedented numbers primarily to pay for the consumables which advertising has caused them to believe essential to the good life, but whose escalating prices require a second income. But even though women now have the money to increase family consumption, they no longer have the time to act as full time consumption managers. In many ways what is happening to today's housewife is similar to what happened to earlier

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES American domestic servants. When these servants left private households for work elsewhere it meant that even wealthy women had to function as the consumption managers of their families. Now housewives are leaving the home for outside work. And, like the servants before them, as soon as other alternatives become available, the negative aspects of domestic service begin to be perceived as outweighing its benefits. Many working wives (in a manner similar to the nineteenth-century servants who considered their mistresses too demanding) are finding their personal interests in conflict with the demands of husband and children. When women had no other work options, loyal service meant security for both servant and wife. But when paid work outside the home became available such service was often perceived as leading to economic exploitation and low social status. As more of today's working housewives come to accept this view, women may finally emerge from their role as the last servant class. In any case, domestic consumption, as Betty Friedan described it in 1963, is already becoming a thing of the past. The household as a consuming unit presided over by women is fragmenting into a cluster of consuming individuals. How American industry responds to this fact remains to be seen.

Notes 'Bitty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: W W. Norton fc Co., 1974). pp. 206-207. »See for example, Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (New York: David McKay Co.. Inc., I960); George Katona, The Mass Consumption Society (New York: McGray-Hill, 1964); David Riesman, Abundance for Whatt Λ nd Other Essays (Garden City, Ν. Y.: Doubleday, 1964), pp 103-367; John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). 'See for example, John Demos, A Little Commonwealth (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970); Darren Rutman, Husbandmen of Plymouth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967); Thad W. Tate and David L Ammerman, eds., The Chesapeake in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel HilJ: Univ. of North Carolina Press. 1979); J.E. Crowley, This Sheba, Self The Conceptualization of Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974); James A. Henretta, "Families and Farms: Mentalite in Pre-Industrial America," William and Mary Quarterly S5 (Jan. 1978), pp. 3-32; Burton J. Bledstein, The Culture of

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK Professionalism (New York: Norton. 1976); T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grate, Antimodemism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books. 1981); Richard Wrightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lrars, Eds., The Culture of Consumerism: Critical Essays m American History, 1880-1980 (New York: Pantheon Books. 1983). 'Nancy Woloch in Women and the American Experience (New York: Knopf, 1984), provides an excellent synthesis of recent research in the history of American women. Woloch takes the position of more recent historians that women's status became higher when they ceased being domestic producers. The more traditional interpretation is that women's social position declined when they abandoned production for consumption. See, for example, Elizabeth Dexter, Colonial Women of Affairs (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1931). 'Much of this scholarship has been influenced by the work of Fernand Braudel, particularly his Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800, translated from the French by Miriam Kochan (New York: Harper. Row. 1974). The Sc Mary's City commission has made a detailed study based on archeological remains and surviving records of the domestic material culture of the early Chesapeake. The Summer, 1974 issue (69) of the Maryland Historical Magaiine is devoted to the Commission's earlier findings. Since then a number of important articles have been published by Lois Carr and Lorena Walsh. Of particular interest is "Inventories and the Analysis of Wealth and Consumption Patterns in St. Mary's County, Maryland. 1658-1777." Historical Methods, 13 (Spring. 1980). pp. 81-104. See also Cary Carson. N. Barka, W. Kelso. G. Stone and D. Upton, "Impermanent Architecture in the Southern American Colonies," Winterihur Portfolio, 16 (Summer/Autumn, 1981), pp. 135-196. James Deetz, in Small Things Forgotten (Garden City. N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977) has provided a theoretical framework for the domestic material culture of the Northeast. Laurel T. Ulrich. Good Wives: Image and Reality m the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York: Knopf, 1982), gives a detailed picture of the domestic environments of colonial women. 'William Scale, Recreating the Historic House Interior (Nashville: American Association for State and Local History« 1979) has established a methodology for such restorations. 'Many titles could be cited for these topics. Three representative ones are Edgar de Ν. Mayhew and Minor Myers, A Documentary History of American Interiors (New York: Scribner's, 1980); Henry Classic, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United Stales (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1969); Siegfried Giedion, Mechanisation Takes Command (New York: Norton, 1948). In addition there are such general works as Edgar W. Martin, The Standard of Living in I860, American Consumption Levels on the Eve of the Civil War (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1942); Russell Lynes. The Taslemakers (New York: Gross« it Dunlap, 1949) and The Domesticated Americans (New York: Harper k Row, 1963); Jan Cohn, The Palace or the Poorhouse, The American House as a Cultural Symbol (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1979). 'It is interesting to compare Margaret F. Byington, Homestead, The Households of a Mill Town (New York: Charities Publication Committee, 1910) with Lee Rainwater, R. Coleman and G. Handel, Workingman's Wife (New York: Oceana Publications. Inc., 1959). T h e term "domestic sensualist" was used by Carol Shammas to describe patterns of domestic consumption which emerged in the eighteenth century. See her "The Domestic Environment in Early Modern England and America," Journal of Social History, 14 (Fall, 1980), pp. 3-24. "Nancy Gott, The Bonds of Womanhood, "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven. Yale University Press, 1977), p. 45.

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES "Carolina Howard Oilman, Recollections of a Housekeeper (New York: Harper. 1834), pp. 16-17: Waller Muir Whitehall. Boston, A Topographical History (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 1968). pp. 125126. Peter Parker of Boston is an example o( a lather who gave his daughter a Cully furnished house as a wedding present. In 1848 he commissioned M. Lemoulnier of Paris u> design a handsome brick house in the South End of Boston which was one of the wonders of the mid-century city. It was the son-in-law rather than the daughter who determined the interior appointments. It was also customary for husbands in the early nineteenth century to do the daily marketing. Lily Martin Spencer has documented this practice in her painting " T h e Young Husband: First Marketing," reproduced in Robin Bolton-Smith and William H. Truetuier, Lily Martin Spencer, The Joys of Sentiment (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1973), p. 43. " J o h n Pendleton Kennedy. Swallow Bam (New. York: Putnam, 1852). p. 24. "Mary Virginia Terhune. Judith, A Chronicle of Old Virginia (Philadelphia: Our Continent Publishing Co.. Ί883); Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Pearl of Orr's Island (Boston: T i d i n o r and Fields. 1862). p. 364. "Henry James in The Europeans caused his French bred heroine, the Baroness Munster, to refer to her affluent American cousins, the Wentworths, as "Quakerish" in their simplicity. Henry James, The Europeans (New York, 1878; rpt. New York: Penguin Books. 1964). p. 51. "Richard Sennet I, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf. 1977), pp. 65-72. "Quoted by Clarence H. Dunhof, Change in Agriculture, The Northern United States, 1820-70 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), p. 19. "Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom's Cabin (Boston. 1852; rpt. New York: Collier Books. 1962), p. 213. "James T . Lemon, "Household Consumption in Eighteenth-Century America and Its Relationship to Production and Trade: The Situation Among Fanners in Southeastern Pennsylvania," Agriculture History, 41 (Jan. 1967), pp. 59-70; Danhof. Clarence. Change in Agriculture: The Northern United States (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 18-20. "Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife (Boston: Carter and Hendee. 1835). p. 1. " J o h n M. Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979). pp. 59-60. "Mary E. Wilkins, " T h e Revolt of Mother," in The Best Stories of Mary E. Wilkins, Ed. Henry W. Lanier (New York. Harper. 1927). pp. 2342. "Mary W. M. Hargreaves. "Horoesteading and Homemaking on the Plains: A Review," Agricultural History, 47 (April, 1973), pp. 156-163; Mary W. M. Hargreaves, "Women in the Agricultural Settlement of the Northern Plains," Agricultural History, 50 (Jan. 1976), pp. 179-189; Joann Vanek in "Household Technology and Social Status: Rising l i v i n g Standards and Status and Difference in Housework," Technology and Culture, 19 (July. 1978), p p . 361-375, cites examples of the undermodeniizaiion of rural American homes as late as the 1940s. "Richard L_ Bushman, "Family Security in the Transition from Farm to City." Journal of Family History 6 (Fall, 1981). pp. 238-256. Sam Bass. Warner, The Private City (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), pp. 17-19. "Margaret Byington wrote in 1910 "The men are inclined to trust all financial matters to their wives. It is the custom in Homestead for the workman to t u m over his wages to his wife on pay day and to ask no questions as to what it goes for. He reserves a share for spending money;

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK otherwise his part oi (he family problem is to earn and hers is to spend." Margaret F. Byington, Homestead, The Households of a Mill Town (Nev/ York: Arno Press, 1969). p. 108. "Bruce Laurie writes of the irregularity of work available to artisans in Philadelphia in (he 1830s and 40s in " N o t h i n g O n Compulsion: Life S(yles of Philadelphia Artisans. 1820-1850," Labor History, 15 (Summer, 1974). pp. 337-566. "Laurie quotes a Philadelphia artisan who in 1850 spoke of as "necessities" for the "worthy mechanic" "a house . . . on a front street, three stories high,, bath room, hydrant, good yard, cellar . . . house furniture, bedding, clothing, amusements." "Nothing on Compulsion," p. 373. "Maria S. Cummins. Mable Vaughn (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1857), pp. 177-181; Edith Wharton, "Mrs. Manstey's View." in The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton, ed. R.W.B. Lewis (New York: Scribner's, 1968), I, pp. M l . "William Dean Howells described a "young coloured girl . . . resplendent in a white hat trimmed in orange and purple." He was nonjudgmental but clearly thought the girl's taste very different from upper class white'». /! Woman's Reason (Boston: Osgood, 1883), p. 374; Carol Croneman, "Working-Class Immigrant Women in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York. T h e Irish Woman's Experience," Journal of Urban History, 4 (May, 1978). pp. 255-273. "Mary Terhune [pen name Marion Harland] "Getting on in the World." GodeyS Lady s Book. 82 (Feb. 1871) pp. 135-142. "James M. Patterson, "Marketing and the Working-Class Family," in Blue Collar World, eds. Arthur B. Shostak and William Cornberg (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. 1964), pp. 76-85. " J o h n Modell .and Tamara Hareven, "Urbanization and the Malleable Household," Journal of Marriage and the Family, 35 (August. 1973), pp. 467-479. "Lisbeth A. Cohen, "Embellishing a Life oi Labor: An Interpretation. at the Material Culture of American Working-Class Homes, 1885-1915," in Material Culture Studies in America, ed. Thomas j . Schlereth (Nashville: T h e American Association for State and Local History, 1982), pp. 289-305. Cohen states that immigrant women furnished their homes according to the traditions oi their homeland as well as imitating upper class styles. "For social mobility in the antebellum years see Edward Pessen. Riches, Class and Power before the Civil War (Lexington: Heath, 1973). •«Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London, 1832; rpc New York: Vintage Books. 1968), μ 338. "George William Curtis, The Potipher Papers (New York: Harper's, 1900), pp. 99-100. "Anna Cora Mowau Ritchie, Fashion (New York: S. French, 1849). "Curtis. The Potipher Papers, p. 100. "Karen Haluunen. Confidence Men and Painted Women, A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. 1982), pp. 56-91. "William Dean Howells. The Rise of Silas Lapham (New York. 1884; rpt. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 1912). p. 324. «Mary Beth Norton. "The Evolution of White Women's Experience in Early America," American Historical Review, 89 (June 1984). pp. 593619. For a discussion of the theory that women in the colonial period were better off than their nineteenth-century descendants. " Harriet Beecher Stowe, Household Papers and Stories, The Writing» of Harriet Beecher Stowe, VIII (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), p. 98. " A n n Douglas. The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977). chaps. 3. 4.

242

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES " J e a n Cordon, "Harri« Beecher Stowe and ihr Religion οf Domesticity in a Consumer Society," unpublished paper given at the conference "Victorian Album, Aspects of American Lite 1865-1900" sponsored by the Victorian Society in America and the National Archives. Washington, D C . March 21-24. 1979. "George Talbot, At Home, Domestic Life in the Post-Centennial Era, 1876-1920 (Madison: The Stale Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976). p. viii. "Kenneth Ames. "Grand Rapids Furniture at the Time of the Centennial," Wmterthur Port/olio. 10 (1975). pp. 23-50. H David Kauman. Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford, 1978), p. 53. "William Seele, The Tasteful Interlude: American Interiors Through the Camera s Eye, 1860-1917 (New York: Praeger, 1975). " T h i s is the opinion ot the authors. A discussion of the middle class home as a Utopian retreat can be found in Kirk Jeffrey, " T h e Family as Utopian Retreat from the City: The Nineteenth-Century Contribution," Soundings, 55 (1972). pp. 21-41; Clifford E. Clark. "Domestic Architecture as an Index to Social History: The Romantic Revival and the Cult of Domesticity in America. 1840-1870." Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 7 (Summer 1976). pp. SS-56. "Kenneth Ames, "Grand Rapids Furniture at the Time of the Centennial." p. 51. " J o h n William Ferry. A History of the Department Store. American Assembly series (New York: Prentice-Hall. Inc.. 1960); Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan, Give the Lady What She Wants! (Chicago: Rand McNally. 1952). "Henry James, The Bostonians (New York. 1886; rpt. New York: Dial Press, 1945). p. IS. "Edith Wharton. The House of Mirth (New York. 1905; rpt. New York: Scribners, 1975), p. 10. "Aline Saarinen, The Proud Possessors: The Lives, Times and Tastes of Some Adventurous American Art Collectors (New York: Random House, 1958). M Thorstein VeWen, The Theory of the Leisure Clou (New York, 1889: rpt. New York: Random House, 1934), chap. 6. " R u t h Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother (New York: Basic Books, 1983), chap. 3. See also Susan Strasser, Never Done, A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982); Daniel T . Rodgers, The WorA Ethic in Industrial America 1850-1920 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 1974). " J o h n Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose, chaps. 4. 23. "Faye E. Dud den. Serving Women: Household Service m NineteenthCentury America (Middletown. Ct.: Wesleyan University Press. 1983); Daniel E. Sutherland, Americans and Their Servants: Dbmestic Service in the United States 1800-1920 (Bann Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1981). "Kauman, Seven Days a Week, chap. 1. "Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beech er Stowe, The American Woman's Home (Hartford: Stowe-Day Foundation, 1975), chap. 1. "Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities (Cambridge: ΜΓΓ Press, 1981). chap. 4 •'Gweldolyn Wright, Moralism and the Model Home: Domestic Architecture and Cultural Conflict in Chicago, 1873-1913 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), chaps. 4-9. "Kenneth R. Andrews, Nook Farm, Mark Twain's Hartford Circle (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 1950).

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK "Robert W. Winter. "The Art» and Crate as a Social Movement." Record of the Art Museum Princeton University. 34 (1975). pp. 36-42; Robert C. Twombly, "Saving the Family: Middle Class Attraction to Wright's Prairie House, 1901-1909," American Quarterly. 27 (March 1975). pp. 57-72. "See tor example the early twentieth century issues of Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal and Woman's Home Companion. "Maxine Seller, "The Education of the Immigrant Woman, 19001935," Journal of Urban History. 4 (May 1978), 307-30. "Marione East, Home Economics Past, Present and Future (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1980). •'Ian Watt, The Rise of the Sovel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: Univ. oi California Press), chap. 6. "Mary Terhune, "Eighty Years of Reminiscence." Ladies Home Journal, 37 (Oct. 1920), pp. 128-32. "Adeline Whitney, We Girls: A Home Story (Boston. Osgood. 1874), μ 102. "Daniel Sutherland, Americans and Their Servants, p. 198. "Marion Harland, The Distractions of Martha (New York: Scribner's, 1906). n Ladies Home Journal, 42 (August 1925). p. 128: Ladies Home Journal, 41 (March 1924), p. 132. Ladies Home Journal. 44 (April 1927). p. 1. "Charles A. Thrall. "The Conservative Ute of Modern Household Technology." Technology and Culture, 23 (April 1982). pp. 175-194. "Stow Persons, The Decline of American Gentility (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1973). "Stuart Ε wen. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture I.New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976); Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and its Creators (New York: Morrow, 1984). "Daniel J. Boorstin, "Welcome to the Consumption Community," Fortune, 76 (SepL 1967). pp. 118-138. ""At Our Fair in Moscow." Newsweek, 54 (August 3,1959), pp. 15-20.

Jan McArthur is Chair of the Department of Housing and Interior Design of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Jean Gordon is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

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Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West ELIZABETH

JAMESON

In this article, Elizabeth Jameson questions whether Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis and the Cult of True Womanhood are useful starting points for examining changes in the lives of western women. Imposing the images either of frontier liberation or of genteel womanhood, she says, distorts women's lives and makes women passive objects of their own history. More explicitly than in any other article in this book, Jameson shows the methodological consequences of making women the actors in their own stories. Once we do this, we can look through western women's eyes at the contrast between their private lives and their public images. Jameson goes on to offer a number of suggestions for getting past the stereotyped images to the realities of how women shaped continuity and change in their own lives. She provides useful guideposts for judging the meaning of the western experience from the perspectives of the women who lived it.

I lived the history that I can tell. And of course the history today in books that's written a lot is not really the true thing, as it was lived.1

May Wing, who spoke these words, was born in Leadville, Colorado, in 1890. A daughter, wife, and mother of miners, she spent her life in Colorado mining towns. I do not think that May Wing would recognize herself in much of the scholarship on western women, which has been influenced by the assumptions of both traditional western history and the Victorian Cult of True Womanhood.2 Assuming that men's and women's worlds were separate, that men's lives were public and women's were private, that men were active and women were passive, historians have created a number of polarized images of western women. Common stereotypes divide them into good and bad women, either genteel civilizers and sunbonneted helpmates, or hell raisers and bad women.3 Recently some historians have distinguished class divisions within prostitution and have begun to provide a more complicated sense of "bad women's" lives and options." But our understanding of all women's roles has been shaped by prescriptions for female respectability in Victorian America, and I want to concentrate here

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Home in the Rockies, December, 1896. Courtesy Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.

on interpretations of the lives of most western women, who were married and therefore "good." Understandings of these "good" women's lives have been influenced by the polarized images of the genteel civilizer and the helpmate (or the oppressed drudge). The civilizer was projected from Victorian prescriptive literature, which reflected and taught the cardinal virtues of "true womanhood": piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness to male authority. Women were to shape national morality from the privacy of their family hearthsides, leaving public action to men. The assumption that women behaved as they were told influenced early works on western women, beginning with Dee Brown's The Gentle Tamers in 1958.5 He portrayed an image of western woman as the reluctant pioneer who, while her man tamed the physical wilderness, gently and passively tamed the man and brought civilized culture to the frontier. Although civilization and culture were, perhaps, laudable goals, the problem with the genteel civilizer was that she did nothing active to achieve them. Historians countered this passive image by emphasizing the hard work women did, but this approach led to equally one-dimensional views of the heroic feats and stoic endurance of oppressed wives. Both the genteel civilizer and the oppressed drudge can be found in recent works.6 These dichotomized images are rooted in the presumed separation of public spheres as places for men only and private spheres for women only. Yet in the West women entered the public arena of the voting booth before

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their eastern sisters did. By 1914 women could vote in the Territory of Alaska and eleven states. All but Illinois were west of the Mississippi, and in Canada suffrage was first won in three western provinces. Influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis that the West was a liberating and innovative environment, historians accepted the belief that the frontier liberated women. Then they debated whether men "gave" women the vote because they valued women's civilizing influence or because they recognized women's contributions as workers. Recently, feminist historians like Julie Roy Jeffrey have questioned the significance of suffrage, pointing out that political emancipation does not necessarily mean sexual or social emancipation, and have looked instead for transformations in the Cult of True Womanhood and in women's work roles as evidence of women's liberation in the West. While the assumptions of a public literature which sharply differentiated women's and men's roles and spheres have been a starting point for most of this history, there are important questions we need to raise about how accurately that literature reflected western women's lives. We need to think carefully about what different sources tell us about the work, daily concerns, and public actions of western women. The use of prescriptive literature assumes literacy in English and adherence to upper-class Euro-American values, an assumption which excludes virtually all American Indians, Hispanics, blacks, Asians, and many European immigrants, and fails to explore class differences among Euro-American women. When historians find evidence of Victorian values in western women's writing, we need to remember who wasn't writing. By virtue of class or ethnicity, most western women did not fit the prescriptions of True Womanhood. Moreover, ideology does not describe behavior. We need only to reflect on the prescriptive literature which surrounds us today, from Cosmopolitan to Ladies Home Journal, to realize that there is often a difference between what a culture tells us we ought to do and what we in fact do. Our problems of interpretation of western women's lives have been at least partially problems of sources. Historians went first to prescriptive literature and the writings of prominent people because those were the easiest sources to locate. Such documents are saved in archives. The census and other demographic materials provide descriptions of some important factors: the ratio of women to men, the ethnic composition of an area, female literacy, the number and spacing of children, who kept boarders, and so on. Such materials, though they have not yet been used extensively in western women's history, have much to tell us. But they cannot provide a subjective entry into women's lives, nor are they helpful in describing the variety of women's work, which, with the exception of keeping boarders, was rarely noted by census takers. We need additional sources to provide accurate, three-dimensional pictures of western women. 1 began thinking about how our images are related to our sources trough my work on women in the Cripple Creek, Colorado, mining district. The public literature I consulted, including male working-class "^spapers, defined men by their work roles, but defined women by their

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relationship to morality, as either "good" or "bad." This literature, so preoccupied with female gentility, virtually ignored women's work.7 But my oral-history interviews with mining-town women revealed a women's community and a female culture which revolved around the female life cycle and around women's work. I began to question some of my earlier interpretations and to contrast the public image of mining-town women with the images they drew themselves. In questioning others' interpretations of western women, then, I am not denigrating the often-important work of historians who have used the conceptual frameworks of prescriptive literature, but am trying to describe a historiographic journey in which we are all engaged. I have used the work of other historians in this article to include women outside the scope of my own research. I have included Canadian materials because western women in the United States and Canada did similar work, received similar messages about appropriate domestic roles, and were granted the vote before eastern women. Most of the documents we have used to explore the lives of western women have been public documents. These include newspapers and other male sources, and also women's diaries, which were often intended to be shared as family history, as guidebooks for the western journey, or for publication. Some were copied before they were given to archives or to family members.8 They often omit women's private concerns, although they are sources for accounts of daily activities and were more frequently outlets for emotions than were men's diaries. What sources, then, round out the picture of women's lives in the West? We are not, to use an overworked concept, dealing with histories of the "inarticulate." We are trying to hear what women have articulated, but which has not been heard, either because their words are not found in archives, or because they speak of things which until recently we haven't defined as the stuff of history. Two excellent sources through which to approach the daily lives of western women are oral histories and private writing, some of which is in historical collections, and more of which can be gleaned from family attics. Elizabeth Hampsten, who has published the letters of North Dakota women, made some important observations about the language of women's sources. She emphasized that nineteenth-century language instruction "strongly advocated rising class expectations," so that public documents use more formal and genteel language and are more likely to reflect prescribed cultural values. "I have found," she wrote, "that this language of composition differs markedly from the conversational talk encountered in the letters and diaries of working women," and she noted the "highly oral" and less formal language of these sources, which is similar to the language of oral history interviews.9 While public language sometimes supported notions of female submissiveness, purity, and leisured domesticity, the women's informal talk frequently does not. Understanding the contexts of public and private language, we may begin to transcend the dichotomized spheres and see women whole. We can consider what different sources tell

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us about women's image as reluctant pioneer, about their daily work, and about the supposedly widely separate worlds of private sexuality and public community involvement. THE RELUCTANT

PIONEER

Although historians differ about the impact of the westward journey on women's roles, most agree that the decision to move west was made by men.10 The image of women as reluctant pioneers is derived partly from women's diaries and letters from the Overland Trail, which indicate that many women felt torn about the western journey or joined their husbands under protest. An example is the frequently quoted Abby Fulkerath, who wrote: "Agreeable to the wish of my husband, I left all my relatives in Ohio . . . & started on this long and somewhat perilous joumey. . . . it proved a hard task to leave them but harder still to leave my children buried in graveyards."" Responding to her pain at leaving her family and dead children, we may too easily reduce her to a reluctant pioneer. But what did she mean by "agreeable"? Did she genuinely agree with her husband's desire to move, but feel tom at the same time by what she left behind? A more complicated reading of such sources may replace the images of adventurous men and passive women with a more complex understanding of the competing emotional and economic reasons each had for staying or leaving. Women's pain at going west is expressed primarily in terms of leaving family and women friends. Some, of course, may have been able to prevent the move west, and we don't know how many vetoed the journey. More importantly, for many women such concerns did not apply, because they brought their families with them. Nearly half "of all emigrant families traveled in larger-than-family groups based on kin," most often in extended family groups. At least 40 percent of the households listed in the 1850 Oregon census had kinship ties with at least one other household,12 and after the first settlement of an area, people often migrated to reunite families, an entirely different emotional proposition from leaving kin. Since many diarists wrote for family and friends left behind, they may not accurately represent the feelings of all women emigrants. Another factor that affected a woman's enthusiasm was her point in the life cycle. Lillian Schüssel found that Overland Trail diaries reflected that newlyweds and single women liked the journey more than did women of childbearing age. Sheryll Patterson-Black found considerable enthusiasm for establishing homesteads among women who moved to western Nebraska or eastern Colorado from areas slightly further east, from single women and widows, and from independent women homesteaders.13 We need to sort out the relative importance of the length of the journey, closeness of women and kin, life cycle, previous farming experience, and family status in women's feelings about the move west. Beyond these distinctions, we need to remember that experience sometimes overcame initial reluctance, and diaries written during the journey did not represent women's

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reactions after they were settled. The image of the reluctant pioneer illustrates the need to be careful about assuming that our images represent women's real experiences. DAILY

REALITY

The daily realities of western women's lives were shaped by work and by family concerns related to childbearing and childrearing. These two areas were not unrelated. A woman's work multiplied as her family did, and women did not therefore make as sharp a separation between work and sexuality as the public culture implied. Although some historians have questioned whether the frontier was a liberating environment for women because traditional divisions of labor were not abandoned, the existence of work roles rather than their persistence should encourage us to rethink the significance of the Cult of True Womanhood in the West. While some of its ideals were expressed by some western women, the roles it prescribed could be attained only by leisure-class urban women. Definitions of Victorian womanhood arose from the changing realities of an elite who did not perform productive labor and who were valued for their very economic uselessness. That ideal was far from the reality for homesteaders or for working-class women in mining towns or urban areas. Women as civilizers were presumed to be dependent on male labor and submissive, therefore, to male authority. Yet the homestead family was an interdependent economic unit. Work was divided, as in most cultures, along gender lines. Men plowed, planted, and cared for the sheep, horses, and pigs. Women raised and processed vegetables, kept the dairy and the poultry, made clothing, cared for the sick, and did housework. In mining towns, where the male-dominated work structure created the greatest possibility for achieving idealized work roles, women's wage work consisted mostly of domestic labor—cooking, sewing, keeping boarders, waitressing, doing laundry, and prostitution. Married women frequently tended vegetable gardens and small livestock, made clothing, did housework, and provided income by keeping boarders, cooking, or doing laundry at home. The existence of separate work roles does not tell us how women perceived or valued their labor. Moreover, the spheres, if separate, were permeable. Men could and did cook, do housework, care for the sick and dying, even deliver babies. Women could and did plow, plant, and harvest. 14 And all western women knew periods when they had full responsibility for managing family economic fortunes. Male homesteaders left to earn money. Mormon men went on missions, and Mormon women assumed primary economic responsibility. The wage work available to black men, especially on the railroads, took them away from their families." In mining towns, shutdowns, strikes, and accidents, if they didn't leave a woman a widow, left her responsible for family welfare for a time. And a man's death left a woman responsible for wage work or fieldwork as well as "women's work." 16 In any of these circumstances, family survival depended on flexibility and interdependence in work roles. One consequence

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may have been that men and women understood the labor involved in each other's work and respected one another for it. As one man who briefly agreed to cook on the Overland Trail wrote, "I have given up the office of chief cook and take my turn with the rest and my portion of other duties. I had rather do it as it is more slavish work than I had anticipated and by far the hardest post to occupy." 17 The public image of women's work, however, was often idealized. The public literature said, for instance, that "the interior of the home of the average industrious miner of the Cripple Creek district . . . would be a revelation. . . . Their homes are neatly furnished, carpets on the floor, kitchens furnished with all the conveniences a good housewife is so proud to own." One Cripple Creek woman wrote that a workingman should be able to come home to a "rosy wife" who could "sing at the wash tub" and find "nothing under the sun that makes her as merry as housecleaning." 18 The reality was harder and more mundane. For all the talk of "modern conveniences," no woman I interviewed had a washing machine before 1915, and few had running water. Cooking on coal or wood stoves; hauling water for cooking, cleaning, and washing; sometimes hauling and heating water for baths for men on different shifts; doing the family baking; raising and processing vegetables at high altitudes, were more than full-time occupations. One woman I interviewed baked fifteen loaves of bread twice a week. Leslie Wilkinson remembered clearly how hard his mother worked. Bake day, mending day. A certain day for a certain thing. That's what I remember, those special days that my ma had. Ironing, cooking, and washing, every day. Then her day, Friday, was mending day. She always sat down and mended everything that had to be mended. . . . Oh, it went on to maybe 11 o'clock at night, my mother'd be ironing, the door wide open.

Kathleen Chapman described how much housework had changed from the days when she scrubbed clothes on a washboard, and hauled fuel in and ashes out. She said her mother "never was idle. I never knew Mama to be idle."19 Since children added to women's workloads, it should not surprise us that private sources reveal women sharing information about the various stages of their life cycles, including how to avoid pregnancy. Perhaps nowhere is the difference between public assumptions about women's nature and private reality more pronounced than in the expectation that "true women" were "pure," that is, asexual. The strains of childbearing and the work involved in caring for small children formed an important difference between male and female experience. As one woman told me, " . . . one thing that was nice, after you went through menopause, you didn't have to worry. You don't have to figure on a calendar and figure up so many days, you know." And John Ise wrote that his home was "pleasanter" after his mother stopped having children, that she became "gentler and mellower" after she was released "from the strain of bearing and caring for the babies." 20 A rich and largely private world of women sharing information about

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contraception, pregnancy, birth, and menopause is beginning to be documented from a number of places. In contrast to the more careful prose of public life, women wrote privately about excreting and "farting"; they discussed, often with humor, concerns about sexuality, contraception, and pregnancy.21 Although a number of birth-control techniques were described in print before 1873, the passage of the Comstock Laws made it illegal to mail contraceptive information and pushed this aspect of women's culture even further underground. Yet the women of the nineteenth-century West were less prudish than prescriptive literature would lead us to expect. The first woman I interviewed about birth control was by far the most uneasy. She told me that she didn't know how her mother "kept from having more than she did," because when her mother's friends visited, the children were locked out of the parlor while the "woman talk was going on." 2 2 Although she was barred from the "woman talk," it was harder to maintain such innocence in a one-room house, and many children must have been aware of sexuality. 23 Whether or not a woman's mother explained the facts of life to her, some older woman usually offered advice. One woman said her mother-in-law told her how to douche. 24 Another told me: Well, usually when a girl was going to be married, these old ladies would tell them. I imagine if my mother had been alive, she would. But my second stepmother, she used to talk to us girls a lot. And then they was a lady that lived next door. When she heard I was going to be married, she asked me over to tea one day. She asked me if I knew anything, and then she told me a lot of things.23 The variety of suggested contraceptives demonstrates women's determination to find something that worked. Well, they had different things that they would use. Now, I know, when I was married, the older women, they used Vaseline a lot. They said a greased egg wouldn't hatch. And then a lot of them used salt. They would use this, you know, that they put in ice cream, this rock salt. . . . I never did use the rock salt. Because we were told that it wasn't a good thing to use—it affected the mind. . . . And then, of course, we were more or less a little bit careful. I suppose the Catholics called it the rhythm, you know, and we were taught on that. Well, of course, we were always told as long as you nursed a baby, you wouldn't conceive. You see, you wouldn't menstruate. So I didn't, I nursed Bob until he was 18 months old. . . . [T]he older women, they would get out of bed right away, and in that way they claimed that they could help themselves. Of course, we had chambers at that time, and they would just go there, and of course they thought that they had lost everything. They was a lady that come through one time, and she asked us if we used birth control, and she had a recipe, or a receipt, whichever you'd call it. She took cocoa butter, and you took a shoe box, with the top on it, and then you put holes in it. Then you put this melted cocoa butter in it. Then there was something else she used to put in it—what was it? . . . Boric acid. So much boric acid with so much cocoa butter. And you made these—they'd be a little cone, like, and you'd use those. We made them together, this [friend] and I; we met the lady and we used to make them together. Yes, it worked. And in later years, in the magazine, you saw

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where there was a rubber kind of a thing, that you would insert in your vagina. Like a diaphragm.26

The same list of possibilities crops up in sources from different places. The cocoa butter recipe, for instance, is spelled out in greater detail in an unsigned letter addressed to "Dear Momma," included in Violet McNaughton's papers in Canada, and the recipe was accompanied by a batch of the suppositories, in this case cut into squares like fudge. In Canada, women's sections of agricultural newspapers carried requests for contraceptive information. In both countries, references to attempts to miscarry can be found, even in published sources.27 These glimpses of a widespread folk tradition shared by Victorian women suggest a history of private concerns that knit women's lives together. We might document this more fully through private literature and oral histories. While women shared information about contraception, childbirth, and menopause, sex was a slightly different matter. One woman told me that "Our sex life was secret," and denied that women talked about sex, even though she could tell me the birth-control strategies of each of her friends. My small number of interviews about sex revealed different feelings about sexuality and who controlled it. Most women said they were ignorant of sex before marriage, but one woman suggested that men were ignorant, too. She said that she was married two weeks before her husband touched her, which surprised her because "I had been told, you know, how some men, how—they were." She said that she was happy with being kissed and held "because I didn't know any different. But after I realized what sex was, why, it was different." She said, "I suppose somebody maybe at the store told him what he was to do—what that thing was for!" This woman said that she enjoyed sex and experienced orgasm. "As I've told so many, you've got to find a man knows how to handle a woman in sex, for you to enjoy it." But, she said, "I could take it or leave it and be happy either way. . . . I never married a man for sex, or I don't think I ever married a man for love, either. More for security." She felt that it was not proper for her to initiate sex, and that she could not refuse. "I felt that that was my duty, to be available. They were making a living for you. . . then you should please them." She reflected the Victorian notion of wifely duty, but her experience of sexuality was more complex. While this woman felt sexually subservient because she was financially dependent, a contemporary expressed the opposite view. She said, "Sex wasn't your main life, as it is today," because women worked harder in the past and "most men respected a woman if she was tired"; consequently, women initiated sex. She added, "I had a good man. Now some of them weren't that good. They were demanding. Didn't make any difference how a woman felt." 2 8 It is clear from her generalizations about "most men" and "some men who were demanding" that women discussed at least that aspect of sexuality. At the same time, it is important to hear the tension in these statements between women's beliefs about what ladies should talk about and the reality of what women did discuss. Further, most of the evidence we have for

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women's private concerns about sexuality is from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; we don't yet know whether we are documenting the transformation of women's attitudes, or conversations that existed earlier but can no longer be recorded. If women discussed sexuality in private, their talk did not change public portrayals of female purity. Although western women were most concerned with daily reality, they also wanted to appear respectable. They publicly denied some private concerns, and they desired the nicer things that ladies could have. Some adolescents, like Laura Ingalls and Anne Ellis, resented the discomfort of ladies' clothing and resisted wearing corsets. Others desired respectability more than comfort. Beulah Pryor was taken out of school to help her mother do laundry and run a boardinghouse to support the family, after her mother threw her husband out of the house for beating her. Beulah saved every cent for years to buy a much-coveted corset and a pair of high-heeled shoes; she did hard work in this uncomfortable clothing because it represented so much to her. The corset may have contributed to an early hysterectomy after carrying heavy buckets of coal ruptured her ovaries.29 Trying to do heavy labor in the trappings of a "lady" is a highly material sign of the contradiction between upper-class ideology and working-class reality. Similarly, the distance between women's private letters and conversations and the public image suggests that daily life was "corseted" into genteel language for public respectability. PUBLIC

LIFE

It is not surprising that much of women's private talk remained private. It is more difficult to grapple with the fact that much of their public work remained similarly invisible to historians. Women's family concerns were extended to establishing communities and building schools, churches, and social groups. But women received less credit than men for their community service, and the public recognition system has enforced the distinction between public spheres for men and private spheres for women. Julie Roy Jeffrey wrote, for example, that in Roseburg, Oregon: as elsewhere, it was the men who usually established the political, social, and economic institutions which would help to integrate the community and who founded its official cultural groups like lyceums and debating societies. At least they took credit for these activities, [italics added] 30

But many women knew otherwise. One Canadian woman described how the Women's Institute started hospitals and libraries when no one else would, and then municipalities took the credit after they were established. "That happened again and again. The Institute started something and then it was taken over by the people who should have done it in the first place." Another said, "The women . . . did just as much to make this western country as any of the men did. They were just taken for granted. . . · Women sat in the background while the men got praised." 31

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Occasionally women were recognized, as in emergencies when they performed "male" roles. In mining towns, women received public notice for their toughness during strikes, much as women workers have been valued during wartime. During strikes, women and children could yell at the militia, throw stones at soldiers, distribute strike relief, and do other things for which men would have been jailed or shot. They received public praise for these actions, but the public accounts again differ in tone from the women's own voices. The Miners' Magazine wrote during the Cripple Creek strike, for instance: Mrs. James Prenty and Mrs. Blixer, both prominent in the women's auxiliary . . . were in custody, though not under arrest, for about an hour today. They were charged with having indulged in insolent criticism and denunciation of the military. They were allowed to sit on the stairs leading to the bullpen for a while and were then taken before Provost Marshal McClelland, who gave them a lecture on the necessity of using caution in their public speech.32 There is a sharp contrast between the "insolent criticism and denunciation" of public discourse, and women's more earthy accounts of the strikes, which connect family concerns with public action. One woman told me how her mother wrapped her firstborn in a blanket and went with her husband to mill around Bull Hill to convince the sheriff's deputies who were coming to end a strike that they were outnumbered. She dated the strike in family time: "In 1894 Tom was born, and that's when the Bull Hill strike was." Another told me how the women in her family protected their homes from the militia. I did have an uncle that lived in Goldfield. His name was Ed Doran. And Grandma was there. Aunt Mary was expecting. So Uncle Ed, of course, got out. Well, he got word that they were going to raid the house. Of course the militia had the way of doing, in the middle of the night they'd come after the men and take 'em to the bullpen and then they'd send 'em out. But Uncle Ed got word that they were going to come that night, so he left. Grandma never said just exactly where he went or where he hid. But she was there when they came, and they tore that house to pieces! They even looked in the breadbox. Well, that got Grandma's goat. And she said, "Shure'n he's not little enough to put in the breadbox! Now every Godblesset one of you get out of this house and leave this woman alone!" She said, "You can see what condition she's in. Now," she said, "git!" Then I had another aunt that lived there. Her name was Hannah Welch. . . . And she had two great big butcher knives, and she kept those knives razor sharp. And she always said if one of those militia men ever come in her house in the middle of the night, they'd leave with less than they brought in!" The women saw the connection of public action with family needs, and seem to have known how hard they worked and what they contributed. As Nellie McClung, the Canadian feminist, said during World War I: Women have been discovered more or less since the war began. You know we always knew ourselves that we were here; we always knew, that we had hands to work and brains to think and hearts to love; we always knew that we were a Na-

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tional asset but there were some people that had not just realized it yet, statesmen particularly.14

There are two related issues here. The first is whether men recognized women's contributions, and what the differential rewards were for men's and women's community service. The answers will illuminate the question of whether some public options, like the vote and access to higher education, were extended to women at least partially because their work was valued. The second issue is how women themselves valued their daily work and community activities, and the extent to which they organized in their own behalf. Jeffrey argued that women did not act for themselves and that the recognition they received was based in conservative beliefs about sex roles: A careful study of the two territories granting suffrage to women in 1869 and 1870 reveals, first of all, that the vote was offered to women, not because women thought to ask for it, but because it suited a minority of men to give it, and second, that the arguments made in favor of granting women the suffrage were conservative. Women were to vote not because they were the same or equal to men, but because they were different from men.The domestic conception of women provided the basis for the suffrage defense."

The passivity of western women about suffrage has recently been challenged in two ways. Some new studies, like Carolyn Stefanco's, which appears in this book, document suffrage coalitions in the various western states. Other historians argue that women may have influenced politics in private, and criticize histories that focus on legislative debates and public arenas from which women were excluded before they could vote. Virginia Scharff, for instance, suggested that women's rights advocate Julia Bright probably influenced her husband, William, who introduced the suffrage bill in Wyoming.36 At the first Wyoming legislative session, the lawmakers passed bills for suffrage, married women's property rights, and equal pay for male and female teachers. If as Jeffrey suggested there was no women's movement in Wyoming in 1869, it was perhaps because there were not enough women for a movement, but feminists like Julia Bright and Esther Morris influenced the legislation. Wyoming is an exception in western suffrage, however, which generally was achieved after the frontier period, when women were more numerous and more organized. After the frontier period, workloads lightened, neighbors were nearer, and contacts among women which led to organized reform increased." In Utah part of the support for suffrage came from the desire to insure a solid Mormon voting majority when non-Mormon settlement increased after the transcontinental railroad was completed. Additional factors included the existence of strong women's groups, the belief that granting suffrage would help hold onto a faction in the Church that favored it, and the desire to refute critics who believed polygamy enslaved women. For forty years after they were enfranchised, Mormon women published women's newspapers, organized suffrage groups, and campaigned for suffrage in other western states with Mormon settlement.38

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There is considerable evidence in both the United States and Canada that women organized in their own behalf, and that their participation in rural reform movements, organized labor, and partisan politics contributed to suffrage victories. After the Civil War, large numbers of women were active in farm protest movements for the first time. They participated in the Grange, the Farmers' Alliance, the Populist Party, and later in the Socialist Party and the Farm Union. In both countries, women joined the pro-suffrage Women's Christian Temperance Union, not only in defense of morality, but also in defense of homes they had helped build and which they feared were threatened by male expenditures for alcohol. The genteel temperance movement took women out of their prescribed sphere and into the public arena. Smashing up saloons was hardly genteel behavior, however civilizing it may have been.39 The Grange and the Farmers' Alliance were unusual among maledominated organizations in admitting female members, officers, and convention delegates. The Grange lodges provided services for women, like sewing-machine cooperatives; adopted women's issues, like opposing margarine as a substitute for their cash product, butter; and endorsed political rights for women. The Populist Party supported women as organizers, theorists, delegates, and candidates for public office. The Farmers' Alliance argued that women should be active because they had a direct economic interest in reform. That those direct economic interests were tied to regional and family economies does not make the argument conservative, but concrete. Some western women became interested in politics when they realized that the farms and homes they had helped build were endangered by public policy or could be sold by their husbands without their consent.40 The suffrage coalition included all of these groups, and could combine their moral and egalitarian arguments. The conservative arguments for suffrage were also used in the East but didn't work there, and both women and men tended to emphasize Victorian ideals in the public arena. Western women organized suffrage campaigns, circulated petitions, and lobbied for the vote. Male support seems to have come less from the genteel upper classes than from farmers and miners who endorsed political philosophies that supported equality. In the 1890s, Populists achieved suffrage in Colorado and Idaho, and in California and Kansas the countryside voted for suffrage, but urban voters defeated it.41 In Colorado, the first state to enfranchise women by a vote of the male electorate, the strongest support before it was adopted correlated with the Greenback vote from 1878 to 1884, and with the Union-Labor vote in 1888. When it passed in 1893, the major support came from Populist metal miners.42 While middle-class women were most visible as suffrage leaders, the influence of farm women and miners' wives on the vote needs to be considered. The process was similar in Canada. In 1916 Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan became the first three provinces to enfranchise women. Again, the suffrage movement was related to female participation in agrarian reform. The Women's Institute was a forum and a meeting place,

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and by 1914 farm women with overtly political aims organized through the United Farm Women of Alberta and the Women Grain Growers' Association. The western women's movement began in Manitoba, where Icelandic women organized a suffrage league in the 1890s and the WCTU championed the cause before 1893. The Winnipeg (later the Manitoba) Political Equality League was founded in 1912 with support from the WCTU and the Manitoba Grain Growers. Manitoba women gathered 40,000 signatures on a suffrage petition before winning the vote on January 28, 1916. The Saskatchewan WCTU and Grain Growers Association petitioned for suffrage in 1912, and the Provincial Equal Franchise Board collected 10,000 signatures before women were enfranchised March 14, 1916. Alberta followed suit on April 6, after six years of lobbying by the WCTU, the UFWA, the Equal Franchise League, Women's Canadian Clubs, and Women's Institutes. The leadership of the WCTU and support from farm and labor movements characterized suffrage organizing in all three provinces.43 Women in the western United States and Canada were not the passive recipients of male generosity regarding votes for women. Western women voted as western men did after they were enfranchised. Perhaps their politics were shaped by family economic options rather than by abstract ideals about special female roles and values. We need a more complicated history to explain the connections between western women's daily lives and their public activism. Western women's history allows us to explore the reshaping of gender ideologies by people for whom leisureclass roles were not possible. Such a history cannot begin with the assumption that traditional cultural beliefs determined behavior. If they did, the belief systems would never change. The interaction between ideology and behavior makes history dynamic and reveals people's roles as historical actors who help shape social life. The interplay of gender, family roles, and economics which shaped western women's options is more complicated than the images we have imposed on them. The Women's West Conference was an important step in the process of questioning older interpretations. Our evidence is still too scattered to suggest a new synthesis of western women's history, but new hypotheses are emerging. It is fairly easy to criticize the traditional images of western women for their racial and class bias, and for the incredible passivity of the "gentle tamers." The emphasis on the helpmate's hard work was an important corrective to the utterly passive civilizer, but the helpmate led too easily to the one-dimensional drudge who was the passive victim of male oppression. Neither the civilizer nor the helpmate was an actor who helped to shape her own history, and thus neither image explains how beliefs and work roles changed. Despite notions of genteel womanhood that promised respectability, despite a patriarchal family system, and despite the fact that men got more public recognition than women for their work, women created a female community which supported them and they helped to shape communities and politics in the West.

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How can we best explain western women's history? First, we need to stop assuming that all westerners believed in the Cult of True Womanhood. Instead, we need to define the beliefs about sex roles that westerners of different classes, races, and ethnic backgrounds expressed. Even when they publicly espoused some Victorian values, we need to examine the context and remember that they may have done so to lend respectability to beliefs and movements that challenged genteel assumptions. Thus, conservative arguments could lead to suffrage victories. As we document more concretely the variety of gender ideologies held in the West, we can explore whether contacts among people with different heritages, experiences, and beliefs created new understandings of sex roles. If our research shows that some westerners internalized genteel sex roles, then we will need to look at how the Cult of True Womanhood was changed in the West. The possibilities include that change occurred because the belief system clashed with daily necessity, that internal inconsistencies within the belief system itself were heightened, and that change occurred over time through different generations' responses to the West and to larger social and economic changes. Let me comment briefly on each of these hypotheses. First, the Cult of True Womanhood contained a widely recognized internal contradiction: women had to leave the domestic sphere for public action to achieve the moral authority they were told they should exercise. As women became more active in public arenas, their initial preoccupations with morality and culture could lead to sharper analyses of social issues, including the restriction of women to the private sphere. For example, Frances Willard, president of the WCTU, turned to socialism in the last years of her work, saying that she had thought people were poor because they drank, but that she had come to understand that they drank because they were poor. Sarah Piatt Decker of Colorado, as president of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, helped shift her organization from a primary focus on culture to working for suffrage. Just as involvement in "civilizing" activities could lead to political consciousness, daily experience may also have modified women's beliefs. Our genteel western foremothers learned to take off their gloves and cook with buffalo chips, however distasteful they found it. We need to explore further how such necessary acts modified genteel expectations, and then we need to look at frontier women's daughters, who appear to have been more receptive to new roles than their mothers were to the western journey. These approaches need to be set in the context of larger economic and social changes that affected western women and their families. The West of traditional western history was the last frontier, both because EuroAmericans reached the western shores of the continent and, more importantly, because the development of national transportation, markets, and manufacturing transformed the West as Euro-Americans settled there. By the late nineteenth century, western agriculture was affected by new technology and by access to national markets, and mining had changed from the first excitement of the boom days to dangerous labor for a daily wage.

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Families in farming and mining areas confronted growing urban and corporate control of their lives. On the farm, some of women's cash products were threatened, as butter was by margarine. Families were hard-pressed to buy machinery to grow cash crops for distant markets, and frequently felt threatened by banks, railroads, and grain elevators. Family security in mining towns was endangered by accidents, shutdowns, and strikes, and mine owners and the militia became tangible enemies to working-class families. The perception of common enemies may have emphasized the interdependence of family members and what women and men shared more than what separated them. Such common understandings may help explain women's entry into public life through reform and protest groups and partisan politics. Thus, outside forces may have helped transform genteel beliefs about appropriate behavior in the West. Until we explore what beliefs and values men and women shared, we cannot assume that they inhabited totally different spheres. John Faragher found, for instance, that mid western farm men and women were both concerned about practical economic considerations,44 which may have been a major factor in couples' shared decisions to move west. The popular notion that women would civilize the West was really propaganda to encourage family settlement. Rather than assuming that western men were mythic rugged individuals whom genteel women were to civilize, we need to explore whether both sexes shared desires for stable households and communities. This will require that we look at men's private beliefs and concerns as well as women's, and one contribution of this new history may be that we will begin to look at the connections between public and private life for both men and women. Rather than classifying women as civilizers or workers, and dividing the world into public and private spheres, exploring the connections of family and public concerns will show how women contributed in both arenas. One scenario is that women overcame loneliness by forming friendships and sharing work and private concerns. Then they joined together to build schools and churches, and entered public life to accomplish goals connected to family needs, which the public culture considered appropriate for women. In Colorado, for instance, women received the vote in school elections in 1876, and then the full franchise seventeen years later. At the same time, economic change stimulated the growth of populist and labor movements, which appealed to women's interests and which supported political alliances that contributed to suffrage victories. Western women expected and found lives shaped largely by family responsibilities and hard work. Their understanding of family needs helped them transcend the dichotomized world the Cult of True Womanhood prescribed. They did not see themselves as passive civilizers or as uniquely oppressed, as wholly private or public. They understood that they performed valuable work for their families and their communities, and that these efforts were intertwined. One example is May Wing, who entrusted me with what she wanted said at her funeral. She did not talk about her hard work or her civilizing mission, but she wanted people to remember

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that she had run the Victor Museum for twenty years (from age seventy to ninety), that she had helped start the hot school lunch program in Victor, that she had organized a boys' chorus, and that she had helped found and had taught in a multidenominational Sunday School in Goldfield. She worked hard all her life, and the connection of family with schools and churches helped stimulate and support her community involvement, but imposing the image of either civilizer or helpmate on her would falsify the way she described her life and options. May Wing valued her work and wanted recognition for it. "And these things I'm kind of proud of," she said. "You can give it to the preacher and he could preach the story of my life." 45 We need to approach western women's history, not through the filters of prescriptive literature or concepts of frontier liberation and oppression, but through the experiences of the people who lived the history. The documents are hard to find, and until recently historians have not looked for them. But we need to remember that western women "always knew ourselves that we were here." As we approach women's lives anew, we need to let new questions come from their experience. The daily details of work, family survival, and relationships dominate their words. Given the predominance of daily and personal experience, we might even ask whether the question of public recognition is the most important starting place. We may be accepting a male belief in the superior merit of public recognition in conferring status, which needs to be balanced by the daily recognition and support from family and women friends. Our foremothers may have known that the details of daily survival and human touch dominate our lives, not brief moments of public recognition or a few minutes in a voting booth. If that is true, their emphasis on daily detail may be an important contribution to feminist history. It may say that a history of daily life, in which women were important actors, is more important than a history of battles, dates, and kings. I am not certain where our historiographic journey will take us next, but our starting point must be western women's lives as they experienced them. The challenge was issued by May Wing and by Nellie McClung, who wrote, "I grew indignant as I read the history and saw how little the people ever counted. . . . When I wrote I would write of the people who do the work of the world, and I would write it from their side of the fence." 44 Before we can usefully interpret western women's histories, we need to accept their challenge. We need to listen to the many voices of the women who lived the history that they can tell us, and then we need to write it from their side of the fence. Notes I am indebted to many people, especially to the authors cited in this article, including those whose conclusions I have questioned. Changing interpretations are healthy in a developing field, and everyone's work has been important in enabling us to raise new questions. Elizabeth Hampsten, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, Diane Sands, and Elliott West provided

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useful comments for rewriting this article. I am particularly grateful to Susan Armitage for playing devil's advocate in ongoing conversations that have stimulated my questions and helped me rethink the topic. 1. Interview with May Wing, Colorado Springs, Colo., 16 Feb. 1979. 2. Barbara Welter delineated the prescriptions of the Cult of True Womanhood in her important article "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860," in American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (Summer, 1966): 151-74. An example of recent work that was influenced by older western history is Sandra Myres, Westering Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800-1915 (Albuquerque: University of new Mexico Press, 1982), which emphasizes the themes of individualism and of the frontier as an arena for adaptation and liberation for women. 3. Beverly Stoeltje delineated the stereotypes in "A Helpmate for Man Indeed: The Image of the Frontier Woman," Journal of American Folklore 88, no. 347 (January-March, 1975): 27-41. For a discussion of challenges to the stereotypes see Joan M. Jensen and Darlis A. Miller, "The Gentle Tamers Revisited: New Approaches to the History of Women in the American West," Pacific Historical Review 49 (1980): 180-85. 4. See for instance Mary Murphy, "The Private Lives of Public Women," in this volume and "Women on the Line: Prostitution in Butte, Montana, 1878-1917" (Master's thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1983); Paula Petrik, "Capitalists with Rooms: Prostitution in Helena, Montana, 1865-1900," Montana The Magazine of Western History 31 (April, 1981): 28-41; Marion S. Goldman, Gold Diggers and Silver Miners: Prostitution and Social Life on the Comstock Lode (Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press, 1981). 5. Dee Brown, The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1958). 6. Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1880 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), argues that women were civilizers who were strongly identified with the Cult of True Womanhood. Lillian Schüssel, Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York: Schocken Books, 1982) emphasizes the image of woman as reluctant pioneer. Examples of the oppressed drudge or helpmate are most often found in local histories but are suggested by Schüssel and by Joanna Stratton, Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981). 7. Elizabeth Jameson, "Imperfect Unions: Class and Gender in Cripple Creek, 18941904," Frontiers 1, no. 2 (Spring, 1976): 89-117; also in Milton Cantor and Bruce Laurie, eds.. Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1977), pp. 166-202. 8. The diary of Mollie Sanford, for instance, published as Mollie: The Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford in Nebraska and Colorado Territories, 1857-1866 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959), was taken from a holographic copy which Mollie Sanford produced before bequeathing it to her grandson. 9. Elizabeth Hampsten, Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writing of Midwestern Women. 1880-1910 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 50-51, and To AU Inquiring Friends: Letters, Diaries, and Essays in North Dakota, 1880-1910 (Grand Forks: Department of English, University of North Dakota, 1979), p. 1. 10. Schüssel, Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey, p. 10; John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 171; Jeffrey, Frontier Women, pp. 63-64. 11. Quoted in Lillian Schüssel, "Mothers and Daughters on the Western Frontier," Frontiers 3, no. 2 (Summer, 1978): 30. 12. Faragher, Women and Men, p. 33; Jeffrey, Frontier Women, p. 76. 13. Schüssel, "Mothers and Daughters on the Western Frontier," pp. 29-33; Sheryll Patterson-Black, "Women Homesteaders on the Great Plains Frontier," Frontiers 1, no. 2 (Spring, 1976): 67-88. 14. SeeWilliamD. Haywood, Bill Haywood's Book: The Autobiography of Big Bill Haywood (1929; reprint, New York: International Publishers, 1974), pp. 38-39, 45, for examples of a man delivering a child and doing housework; and John Ise, Sod and Stubble

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(1936; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), pp. 29, 8 3 - 8 4 , 109, for examples of women doing field work and of men nursing the sick. Other examples abound in the primary literature. 15. Ruth Flowers interview by Theresa Β an field, quoted in Sue Armitage, Theresa Banfield, and Sarah Jacobus, "Black Women and Their Communities in Colorado," Frontiers 2, no. 2 (Summer, 1977): 46. 16. See, for example, the account of Maria Duran Apodaca, quoted in Joan Jensen, With These Hands: Women Working on the Land (Old Westbury, Ν. Y.: Feminist Press; New York, St. Louis, and San Francisco: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1981), p. 121. 17. Quoted in Faragher, Women and Men, p. 82. 18. "Business Prosperity Depends on Labor," Cripple Creek Daily Press. 23 Apr. 1901, p. 4; Augusta Prescott, "The Kind of a Woman a Workingman Should MarTy," Cripple Creek Daily Press. 15 Feb. 1903, p. 12. 19. Interview with May Wing, Victor, Colo., 21 Oct. 1978; interview with Leslie Wilkinson, Cripple Creek, Colo., 7 Sept. 1975; interview with Kathleen Chapman, Wheat Ridge, Colo., 27 Apr. 1979. 20. May Wing interview; 21 Oct. 1978; Ise, Sod and Stubble, p. 274. 21. For examples see Hampsten, To All Inquiring Friends, pp. 34, 44, 15-16, 18-19, 30, 39; and Linda Rasmussen, Lorna Rasmussen, Candace Savage, and Anne Wheeler, A Harvest Yet to Reap: A History of Prairie Women (Toronto: Women's Press, 1976), p. 72. 22. Interview with Clara Stiverson, Golden, Colo., 29 July 1975. 23. I began thinking about children's awareness of sexuality on the frontier in 1972, when I was in Nulato, an Alaskan Athabaskan village. One day a small boy asked me where moose came from. Like most children in Nulato, he lived in a one- to three-room house. As I struggled with my limited knowledge of the mating habits of moose, his face suddenly lit up with recognition. " O h , " he said. "They got boy moose and girl moose!" 24. Interview with Beulah Pryor, Colorado Springs, Colo., 6 May 1979. 25. Interview with May Wing, Boulder, Colo., 6 Mar. 1976. 26. Ibid. 27. See Rasmussen, Rasmussen, Savage, and Wheeler, A Harvest Yet to Reap, pp. 27, 74; Anne Ellis, The Life of An Ordinary Woman (1929; reprint, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), pp 193-94; Faragher, Women and Men, pp. 123, 235; Jeffrey, Frontier Women, p. 58. 28. Although I have been granted permission, through signed release forms, to share this information, I have elected not to identify the narrators in this section. All were women born in the 1890s. 29. Beulah Pryor interview. 30. Jeffrey, Frontier Women, p. 85. 31. Quoted in Rasmussen, Rasmussen, Savage, and Wheeler, A Harvest Yet to Reap, p. 142; Inez Henderson, Hythe, Alberta, interview 1974, quoted in ibid., p. 44. 32. "The Situation in Colorado," Miners' Magazine, 16 June 1904, p. 9. 33. Kathleen Chapman interview; May Wing interview, 21 Oct. 1978. 34. Nellie McClung, ca. 1917, quoted in Rasmussen, Rasmussen, Savage, and Wheeler, A Harvest Yet to Reap, p. 116. 35. Jeffrey, Frontier Women, p. 190. 36. Carolyn Stefanco, "Networking on the Frontier: The Colorado Women's Suffrage Movement, 1876-1893," in this book; and Virginia Scharff, "The Case for Domestic Feminism: Woman Suffrage in Wyoming" (paper presented to Western History Association, Phoenix, Ariz., 1982). 37. See Carol Hymowitz and Michaele Weissman, A History of Women in America (New York: Bantam, 1978), p. 184. 38. Beverly Beeton, "Woman Suffrage in Territorial Utah," Utah Historical Quarterly 46 (1978): 100-20. 39. Jensen, With These Hands, p. 144. 40. Ibid., pp. 4 5 - 4 6 , 145.

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41. Ibid., p. 147. 42. James Edward Wright, The Politics of Populism: Disseru in Colorado (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 116, 190, 203. 43. Candace Savage in Rasmussen, Rasmussen, Savage, and Wheeler, A Harvest Yet to Reap. pp. 122, 174-75. 44. Faragher, Women and Men, p. 15. In an analysis of the diaries of twenty-two men and twenty-eight women, Faragher found that two-thirds of their concerns overlapped in the areas of "a natural aesthetic, hard work, good health, and practical economic considerations." The remaining one-third of the content was distinguished by women's concern with family and relational values, while men emphasized aggressive values. 45. May Wing interview, 21 Oct. 1978. 46. Nellie McClung, Clearing in the West, epigraph in Rasmussen, Rasmussen, Savage, and Wheeler, A Harvest Yet to Reap.

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Cloth, Butter and Boarders: Women's Household Production for the Market J o a n M. Jensen

A B S T R A C T : This article presents an historical framework Tor analyzing American women's household production for the market from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. It argues that women's household production — particularly the making o f cloth and butter and the taking in o f boarders — was a crucial economic factor in both urban and rural families, maintaining within them a simple commodity mode o f production. With the disappearance o f this type o f household production women moved from a household income to a wage income and into the capitalist mode o f production.

In the study of women's work, as in most areas of study, historical interpretations and economic theories usually coincide to produce paradigms or models. For women's work in the United States, the developmental model has tended to be the following. As the economy industrialized, households moved from subsistence to simple commodity production by the entire family. Then the men became wage workers while most of the women remained in the home producing goods and services for use. As the economy reached an advanced industrial stage, a majority of unmarried women, and then a large minority of married women, joined the male wage-labor force outside the home. By the 1970s, almost half of all women in the United States were in the paid labor force. Predictions on the future vary.

DOMES™ IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK Some theoriests argue that almost all women will become wage workers; others that at least part of the married women will remain working in the home, a reserve labor force capable of being turned out to work in time of need and returned to the home when their labor is no longer necessary for the economy. 1 Such a summary grossly oversimplifies the complexity of the important writings on women's work produced in the last decade but it does, I think, accurately reflect the general conclusions. Housework and wage work have absorbed the attentions of most historians and economists. When a woman cares for children, cleans the house, or cooks a meal — past or present — we can categorize it. W h e n she leaves the house for an underpaid job, we can also categorize it. But what if the woman performs work at home for the market as well as for use? Such work is not common today; it was in the past. In the early nineteenth century, women in New England wove cloth and sold it to local country stores. Early in the twentieth century, women in western Montana made butter, sold it for cash, and used the money to buy windmills for their family farms. In New York, women of the same era took in boarders to add to the household income. These types of work were simple. W h a t this work meant in the larger context of the economy, however, is so complex that it has yet to be described by historians. T h e purpose of this article is to describe the work usually omitted from descriptions of wage work and housework — that is, work done in the household in addition to producing goods and services for use. It suggests a change in the concept of simple commodity production so that this part of American women's work in the past can be explored more fully and theories can begin to account for, and analyze, the effect of this past work on future politics. T h e following analysis focuses on only a few types of household production for the market, looking primarily at clothmaking and buttermaking in rural areas, and taking in boarders in urban areas. Other types of labor performed by rural women, particularly the work of Black women performed under slavery and sharecropping, farm women's field laboi on family farms, the production of goods like canning 0 f vegetables, and services for hired workers will not be

H I S T O R Y O F W O M E N IN T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S d i s c u s s e d here. T h e s e jobs brought in no specific a m o u n t s of cash or credit but became part of the overall farm production. Cloth, butter, and boarders, however, b r o u g h t important amounts of cash and credit into the h o u s e h o l d economy. 2 T h i s article is not meant to be a detailed description of these types of production; rather it seeks to explore the historical significance of this work and to present a framework within which it can be more carefully analyzed by future researchers of w o m e n ' s labor history. A word about definitions is necessary before beginning this analysis of different types of household production. Household production for the market is here defined to include both commodities and services that were produced by women beyond those used by the immediate members of the family. T h e term home industries will be used to refer to production of c o m modities for the market. Home services will be used to refer to services produced for the market. A semimonetary farm household economy will be used to refer to a farm household that produced a small surplus of commodities for the local or regional market; town household economy will be used to refer to a n o n f a r m household that produced a small surplus of services for the local market. Using these terms, it is hoped, will eliminate some of the confusion surrounding descriptions of this type of work. Sources used for this article are primarily literary. The examples were culled over several years from a wide range of materials on women's agricultural and economic history. Statistics are available for a few of these types of work. Quantitative studies, for example, exist on some aspects of boarding, butter making, and sewing. For the most part, however, there has been little systematic study of these aspects of American economic history and a few comments here might help readers understand why this is so. Farm women expected to undertake work that would bring in money to the household economy. T h e type of work varied with ethnic group and locale. In Texas, Anglo women picked corn and cotton but did not work in fields otherwise. They supervised poultry, dairy, small orchard, and market garden work. Black women, on the other hand, worked at all types of field

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK work, as well as sold eggs and poultry and often worked as midwives. In the Midwest, German and Scandinavian women hired out for field work and engaged in dairy and poultry work at home. 3 According to Hazel Kyrk, a University of Chicago economist, as late as 1930 all farm women contributed some money to the houeehold income. Yet census takers were often explicitly instructed not to record these women as "gainfully employed." Instructions to census takers provided for exclusion of part-time irregular employment, a definition that exactly fit the household production of farm women. The 1890 census instructed, "For a woman who works only occasionally or for a short time each day at outdoor farm or garden work, or in the dairy, or in caring for livestock or poultry, the return should be none." These census instructions tell us something about the status of women's household production but leaves a gap yet to be filled in by studying agricultural census returns and state surveys, by detailed studies of regional economies, and for the twentieth century, by oral histories. 4 Like the income from household production by farm women, income from services performed for boarders is difficult to assess because the national census often excluded it from occupations. Sometimes, as in 1920, census takers were cautioned that taking in boarders and lodgers "should be returned as an occupation only if the person engaged in it relies upon it as his (or her) principal means of support or principal source of i n c o m e . . . . If, however, a family keeps a few boarders or roomers merely as a means of supplementing or eking out the earnings of income obtained from other occupations or other sources no one in the family should be returned as a boarding or lodging house keeper." Many families in nineteenth century and early twentieth century industrial towns did just that: took in boarders to eke out a living. Again state and local census material can fill in these gaps. Boarders were usually listed on original census data of members living in households and other kinds of work can be traced by a more careful analysis of the sexual division of labor. But the census problem is symptomatic of an underlaying attitude that has persisted to the present. Only work that involved wage labor or ownership of

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES the m e a n s of p r o d u c t i o n o u t s i d e t h e h o m e was seen as i m p o r t a n t for economic c h a n g e . T h e sheer q u a n t i t y of this type of w o r k , however, and the c o n t i n u e d perf o r m a n c e of it by w o m e n t h r o u g h the nineteenth a n d into the early twentieth c e n t u r y indicates that it may h a v e been of great significance in the d e v e l o p m e n t of capitalism in the United States. 4 T h e history of h o u s e h o l d p r o d u c t i o n is still far f r o m complete. In part, it remains incomplete because of two historical misconceptions a b o u t f a r m a n d t o w n h o u s e h o l d economies that lead to c o n f u s i o n about h o m e industries and services. T h e s e misconceptions continually a p p e a r in literature a b o u t w o m e n ' s w o r k . T h e first misconception assumes a view of f a r m s as subsistence or as p r o d u c i n g nearly e v e r y t h i n g . A c c o r d i n g to this view, subsistence f a r m s remained isolated f r o m m a r k e t forces f r o m the early colonial period t h r o u g h m u c h of the nineteenth c e n t u r y . T h e second misconception assumes a static a m o u n t of household e q u i p m e n t . Colonial w o m e n are pictured as candle d i p ping, wool s p i n n i n g , loom weaving, b u t t e r c h u r n i n g h o u s e h o l d w o r k e r s . By implication, all of the h o u s e h o l d needs were taken care of by them. T h e two ass u m p t i o n s reinforce each other. T h e n , according to this view, n i n e t e e n t h c e n t u r y industrialization quickly d o m i n a t e d h o u s e h o l d economies: w o m e n moved into the factories or became " h o u s e w i v e s . " R e m n a n t s of the subsistence f a r m remained on the frontier but g r a d u a l l y disappeared in the course of the nineteenth c e n t u r y . T h e s e a s s u m p t i o n s p r o m o t e the view presented at the b e g i n n i n g of this article. W o m e n moved f r o m h o u s e w o r k into wage w o r k .

Material

Change

S u c h static c o n c e p t i o n s badly distort the reality of w o m e n ' s economic history. H o u s e h o l d s termed " c o l o n i a l " in the above view are actually late eighteenth cent u r y h o u s e h o l d s . T h e r e is a c c u m u l a t i n g evidence that early colonial h o u s e h o l d s could not a f f o r d the e q u i p m e n t to p r o d u c e their o w n h o m e products. Seventeenth c e n t u r y colonists h a d neither e q u i p m e n t to weave, nor to m a k e candles, nor even to grind flour.

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK Early colonists wore skin clothing, much as did the Native Americans, they used grease and rags to provide light, and at first, they ground their corn much as Native American women had done, by mortar and pestle. Gradually hand mills replaced mortar and pestle and grist mills replaced hand mills. Wool processing equipment was acquired. Pottery useful for food processing, especially dairying, was purchased. How the pattern varied from area to area has not yet been fully described but it seems likely that colonial household production was relatively limited before 1750. Wealthy colonists purchased material goods or hired artisans to produce them. Poor families simply went without. Gradually, during the course of the eighteenth century, what had been inaccessible to most became accessible. Farm households gradually purchased both home industry equipment and more finished products* T h e change from hand milling to water-powered milling is an example of how material change could affect the labor of women. European women were not accustomed to performing their own milling and European technology was easily transferred to America and quickly improved. T h e preference for wheat of many early European colonists also quickened the transition from hand ground corn to stone ground wheat. Grist mills were often neighborhood affairs with a single miller working imported grind stones. T h e stones for hand mills most likely also had to be imported or sought in areas that had the proper type of stone. By the early nineteenth century, all wheat in the East was milled by water driven flour mills, most at local mills but some at large commercial operations that exported it or sold it on a national market. In the West, however, hand mills were still in use. In the Southwest, Native American women also continued to hand grind wheat and corn, selling both flour and cornmeal to travelers and to missionaries before flour mills became common. By 1907, few Native American women continued to process their own corn or wheat. Local mills run by water or steam power and then large commercial mills had replaced this home industry. 7

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Cloth

Production W e k n o w more about the transition from home m a n u f a c t u r e d to factory manufactured cloth than we do about the transition in milling. Recent research on colonial Maryland indicates that the development of spinning and knitting was a response of upper income plantation households to stagnation in the tobacco economy about 1680. Within the next century, according to a study of one Maryland county, the percentage of households that had wool processing equipment rose from less than ten percent to eighty percent, as the processing of wool spread to the poorer classes. There is as yet no comparable study for the New England colonies where many textiles were imported, but by the early nineteenth century, textiles were a major home industry in a number of states and surpluses were often bartered or sold.· T h e ideology of self-sufficiency of the N e w England farms in 1800 was based to a great extent on the ability of women in the household to provide a surplus for the local market. The factory manufacture of yarn and cloth undermined this rural way of life. Farms in southern New England and the northern mid-Atlantic states disappeared first with whole families moving to mill towns. In northern New England, farm families h u n g on by using the wages of farm daughters to pay off mortgages. 9 Farm families elsewhere either commercialized, developed new ways women could bring cash into the old farm economy, or moved West where land was cheap. By the Civil War, few women did any spinning or weaving within the household except o n the frontier. By the end of the 1870s, the price of yardage had dropped so low that store-bought calico had begun to replace homespun everywhere, even in the remote areas of the Southwest, where it destroyed a small local trade in cotton articles manufactured primarily by Native Americans. 10 Even then there were exceptions to the generalization that women no longer wove in the home for the market. Cloth for clothing was now purchased but factory manufactured rugs had not yet captured the national market and surplus f r o m local markets filled the void. M o r m o n women wove large quantities of rugs for sale in the 1880s. N a v a j o women also produced rugs for a specialized Eastern market, primarily able to

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK compete because of a depressed local e c o n o m y and domestic sheep production. By 1 9 0 3 , N a v a j o women were producing 4 0 , 0 0 0 to 5 0 , 0 0 0 hand woven rugs a year, selling them c o m m o n l y for $ 1 . 0 0 a pound, and using the money income to buy commercially g r o u n d flour and factory m a n u f a c t u r e d cloth. As farm w o m e n added textiles to the items customarily purchased with cash or by barter, they found new ways o f bringing in an income by producing other items in demand on the local market. Rural women sometimes made clothing or performed household services for single males but a more significant contribution to the farm e c o n o m y was in the production of butter. 1 1

Butter — A Rural

Industry

Nineteenth century farm w o m e n produced large quantities of butter, often marketing it in the s a m e way as cloth had been marketed earlier, by taking it to the local country store where they e x c h a n g e d it for needed commodities. Stores then shipped it to urban distributors. Agricultural censuses regularly reported p r o d u c tion of butter and references to w o m e n ' s dairy work are scattered but numerous. By 1 8 4 0 , 14 to 2 3 percent o f agricultural income in N e w England and 5 to 17 percent in Middle Atlantic states c a m e f r o m dairy products, many of them produced by w o m e n . A c c o r d i n g to the 1 8 5 0 records of one c o u n t r y store serving a Louisiana parish, women from 2 8 5 farms b r o u g h t in 2 4 , 0 0 0 pounds of butter that was shipped to urban areas. O n e region of Delaware in 1 8 5 0 had 2 5 6 farms producing an average of 6 0 2 pounds o f butter per farm. W i t h i n a decade, the farms of this region were producing an average of 1 , 1 9 3 pounds. In this area, butter making was still considered women's work. O n e quantitative study of marketable butter surplus produced by 21,000 rural households in the northern United States listed in the 1 8 6 0 agricultural census concluded that income from sales of butter o n small farms provided a significant addition to the income o f f a r m families and a substantial potential for generating income through market trade. A n y farm o v e r 2 0 acres could produce this marketable surplus with farms o f 2 0 to 4 9 acres being capable o f producing 4 3 pounds of surplus

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES butter per year. O n the 20 percent of the Eastern farms of 100 to 499 acres, as much as 40 percent of the income could come from the sale of milk and dairy products." By the Civil War, some women on southwestern and western farms had also begun to produce butter for the market. Guri Olsdatter, a Norwegian woman in Minnesota, wrote in 1863 that with three cows she produced 230 pounde of butter one summer for an income of $62. Native American women of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma and the Yakima tribe in Washington produced 24,000 and 20,000 pounds of butter respectively in 1890. T h e western market for farm butter continued to exist well into the twentieth century in some areas. Elinore Pruitt Stewart, a Wyoming homesteader, wrote in 1913 that from 10 cows she sold enough butter to pay for a year's supply of flour and gasoline. T h e butter making of other W y o m i n g women has already been mentioned. 1 J Farm families successfully fought the introduction of butter substitutes, scornfully called "hog butter." T h r o u g h their Granges, women and men generated enough pressure to force Congress to pass a stiff regulatory law in 1887 to control the manufacture of processed oleomargarine. T h e law decreased production of oleomargarine for almost a decade but by the turn of the century production had increased once more. Moreover, new dairying equipment — especially mechanical cream separators — and centralized marketing techniques allowed the commercialization of buttermaking in the early 1900s. W y o m i n g women on the frontier were among the last to depend upon buttermaking for a substantial income. 14

Other Farm

Production

Rural women's contribution to the semi-monetary farm household economy of the nineteenth century through the making of butter was not the only one. Black and white rural women also developed truck farming to supplement their household income. T h e garden had traditionally been part of women's work on

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK the farm and the word " t r u c k " became associated with their gardens in the colonial period. By the late eighteenth century, English visitors had already described the little patches kept by Euro-American farm women in which they raised "truck" for local markets." There is some evidence that Afro-American women in the South also developed truck gardening and trade under slavery and considerably more evidence that as freedwomen even more of them moved into truck farming. Frances Harper, a well-known Black abolitionist lecturer who went South during reconstruction, mentioned Black South Carolinian women as providing the majority of truck farm produce in that state and, moreover, using this as an economic base to allow Black men greater freedom in their political activities.1® Farm women often provided incomes from combinations of sales and services. Native American women sold herbs, berries, nuts, and in the West provisioned the army with fodder and vegetables in the late nineteenth century. In addition, they sold pottery, baskets, weaving, and bead work which sometimes, as in the case of Navajo weavers, almost reached mass production. 17 Euro-American women put together incomes equally varied. O n e Nebraska farm woman, Mary Harpster, kept an account for the years from 1884 to 1886. Some of her entries were as follows: May 16,1885— Joe paid for his sewing, 70 cents May 18, 1885— George paid for his sewing, 70 cents June 1 9 , 1 8 8 5 - Sold milk, Joe boarding, $3.50 December 21, 1885— Made three shirts, 25 cents each, for McLains November 24,1886— Washed, 60 cents November 2 7 , 1 8 8 6 - Washed, $1.00 November 28,1886— Ironed, 30 cents November 29,1886— Sewed, 25 cents November 25,1886— Knit mittens, 20 cents

By November 1886, Harpster was bringing in from $4.35 to $4.80 a week and had purchased a knitting machine. Her experiences were similar to those of women in other rural areas in the Midwest and West. Wisconsin women sold milk to dairies that were devel-

HISTORY O F WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES o p i n g a regional market for cheese. M o r m o n women in Utah managed small cheese factories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 1 4 Economist Ruth Allen, who studied 975 Texas families in 1928-1930, concluded that household production for the market could still be an important factor in the lives of these families. Although Allen's p u b lished data is difficult to use because of small samples (usually 20 to 30) on individual questions, her study indicated that women's contribution could be significant. In one sample of Euro-American farm women w h o did not do field labor, one fourth produced a money income. Over a third of the women who were in f a r m - o w n i n g households produced a money income and a fourth of the women in tenant farming, where women did work in the fields, also produced a money income. At a time when the average farm tenant s cash income was barely over $100 a year, one Scottish tenant woman made an income of $175 from eggs and chickens. Allen estimated that the average money income from production in the home for sale and use exceeded the income from wage labor. T h e farm woman could make more in sales alone than in field labor. T h e reason not all women chose to produce poultry or eggs for the market was that Black and Hispanic women, as well as some EuroAmerican women, did not have the facilities, the skills, or the finances necessary to engage in home production for local distribution. Wage labor was easier to handle and to calculate. Even among most Euro-American farm women, almost none had a system of books that analyzed home production. Nonetheless, h o m e production was so important that Allen estimated women's work of this type probably brought in more income than the entire family's cotton crop.1® A n ideology of economic self-sufficiency underlay this process of home production. T h e economic philosophy was neatly formulated and inscribed on the overleaf of a Nebraska farm account book: "1. Spend as much less than you receive as possible; 2. keep savings for emergency plus something; 3. pay as you as you g o . " Self-sufficiency was absolutely necessary for the early stages of a developing economy but at odds with the shift to rural credit-based capitalist enterprise and the development of the farm-tenant credit system

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK in the South. Most male farmers abandoned this philosophy long before farm women did, however, because of the commercialization of field crops. O n many farms there then existed a dual economy — the women and children providing for living expenses and keeping these expenses on a cash basis while the man handled the field crops, using the income to pay for mortgages and the new machinery. Sometimes the women's cash income helped pay the mortgage and provide cash for capital improvement as well. 20 As commercialization of farming accelerated in the twentieth century and women lost more and more of their local markets to centralized marketing networks, the semi-monetary farm began to disappear. The concept of the dual farm household economy persisted, however, with many farm men unwilling to invest income from field crops in machinery or furnishings for the house. T h e country life reformers of 1900 to 1920 attempted to provide new avenues of income for farm women and urged men to be responsible for the upkeep of the house but for those farms that commercialized their field crops, men controlled the means of production thus leaving women on the farm in a vulnerable position. As long as farm income remained low, women's contribution was important. Her income from production of commodities combined with production of use items gave her status and some independence within the farm family. 21 The farm depression of the 1920s and 1930s accelerated the long-term movement of people off the farm and completed the transition to a money economy of those left behind. Thirty million people left rural areas between 1929 and 1965 and between 1940 and 1970, the farm population declined from 30 to 10 million. Those women who remained on the farm, while still active in the daily operation of the farm, were less likely to produce either goods for use or for sale. Middle class women saw themselves as rural " h o m e m a k e r s " rather than as farm women. Their daughters joined Future Homemaker clubs. Poor women began to commute to urban areas, taking poorly paid wage work. 2 2

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Boarders — An Urban Solution While f a r m w o m e n experienced the impact of commercialization o n their work, similar changes affected u r b a n w o m e n . Both immigrant women and native b o r n migrant w o m e n w h o had left small farms for u r b a n areas had performed farm work in addition to " h o u s e w o r k . " O n c e in town, single farm w o m e n often went into domestic e m p l o y m e n t or into factories but m a rried women f o u n d the opportunities for household production m u c h fewer than in the country. Space was often lacking for g a r d e n s and animals and regional u r ban based m a r k e t s usually provided milk, eggs, and poultry. While w o m e n could take in washing or do home sewing, an even larger n u m b e r may have taken in boarders, as this was o n e of the service sectors that was the slowest to develop on a commercial basis. Particularly in towns in the process of industrializing, u r b a n married women most c o m m o n l y earned money by taking in boarders. Boarding was widespread a m o n g both native born and immigrant households until the 1930s." Abundant records exist to document boarding as an important way in which working-class families in almost every industrial town eked out a living. T h e r e were two national studies done on urban areas, o n e published in 1892 and another in 1904. In addition, federal and state census returns included boarders and the Women's Bureau conducted several surveys. Because boarders became an object of criticism by middle-class reformers d u r i n g the progressive era before World W a r I, there are m a n y literary d o c u m e n t s which, if used carefully to allow for bias, can give us an idea of the importance of the income from boarding in working class families. Boarding seems to have paralleled the process of industrialization, increasing greatly after 1850 and probably peaking a r o u n d 1910, but varying f r o m region to region. A town like Barrington, R h o d e Island, in the process of industrializing f r o m 1885 to 1895, showed about 25 to 30 percent of the families taking in boarders while a stable f a r m i n g c o m m u n i t y like Foster., R h o d e Island, had p e r h a p s 3 to 4 percent of the families with boarders. O t h e r communities studied in the

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK TABLE 1: COTTON WORKER FAMILIES INCOME BY TYPE OF WORK 1892 Percent Boarding Alabama (N = 43) 28 Connecticut (N = 149) 22 Georgia (N= 198) 23 Kentucky (N= 19) 21 10 Louisiana (N • 10) 21 Maine (N = 163) 40 Maryland (N = 163) 23 Massachusetts (N = 399) 21 Mississippi (N = 33) New Hampshire (N-118) 32 New York (N= 186) 31 North Carolina (N-147) 27 31 Pennsylvania (N=212) .07 Rhode Island (N» 34) South Carolina (N - 32) 19 32 Tennessee (N=68) 44 Virginia (N s 123) 27 United States (N = 2132)

Percent Non-boarding 19 20 22 26 0 19 .03 26 21 21 .07 .07 .03 .11 28 .07 18 16

Percent Both 0 .03 .04 .03 0 .02 0 .03 .06 .03 0 .01 0 0 .06 .01 .03 2

SOURCE: U.S., Bureau of Labor, Seventh Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (2 vols.; Washington, 1892), II, Pt. 3.

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show 15 to 30 percent of the households taking in boarders. As late as 1920, in highly industrialized Rochester, N e w York, 16 percent of the married women contributed to the household income by taking in boarders. 2 4 Until we have more detailed studies for individual cities and states it is difficult to say precisely how economic factors interacted to create the divergent percentages of women taking in boarders that was reflected in state studies published by the Bureau of Labor in 1892 and 1904. A m o n g 2132 cotton worker households in 17 states studies in the 1892 report, most of them native born American, 27 percent of the wives took in boarders. Families taking in boarders ranged from highs of 44 percent in Virginia to a low of .07 in Rhode Island. (See Table 1) In the 1904 study of 25,444

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES working class families in industrial centers of 33 states, 24 percent took in boarders or lodgers. The rate of boarding per household ranged from a high of 40 percent in Maryland to a low of 3 percent of households taking in boarders in'South Carolina. (See Table 2 ) 0 What seems to emerge fairly clearly from the studies is that boarding could be as profitable or even more profitable for working-class wives than other forms of women's work. In the 1892 study, cited above, where 27 percent of all the wives took in boarders, 16 percent of the wives worked at other jobs with only a 2 percent overlap where wives did both. Overall, women made 42.65 percent as much as their husbands when they took in boarders and 45.52 percent as much as their husbands in nonboarding type work. In a state like Massachusetts, annual boarding income could average $225.25 while other types of women's income averaged only $184.47. When one looks at the 4559 New York households studied in 1904, it becomes clear that income from women's work at home and outside the home there was critical, for assuming the women were seldom doing both, women provided 32 to 35 percent of the gross family income. Moreover, the average income of women working at nonboarding occupations, came to only 24 percent of the husband's wage but the income from boarders was 37 percent of the husband's income in native born and 43 percent of the husband's income in foreign born households. The survey showed that a foreign family averaged $277 annually from boarders against $230 in native-born families, thus making boarding particularly attractive for immigrant families because the husband's income was likely to be less than among native-born workers. Women may have taken in boarders not only because they could increase the family income but also because that income may have been more than she could have obtained in the low paying jobs available outside the home. 26 According to these survey figures, the wife's income from boarders in 1904 in New York, even in native-born families, could pay for the house rent, clothing, and part of the fuel while the husband's income could cover the largest expenditure, that of food, and other incidental expenses. In either type of family, the

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK T A B L E 2:

WORKING CLASS FAMILIES INCOME Β Y TYPE OF WORK 1904 Percent Boarding and Percent Area Lodging Non-Boardi 23 20 Alabama (N = 297) California (N = 507) 19 5 11 0 Colorado (N = 197) 25 8 Connecticut (N = 810) 30 Delaware (N = 196) 10 31 10 District of Columbia (N = 100) Georgia (N = 298) 38 17 23 8 Illinois ( N = 1633) 32 Indiana (N = 601) 13 29 Iowa (N = 332) 9 14 1 Kansas (N = 196) 27 8 Kentucky (N = 335) 18 17 Louisiana (N = 193) 17 7 Maine (N = 366) 40 16 Maryland (N = 616) 32 Massachusetts (N = 2577) 1 24 Michigan (N = 887) 6 29 4 Minnesota (N = 398) 17 4 Missouri (N = 794) 32 New Hampshire (N = 299) 3 18 New Jersey (N = 994) 4 21 New York (N = 4559) 15 17 4 North Carolina (N = 198) 19 4 Ohio ( N = 1800) 19 4 Pennsylvania (N = 3702) 30 Rhode Island (N=475) 13 3 37 South Carolina (N = 200) 32 6 Tennessee ( N = 199) 19 Texas ( N = 197) 8 29 Virginia (N = 386) 9 17 2 Washington (N = 200) 21 7 West Virginia (N = 199) 7 25 Wisconsin (N=699) 24 9 United States (N = 25.440) SOURCE: U.S., Bureau of Labor. Eighteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (Waihiagtoa, 190«); SO. 260. h o u s e h o l d ended the year with less t h a n 3 1 dollars saved, the d i f f e r e n c e in the f o r e i g n - b o r n m a n ' s salary being just a b o u t m a d e u p b y the greater i n c o m e f r o m

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES children w o r k i n g and boarders in the immigrant family." Detailed studies are available for only a few cities as yet, but the i m p o r t a n t role played by women's home services is evident in a 1908 s t u d y done by Margaret Byington in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Almost 43 percent of o n e g r o u p of families kept lodgers and in half of the households with boarders, that work provided over 25 percent of the total income. Byington also found that the families that took in boarders were families where the h u s b a n d made less than $12 a week. Since 85 percent of the East European men made less than $12 a week, these women were more likely to keep boarders. A m o n g East European women, almost 64 percent kept boarders. T a k i n g lodgers, Byington concluded, "was a deliberate business v e n t u r e on the part of the family to increase the inadequate income from the man's earnings." 2 · In o n e g r o u p of families in Homestead, Byington also f o u n d 53 percent of the families depended entirely on the h u s b a n d ' s wage. O t h e r cities may have had similar but c h a n g i n g patterns for the 1920 Rochester, New York, survey concluded that only 55 percent of the families relied solely on the h u s b a n d ' s wage. Since Rochester was a predominantly working-class town, where 28 percent of wives contributed to the household income, other towns may have had similarly high contributions by wives. 2 * While there is no indication that a negative ideology developed a r o u n d the farm wives' household production, b o a r d i n g - h o u s e services and home manufacturing in u r b a n areas came under increasing attack f r o m two sources: u n i o n s and reformers. Unions concentrated primarily o n sewing and manufacturing in the homes but progressive reformers, beginning in the last decade of the nineteenth century, mounted major campaigns against lodgers in what became, according to some scholars, a rhetoric of " d e m o n o l o g y . " These attacks were f r a m e d in terms of progressive attitudes about childhood. Children in these homes were seen not only as neglected by overworked mothers but also as exposed to the sinister influence of y o u n g single working-class men. In practice, however, not only was this income crucial economically for the households,

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK but also boarders could provide rich psychic returns to householders who were older and whose children were working or already gone from the home. 3 0 Immigrant households may have taken in more lodgers proportionately than native-born households after the turn of the century. If boarding had once been a way middle-class households survived evil days in the early nineteenth century, and a way both nativeborn and immigrant households survived the industrializing process of the late nineteenth century, it may have been that native-born women moved away from taking in lodgers before immigrant women were able o r w jshed to do so. It seems likely that progressive antilodger rhetoric affected n a t i v e - b o r n w o r k i n g class households before immigrant households. M o r e c a r e ful study of the ideology may provide insight into its function in terms of class and ethnic groups. 3 1 What can be said with certainty is that the practice of boarding was an extremely important source of income for married urban women as a whole in the c e n tury from 1 8 4 0 to 1 9 4 0 and that by neglecting it, o n e o v e r l o o k s an important economic element in the lives of the urban working class, the working lives of w o r k ing-class women, and in the developing industrial economy itself.

Theoretical

Implications

Most of the income produced by women was from manufacturing, processing, or services requiring little capital investment. Large-scale capitalist enterprises did not grow from their work. N o r was capital a c c u m u lated and invested by women performing this work. Instead money was absorbed into the household e c o n omy to make it more productive, with any surplus reinvested in male-directed economic ventures. T h i s was particularly the case with the income o f farm women. Or the income was reabsorbed into the urban e c o n o m y through household purchases, either barely maintaining household subsistence or raising the standard of consumption of the family and raising its productivity within the wage labor sector. T h e goal of w o m e n ' s household production remained to m a k e ends meet rather than to consciously m a k e profits. T h e goal was

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES to raise a family if the w o m a n was a widow, or to contribute to the household income. W o m e n were able to use skills developed within the household economy to support themselves and their families but inevitably became wage workers or housewives as further economic development m a d e household production u n p r o fitable.32 Household production was a stage between subsistence and wage labor that did not lead to entrepreneurship. Rather than become entrepreneurs with highly capitalized business ventures, women fell back into the role of providing raw materials or labor for the new enterprise or they became new consumers for the product. T h u s although household production was a transition stage, it was not transitional to capitalism for individual women. 3 3 Males tended to divide into three groups, those w h o o w n e d the means of production, those who did not, and those w h o provided the ideology and s u p p o r t system for this division or mediated between the two g r o u p s . W o m e n , however, never divided in this way in that they directly participated only in the last two g r o u p s . W o m e n almost never controlled the means of production u n d e r capitalism although they may have provided the social context within which those men w h o controlled the means of production f u n c t i o n e d as a group. 3 4 W h a t was the importance of this household production? It allowed high productivity by both adults in families. It allowed families to care for their personal needs b y having w o m e n provide services we n o w call social welfare. W o m e n could provide these services, as well as produce commodities for use in the home and, in addition, p r o d u c e services and commodities for local and regional markets. Rural men could increase production of field crops for the growing u r b a n areas without increasing food costs. Low food costs combined with taking in boarders allowed the males of American u r b a n families to work for lower wages than they might have required had women not contributed to the family income. At the same time, families could a f f o r d to b u y commodities that raised their material standard of living and f o r w a r d e d the development of a complete market economy.

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK The 1920s and 1930s were important decades in the transition of women from household production to wage labor. To maintain the standard of living that women's work in the home had previously allowed, they now began to work outside the home at wage labor. Work at home was no longer productive because the services and commodities that women had produced had become commercialized — capitalist structures could perform them more cheaply than could women. This shift occurred at the same time that a greater emphasis was being put upon keeping children off the labor market and during a period of economic dislocation caused by the depression. As a consequence, the locus of production by married women began to shift from the household to the capitalist workplace. How well does Marxist theory explain these historical developments? Marx did not describe home production in detail in Capital. He did, however, identify what he called the petty mode of production where the workers owned their own means of production. He saw this type of production as being joined to agriculture, both being held together in a bond of union that was broken by the introduction of capitalist production. The centralization of capital annihilated this old system, concentrated the scattered means of production, and resulted first in a modern type of domestic industry and then manufacturing in factories. Thus Marx identified simple commodity production as an important stage in economic development. Ernest Mandel, in Marxist Economic Theory, elaborated on this type of production, again identifying it as a transitional stage between a society governed by labor cooperation and a society governed by the economic laws of capitalism. He pointed out that the money acquired by this type of production was employed to acquire items for use that in turn prohibited the accumulation of capital. Once this simple commodity production was subordinated to capital in a money economy, production for distant markets destroyed the small producer giving rise to domestic industry and then to factory manufacturing. Simple commodity production, as seen in this classical Marxist sense, can accomodate the develop-

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HISTORY O F W O M E N IN T H E UNITED S T A T E S ment of w o m e n ' s w o r k here described if it is expanded to include services produced in the home and to explain h o w the sexual division of labor affacted the historical transition. In the United States, farm families could m o v e West to remain on the land or switch to production of a new commodity — usually butter. T o w n families could accomodate household services to the expanding industrial economy. By responding to market changes, w o m e n ' s production was a crucial economic factor in both rural and urban families, for it maintained within the family the older mode of production. W h e n the older type of production ended, women moved into wage labor in greater numbers and shifted the locus of their work from the home to the workplace. If M a r x i s t theory incorporated all types of women's work, including simple commodity production, it could more accurately describe thepast and predict the future. A model that incorporated the realities of the lives of w o m e n ' s past — that they at one time produced for the market at home as well as produced for use — could illustrate h o w the development of capitalism has affected American women. Such a model m a y even challenge overall theories about the development of industrialization in the United States. W h e n one combines the household production of women in rural and urban areas, it is too important to be ignored. It contributed to the developing capitalist economy and at the same time was critical in the service and commodity producing sectors that remained underdeveloped the longest. W o m e n going to work outside the home today is, in reality, part of a continuing process in which women are and have been shifting their workplace and moving f r o m a household income to a wage income as commodity production, technolo g y , and the development of the service sector displaces their jobs. T h e N e w England women who sold cloth, the W y o m i n g women w h o sold butter for the f a r m windmills, and the N e w Y o r k women who boarded lodgers to allow the household to survive were not so different in motivation from the women who today go out as clerical or service workers. T h e political implications of that process, however, are likely to be far different. Since W o r l d W a r II, for the first time in

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK A m e r i c a n history, large n u m b e r s of married women h a v e m o v e d out of the s i m p l e c o m m o d i t y m o d e of production and into the capitalist m o d e b y b e c o m i n g wage laborers. T h e fact that w o m e n are not o n l y leaving the h o u s e h o l d but also l e a v i n g a transitional m o d e of production may h a v e an important impact o n the development of capitalism and o n w o m e n ' s reaction to it.

Joan Jensen D e p a r t m e n t of N e w M e x i c o State University Las Cruces, N e w M e x i c o

NOTES

I. Renate Bridenthal, "The Dialectics of Production and Reproduction in History." Radical America 10 (March-April 1976): 3-14 and "Loom. Broom and Womb: Producers, Maintainors and Reproducers." Fronliers I (Fall I97S): 1-41 both use the dual model. Patrician Branca. "A New Perspective on Women's Work: A Comparative Typology." Journal of Social History 9 (Winter 1975): 129-1 S3, makes the point that in some countries domestic manufacturing remained important into the late nineteenth century and constructs models that emphasize nonfactory wage work and what I have (lere defined as household production for the market. Michael Merrill. "Cash is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States," Radical History Review 4 (Winter 1977): 42-71. has three main divisions of production: household, simple commodity production, and capitalist. He includes barter and some cash income in household production. No attempt is made here to review the extensive literature on the political economy of women's work. Some of the most important works are: Mary Inman, In Woman's Defense (Los Angeles, 1940), The Two Forms of Production Under Capitalism (Los Angeles, 1964), and Robert ShafTer. "Women and the Communist Party, USA, 1930-1940," Socialist Review 9 (May-June 1979): 8387, who reviews her early argument that women participated in two modes of production under capitalism — wage labor and production of labor-power — and should form separate labor organizations: and Al Szymanski, "The Socialization of Women's Oppression: A Marxist Theory of the Changing Position of Women in Advanced Capitalist

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Society," The Insurgent Sociologist 6 (Winter 1976): 31-60; Margaret Bcnston. " T h e Political Economy of W o m e n ' s Liberation," Monthly Review (1969), a n d Mickey and J o h n Roundtree, " M o r e on the Political Economy of W o m e n ' s Liberation," Monthly Review (1970), ill assume a single m o d e of production as essential for political activity. Wally Seccome. " T h e Housewife and Her L a b o u r U n d e r Capitalism," New Left Review 83 (Jan. - Feb. 1973): 3-24, Jean Gardiner, "The Role of Domestic L a b o u r . " and Margaret Coulson, Branka Magas. and Hilary W a i n w r i g h t . " W o m e n and the Class Struggle," Sew Left Review 89 (Jan.-Feb. 1975): 47-58, 59-71. Ann R. Markusen. "The Economics of the W o m e n ' s M o v e m e n t . " Frontiers I (Fall 1975): 42· 52. Margaret H. Simeral. " W o m e n and the Reserve Army of Labor." Insurgent Sociologist 8 (Fall 1978). 164-179. and the past special RRPE issues on women all discuss various aspects of women's work. 2. T h e work by women under slavery and share cropping may have to be considered as part of a separate plantation mode of production. See Jay R. Mandle. The Roots of Black Poverty: the Southern Plantation Economy After the Civil War ( D u r h a m , North Carolina. 1978). F o r farm w o m e n ' s work for male farm laborers see D. Schob, Hired Hands and Plowboys: Farm Labor in the Midwta. 1815-60(Urbana, Illinois. I975):228. 3. Hazel K.yrk. Economic Problems of the Family (New Yoit. 1933): 132. 4. Schob. Hired Hands and Plowboys. p. 145, 1%. U.S.. Bureau of the Census. Thirteenth Census. 1910 (Washington, 1914) IV: 27. aplained an increase in women farm laborers when women's non-wage outdoor farm work was included. 5. Instructions ot Enumerators. January 1920. quoted in Bertha μ Nienburg, The Woman Home-Maker in the City: Λ Study of Statist'" Relating to Married Women in the City of Rochester. Ν. Y. of 1920 (Washington. 1923). 23-24 a n d A.J. JafTe, a, the Census "Trends in the Participation of W o m e n in the Working F o r c e , " Monthly Labor Review 79 ( M a y 1956): 559-565. 6. Stevenson W h i t c o m b Fletcher. Pennsylvania Agriculture and Country Ufe. 1640-1840 Harrisburg. Pennsylvania. 1950). 324-325. 389, 399,413-414. T h r o u g h a study of 159 wills from the most affluent agricultural areas in southeastern Pennsylvania during t h e period 1740 to 1790, James T. Lemon concluded that an average of 40 percent of produce was sold and that perhaps 80 percent of the farmers had some surplus to sell. " H o u s e h o l d C o n s u m p t i o n in Eighteenth Century America and Its Relationship to Production and Trade: the Situation Among Farmers in Southeastern Pennsylvania." Agricultural History 41 (1967): 59-70. 7. For Native American women selling hand ground flour, see Benjamin Hayes, Pioneer Notes From the Diary of Judge Benjamin Hayes (Los Angeles, 1929): 122. 8. Lois Green C a r r . " T h e Planter's Wife: T h e Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century M a r y l a n d . " William and Mary Quarterly. 3d Ser. 34 (1977). 542-571 and " C h a n g i n g Life Styles in Colonial St. Mary's C o u n t y . " Working Papers from the Regional Economic History Research Center I (1978): 73-118. See Nancy Folbre, "Patriarcy in Colonial New E n g l a n d . " in this issue for an argument that surplus was not sold in eighteenth century New England.

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK 9. Mary Alice Feldblum. "The Formation of the First Factory Labor Force in the New England Cotton Textile Industry. 18001848." (PhD Dissertation, New School for Social Research, 1977). Thomas Dublin, Womtn at Work: the Transformalion of Work and Community in Lowell. Massachusetts. 1826-1860 (New York, 1979) argues thai in some farm communities young women did not go to the mills to pay off mortgages but to earn money for themselves. D'Ann Campbell, "Women's life in Utopia: The Shaker Experiment in Sexual Equality Reappraised — 1810 to I860." The New England Quarterly 51 (March 1978): 36, gives one example of Massachusetts women weavers thrown out of work in 1811 by factory textiles who then joined the Shakers. 10. Rolla M. Tyron, Household Manufactures In the United Stales. I640-IS60{New York, 1966 reprint of 1917 edition). Calico sold for IS to 25c a yard in Nebraska in the late 1860s. By 1885 cloth sold for as little as 10« a yard in parts of Nebraska. A few Nebraska women still wove in the 1880s, however. See Nellie T. Mages Papers, Mary Margaret Harpster Papers, and Autobiography of Ella Newell Likes, all at the Nebraska Historical Society. Lincoln. Nebraska. 11. For Mormon women sec Kate B. Carter. Our Pioneer Heritage 17 Vols.: (Salt Lake City. 1963). XV. 476.480. They also wove sheets, ticking, material for men's suits and some dress material. For Navajo weaving, see U.S., Department of the Interior. Report of the Governor of New Mexico (Washington. 1904), 173. 12. Richard Easteriin, "Farm Production and Income in Old and New Areas at Mid-Century." in David C. Klingaman and Richard Κ Vedder. eds., Essays in Nineteenth Century Economic History: the Old Northwest (Athens, Ohio, 1975). 106: Rita Moore Krouse, "The Germantown Store," North Louisiana Historical Association Journal 8 (1977): 53-64: and Fred Bateman. "The 'Marketable Surplus' in Northern Dairy Fanning: New Evidence by Size of Farm in I860," Agricultural History 52 (1978: 345-363. Material on Delaware is from the agricultural censuses of 1850 and 1860 for the Brandywine Hundred in New Castle County. The author has underway a detailed study of the household production, including dairying, of mid-Atlantic farm women. Studies of other areas are needed. 13. Theodore C. Biegen. "Immigrant Women and the American Frontier," Norwegian-American Historical Association, Norwegian American Studies and Records 5 (1930): 26-29, U.S.. Department of the Interior. Census Office. Report on Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed (Washington. 1894): 120. 126: and Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Letters of a Woman Homesteader (Lincoln, 1961), 279-282. 14. D. Sven Nordin, Rich Harvest: A History of the Grange. 18671900 (Jackson, Mississippi, 1974), and Earl W. Hayter, The Troubled Farmer 1830-1900: Rural Adjustment to Industrialism (DeKalb. Illinois. 1968): 60-84. 15. Allen Wälder Read. "The Comment of British Travelers on Early American Terms Relating to Agriculture." Agricultural History 7 (1933). 99-109. 16. Minnie Miller Brown, "Black Women in American Agriculture," Agricultural History 50 (1976): 202-212. 17. Almost any account of Native American women includes refer-

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES ences to these sales. See Seneca Home Life and Culture (York, Pennsylvania. 1944): 41-43, and U.S.. Department of the Interior, Census Office, Report on Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed. 132. 158, 114. Accounts of the large amounts of hand crafts sold in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are in various reports of the governor of New Mexico. 18. Leonard J. Arlington. "Latter-Day Saint Women on the Arizona Frontier," (Mimeographed address for the Eyring Lectures, LDS Institute of Religion. Tucson. Arizona. 1973): Hilda Faunce. Desert Wife (Boston. 1934), 36: Mary Margaret Harpster Papers, Pioneer Stories of Furness County, Nebraska (Beaver-City TimesTribune, 1914), 90: and "Autobiography of Ella Newell Likes," Nebraska Historical Society. 19. Ruth Alice Allen. The Labor of Women in the Production of Cotton (New York, 1975 reprint of 1931 edition): 86-94, 150. 20. Ellen M. Troop Papers, Family Account Book, and Julia Baptist Letters, Nebraska Historical Society. In Nebraska in 1885, a windmill cost SI SO and a well $76. Viola I. Paradise. "Maternity Care and Welfare of Young Children in a Horn es leading County in Montana," in Child Care in Kurd America (New York. 1972). and Mary Meek Atkeson. "Women in Farm Life and Rural Economy," American Academy of Political and Social Science, Annals § 143 (May 1929): 188-194. 21. William L. Bowers. The Country Life Movement in America. 1900-1920 ( f o n Washington. New York. 1974). 22. John L. Shover. First Majority — Last Minority: The Trans· forming of Rural Life in America (DeKalb. Illinois. 1976). gives the best overview of the demographic transition. For women see Ruth Crawford Freeman and Lita Bane." Savings and Spending Patterns of the Same Rural Families Over a 10 Year Period. 1933-1943." American Economic Review 34 (June 1944): 344-50. who showed that the value of noncash items and services produced by a group of Illinois farms dropped from 42 percent in 1933 to 28 percent in 1942: Wallace E. Huffman. "The Value of Productive Time of Farm Wives: Iowa. North Carolina and Oklahoma." American Journal of Agricultural Economics 58 (1976). 836-841: and Cornelia Butler Flora. "Rural Women." Associates NAL Today 2(Sept. 1977), 16-21. 23. The history of home sewing has not yet been systematically studied but farm women sewed at home for factories throughout the nineteenth century and as late as the 1920s Maine women knitted baby clothes for New York shops. During much of the nineteenth century, women also produced extra items of clothing, like shirts and overalls, for sale to neighbors and to barter at stores. Lucy Johnson, "An Investigation of the Methods by which Farm Women in Maine are Adding or May Add to the Cash Income of the Family," Master's Essay, University of Maine. 1927 : 31. Women made from 50c for a dozen pair of socks to $1.50 for a baby packet and cap. Working constantly they could make $5 a week. "Pioneer Days," Ellen M. Troop Papers. 4. Nebraska Historical Society, mentions making shirts and overalls for her brother's store. Many Nebraska accounts talk of selling shirts to neighbors. For the elimination of home sewing in one city see Joan M. Jensen, "Employers, Women's Labor Power, and the Unions: A Rochester Case Study," paper presented at the Southwest Labor

DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY AND DOMESTIC WORK Studies Conference. Temne. Arizona. M a r c h 4. 1977. M i r i a m Cohen. " C h a n g i n g Education Strategies A m o n g Migrant Generations: New York Women and Their Families in Comparative Perspective." paper presented at the Newberry Library Conference on W o m e n ' s History and Quantitative Methods. July $-7. 1979. argued that home sewing among New York Italian women did not die out until the 1930s. 24 John Modell and Tamara Κ . Haraven. "Urbanization and the Malleable Family A n Examination of Boarding and Lodging in American Families." Journal of Marriage and the Family 35 (1973): 470-471. note that in Boston's South E n d in 1880. 30 percent of all families took in boarders See also Nienburg. The Woman HomeMaker. 23. and Ky rk. Economic Problems of the Family, 15. 25. U.S.. Bureau of Labor. Seventh Annual Report of the C o m m i s sioner of Labor (2 vols.: Washington. 1892). II. Pt. 3: U.S.. Bureau of Labor. Eighteenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor (Washington. 1904): 50. 260. 26. Ibid. 46-50. 236-260 27. Ibid.. 100-101 Modell and Haraven. "Urbanization and the Malleable Family." 471. found that in 1880 Boston more native born than Irish took in boarders. Their study linked age with taking in boarders 28. Margaret By ington. Homestead: Households of a Mill Town (Pittsburgh. 1974 reprint of 1910 edition): 42. 142. 144. 29. Ibid.; Kyrk. Economic Problems o) the Family, p. 136. 30. Modell and Haraven. "Urbanization and the Malleable Household." p. 468: Ray Lubove. The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City. IH90-I917 (Pittsburgh. 1962): 98: and Edith Abbott. The Tenements of Chicago. 1908-193$ (Chicago. 1936): 345 31. Herbert G . Gutman. " W o r k . Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. 1815-1919," American Historical Review 78 (June 1973): 53I-S88 provides a perceptive model for the way this question might be handled. 32. Some parallels are in a British study of farm women, Jennie Kitteringham. "Country Work Girls in Nineteenth Century England." in Raphael Samuel, ed.. Village Life and Labour (London. 1975): 73-138. 33. For graphic proof of the continued lack of involvement of women in privately owned businesses see U.S.. Department of Commerce. Bureau of the Census. Office of Minority Business Enterprise. Women-Owned Businesses. 1972 (Washington, 1976), I. Women owned 4.6- of all industries and made .3 of all receipts. Not surprisingly. almost three-fourths of the businesses were in retail trade (restaurants and food stores) and services. M o s t were single proprietorships. 34. tster Boserup. Woman's Role in Economic Development (New Y o r k . 1970), Robert I. Rhodes, Imperialism and Underdevelopment: A Reader (New York. 1970). T a m i l Szentes. The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (Budapest, 1971), Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Social Classes in Agrarian Societies (Garden City, New Y o r k . 1975), and Carmen Diana Deere. " R u r a l W o m e n ' s Subsistence Production in the Capitalist Periphery." The Review of Radical Political Economics 8:1 (Spring 1976): 9-17. all have stimulating ideas on development but

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES none contains any overall theory about the role of women in development. Scott Burns. The Household

Economy:

lis Shape. Origins,

and

Future (Boston. 1977 reprint of 1976 edition) suggests the household economy receded from 1840 to I960 and then advanced and attempts to relate the household to the overall economy but his conclusions are questionable. Unfortunately, studies like Nadia Haggag Youssef. Women and Work in Developing

Societies ( W e s t p o r t . C o n n . . 1976 re-

print of 1974 edition): 33. 123. neglect household labor. She does note that during the early phases of industrialization local trade is an important source of women's income. Elyce J. Rotella. "Women's Labor Force Participation and the Decline of the Family Economy in the United States.'' paper presented at the Newberry Library Conference on Women's History and Quantitative Methods, July 5-7, 1979. argued that by 1930 single women ID the wage labor force were no longer responsive to the household economy but married women were more responsive

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'The Sphinx in the Household': A New Look at the History of Household Workers BETTINA

BERCH

ABSTRACT: This paper focusses on household service work during the so-called "servant crisis," 1890 to 1920. Contemporaries, under the leadership of Professor Salmon, declared that the servant shortage was due to the ' social stigma'' attached to service In this paper we find their basic service study. Domestic Sen ice, to be (deliberately?) biased and false, and counterpose their findings with a servant's view. This is then tied into the general history of housework's development.

But one day it happens that in her presence a chance allusion is made to some detail of the labor question, perhaps to a strike in which she has no personal interest, and where the exactions of the strikers are so unreasonable that it never occurs to you that any working woman will not see the matter sensibly — that is, as you see it yourself. Watch her face as it hardens, becomes antagonistic, and, above all, secretive. You have a sudden cold feeling that you and she are on opposite sides of a gulf. . . (p. 379). To my servant I am an open book. To me my servant is a sphinx (p. 380). "The Sphinx in the Household" Scribner's Magazine Vol. 50: 379-380, 1911.

INTRODUCTION Domestic service has been the major occupational category for women workers in the United States from at least 1870 to 1950. Domestic service is structurally related to unpaid housework, which absorbs the time and energy of the majority of women in this country, past and present. Domestic service would seem to be the locus of much unresolved class and race tension between women. Yet we know relatively little about this work. There are two types of literature on the domestic service question. There is a body of work, mostly generated in the period from 1890-1920, devoted to the "servant crisis," a notion that "good servants" were scarce (Eaton 1899; Laughlin 1901; Pettengill 1903; Robinson 1924; Salmon 1972). There is a more contemporary secondary literature on the history of domestic service, largely based on surveys generated in the " servant crisis " period (Stigler 1946; Katzman 1978; Hamburger and Fowler-Gallagher 1978; Sutherland 1981). The classic work in the field, Lucy Salmon's 1897 Domestic Service, was and has remained the dominant work in the field for its methodological persuasiveness and as a basic source of information about domestic service. Most other surveys of domestic service followed the pattern of Salmon's work. Most were designed to show that servants' wages were as high or even higher than wages in Economics Department, Barnard College. Special thanks for extremely useful comments and criticism from Sandy Schilen, Laurie Nisonoff, and other members of the RRPE Editorial Board. Thanks to Monica Henry and her staff for their typing assistance.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

comparable jobs. This was usually done by taking a favorable estimate of servant's wages, adding on the imputed value of room and board, and emphasizing the lack of unemployment in domestic service compared with other women's jobs, which were often seasonal. Usually, the longer hours of labor in service were left out of the real wage computations, as only weekly wages were compared. Thus, the social scientists could end up with the still surprising conclusion that wages in domestic service were "competitive." Women workers shunned domestic service even though the work was well-paid and secure. The servant-crisis was declared "non-economic." This incorrect conclusion seems to have had several effects. To some extent, it probably prevented any raising of wage offers in domestic service. It certainly focussed the social reformers on reforming servants' attitudes, rather than on the wages and working conditions in service. From the servants' point of view, wages and working conditions in domestic service resembled slavery, so they avoided it if at all possible. Yet by ignoring the real problems with domestic service, the door was left open for the "technological f i x , " the promotion of labor-saving devices for the household, which were seen as servant-replacing. Now wives were going to be assigned the housework, with no wages paid at all. It is with an eye, then, to some of these larger issues of housework and women's work that this re-examination of the domestic service story is undertaken. After a brief background on the state of domestic service in the late nineteenth century, we shall examine the central thesis of Professor Salmon's classic study. Domestic Service: that the "servant crisis" was not a matter of low wages but more a problem of the social stigma of service. We will then trace the influence of her thesis on other research into the question of servant's wages and working conditions. We will explore this " c r i s i s , " then, from the workers' point of view. Then, in light of this failure to solve the "servant crisis,'' the shift of attention to household labor-saving devices (buttressed with borrowings from the factory efficiency movement, scientific management) can be more fully understood, since servants were not the projected users of the new equipment. As wives were now to do housework, the social reformers' spotlights shifted away from paid household employment. Is it any wonder that it was only in 1971 that household workers finally won national minimum wage coverage.

THE STATE OF DOMESTIC SERVICE BY 1900 While the United States had been characteristically labor scarce through much of its early years, it would be difficult to generalize about the availability of household workers in the late nineteenth century. Depending on the region, there were exslaves, new immigrants and other job needy women in the market. It has been estimated that up to 1915, "almost 80% of black working women in the North were involved in domestic service" (Hamberger and FowlerGallagher 1978: xii). Discrimination on the basis of race, sex, and ethnic origin — which could be compounded by a lack of grasp of English — confined most women's job prospects to usually low-skilled factory work or domestic service. By the late nineteenth century, the number of women servants was increasing, but at a slower rate than the increase of employed women overall (see Table 1).

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Furthermore, since the overall population was growing by 95 percent in the period of 1870 to 1900 and the number of families increasing by 114 percent, the fact that the servant population overall was only increasing by 49 percent was used as an indication that there was a relative shortage of servants (Rubinow 1906: 504). While the issue of wages will be taken up at length, the general picture of working conditions in service can be briefly described. Most servants lived-in, usually sharing a room with other servants. While wealthier households normally hired many workers, with different duties for different types of workers, the middle classes usually confined themselves to a maid-ofall-work and a cook. Servants were expected to rise before anyone else in the household to prepare the heating and breakfasts and to be available for work throughout the day until after the employers had retired for the evening. Servants were " o n c a l l " for night-time emergencies as well. Meals were timed for their employer's convenience, as was the traditional " a f t e m o o n - o f f a servant might have each week. Sunday duties were usually confined to a shorter range of hours per day.

Table 1 Relative Growth Rates of Women's Employment, Overall and in Domestic Service increase in the number of women employed 1870-1880 1880-1890 1890-1900 1870-1900

810,869 1,358,375 1,313,865 3,483,109

%

increase in the number of servants

44.2 51.3 32.8

96,237 246,664 67,124

25.4 5.5

189.7

410,025

46.9

11.0

Source: I. M. Rubinow (1906: 505). While this is only a brief sketch of the conditions of household employment, it serves as an interesting backdrop to the ideas of the housework reformers of the nineteenth century. Most of these crusaders advised women to get rid of their servants and do the work themselves, in various "improved" ways. A few gave tips on how to manage servants, but even then, their best advice seems to have been to learn how to do the housework yourself, as the best preparation for managing others. The leading reformers of the midnineteenth century, the Beechers (justly celebrated for their innovations in household architecture) were not above recourse to ethnic slurs to encourage wives to do their own housework. As Harriet Beecher Stowe writes in House and Home Papers, . . . blundering Biddy rusts the elegant knives, or takes off the ivory handles by soaking in hot water... the fragile china is chipped here and there... Bridget sweeps the parlor with a hard broom, and shakes out showers of ashes from the grate, forgetting to cover the damask lounges... (Crowfield 1864: 63). This tradition of blaming the servant continues through to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, best known for her feminist writings and her kitchenless home propos-

294

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

al. Gilman reminds women of the suspicious servants they've brought into the very bosom of their families: Strangers by birth, by class, by race, by education — as utterly alien as it is possible to conceive — these we introduce in our homes — in our very bed chambers; in knowledge of all the daily habits of our lives — and then we talk of privacy! Moreover, these persons can talk. . . This is the always-open avenue of information for lover and enemy, spy and priest. . . The home is thus vulgarly invaded by low-class strangers (Gilman 1972: 42-43).

Gilman plays on the latent fears of middle-class wives to make them more receptive to her reform ideas, which would have taken those strange servants out of private households and employed them in household catering/cleaning enterprises. Housework reform movements have usually capitalized on fear of servants or disgust with servants: always from the wife's point of view, not the servants'. THE IMPACT OF DOMESTIC

SERVICE

Dr. Lucy Salmon published the first edition of Domestic Service in 1897, after nine years of research. It was reprinted several times (in England as well) culminating in the reprint of the 1897 edition by Amo Press in 1972. It received favorable reviews in social science journals as well as journals for more general readership (Outlook 1897; Bookman 1897; Spectator 1897; Talbot 1901; Willett 1903). Reviewers applauded her choice of topic, finding it long-overlooked by serious scholars, and were impressed by her methodology. They mentioned the number of mistresses and servants she surveyed and the amount of information she collected, usually agreeing with the conclusion of the reviewer for the Political Science Quarterly: "the results... Professor Salmon presents and discusses with fairness and discrimination" (Willett 1903:547). Reviewers did not question her survey method or her statistical technique, but tended to focus on her recommendations for the alleviation of the domestic service problem. Domestic Service has remained a classic work in the field, even for contemporary scholars. While household management books quoted her findings extensively, her work was also considered definitive by scholarly writers. When the Women's Bureau in 1924 published a whole bulletin entitled Domestic Workers and their Employment Relations, they quoted Domestic Service repeatedly (Robinson 1924: 1, 7, 53, 55, 58). When Benjamin Andrews wrote his definitive text, Economics of the Household in 1923, he cited her work extensively, especially her data showing that wages were higher in domestic work than other women's employments (Andrews 1925:453-4, 464-5). Amy Watson's review article on domestic service for the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences starts with a discussion of Salmon's Domestic Service, which she terms a "pioneer social history of domestic service" (Watson 1931: 200). The entry for Salmon, in Notable American Women, reads: Miss Salmon's historical study of Domestic Service (1897), in which she had the aid of Carroll D. Wright, commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Labor, made a pioneering application of statistical method to this field... (Notable American Women vol. ΠΙ 1971: 224).

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Selections from Domestic Service have been reprinted in various anthologies of the history of w o m e n ' s work (see especially, Brownlee and Brownlee 1976: 249-256) and contemporary scholars (such as Katzman 1978: 3, 5, 6, 13, 15, ff.) quote her extensively. Salmon's work, in other words, has been accepted as a classic in its field. THE "PROBLEM" ACCORDING TO SALMON Salmon defined the "servant crisis'' in the following terms: wages were high in domestic service but women shunned this work in favor of lower paying jobs in factories or teaching because there was a social stigma to service. For Salmon, the "servant crisis" was a servant shortage. By convincing the public that servants' wages were already relatively high, Salmon was trying to discourage any attempts to solve the crisis by raising wages. Instead, she favored domestic service schools, to improve the skills (and image) of servants. Somehow she imagined that more training and licensing of servants would increase the supply of servants (contrary to the usual economic logic of more licensing resulting in fewer practitioners). Perhaps in recognition of these contradictions, she urged more do-it-yourself housework: co-operative schemes, take-out services and professionalized housewifery. Salmon decided to study the problem of domestic service by using a survey method, sending out questionnaires to employers of domestic servants and to their employees. She asked for information on wages, fringe benefits, years of service, complaints, preferences and other matters. After drafting the first version of the questionnaire, she sent it to Charles Pidgin, in the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, for his advice. He wrote back to her:1 1. 2. 3. 4.

What I l a c k . . . are the following points. . . The intent or purpose of the investigation. The number of schedules that are to be sent out. To whom the schedules are to be sent. By whom are the schedules to be filled out; that is, the actual work of writing in the answers. . . (Pidgin. Sept. 7, 1888).

Even before beginning the survey, she has been warned of her key methodological problems: unbiased sampling and unbiased responses. Salmon never dealt with these problems concretely. On Pidgin's first point, the purpose of her investigation, she was obviously quite forthcoming, telling Pidgin what she expected to prove. He writes back to her in accord: I have no doubt, as you say, that the 'difficulty' is owing to the dislike to domestic service on the part of the maid, and ignorance of domestic service on the part of the mistress... the question then is, will the one who does the teaching obtain the benefit of such instruction, and on the other hand, will the maids be willing to make any allowance in a financial way as return for the instruction?... I think that the difficulty is owing to a number of causes... (Pidgin, Sept. 20,1888). So Salmon knew, in advance, what she wanted her investigation to reveal. She was considerably less clear about the procedural questions. As Pidgin had asked earlier, how many questionnaires should be sent out? She seems to have been vague, since he later advises her:

296

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES 1 should think that 1.500 schedules would make a very fair presentation; at the same time, if you should adopt the improved methods of tabulation, the difference between 1,500 and 2.500 would not be very material as far as the actual work is concerned, and my advice would be obtain as many schedules as you possibly can, and allow the question of tabulation to be an after consideration (Pidgin, Sept. 24, 1888).

After the actual survey, their standards seem to have slipped a bit. Pidgin writes Salmon: Send the 800 schedules to me and I will examine them and report any opinion of their statistical condition. You can then decide whether 800 will answer, or whether it will be best to wait for the thousand, or more (Pidgin, Feb. 7, 1890).

Not to know how many people to sample is hardly a fatal flaw. But Salmon never dealt with Pidgin's third and fourth points either, which were more serious. She had no interest in constructing an unbiased sample for her survey. Questionnaires were sent to her family, friends, Vassar alumni, and women's clubs. Those in her own social milieu received whole packages of questionnaires. To reach the "general public" she inserted a small ad in a few Boston area newspapers inviting people to request a questionnaire if they were interested. It is indeed doubtful if she had any responses from those ads. Her friends were certainly forthcoming. One of her correspondents writes, for example: Now if you cannot work off all your documents to advantage, let me know and I will send you more addresses. These I send are the best I can offer. But you may get satisfactory results from some others of my friends (Mrs. E. P. Pierce, Jan. 10, 1889).

Some ladies tried a little too hard to be helpful, as one wrote; " A s I am not a housekeeper I enclose the experience of my mother" (Annie Jackson 1890). An interesting survey of wages and hours, when some responses are a generation older! Not only was the sampling quite idiosyncratic, but the attempt to solicit employee's responses was a disguised failure. In spite of Pidgin's specific question as to who would fill in the forms, Salmon had blithely assumed that each mistress would have her servants fill in their own schedules. Thus Salmon would have both the employer and the employee responses for her survey. Yet, this may have been a typical reply, " I have not given the employee's circular to anyone, for I really do not think our servants sufficiently advanced to comprehend it" (Margaret Pierson, March 13, 1889). Undoubtedly, many mistresses assumed their servants were too ignorant to answer a specific survey. Yet one woman's letter to Salmon indicates that some servants were a lot smarter than their employers thought: . . . my Annie was disposed to treat the matter as a joke and fill out the blank with nonsense, but this I protested against. When I asked her for it a few days later she said she had put it in the fire, that only ignorant persons would ever ask such questions or expect to get them answered (L. W. Gould, Feb. 12, 1889). In most cases, we can probably assume that the employer filled out the employee schedules for them. Salmon never refers to these difficulties in her

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account of the study. On the contrary, her long quotations of employee responses in Domestic Service give the impression that most servants had responded. Since Salmon seems to have destroyed the original manuscript returns to protect the anonymity of her respondents (she would have done well to destroy the correspondence, too), it is impossible to verify the actual tabulations of the survey. Even in the eyes of her consultant. Mr. Pidgin, there were problems with her survey methods. Salmon reports the results of her survey in Domestic Service. She tries to convince the reader that the solution to the servant problem is not to be found in paying them higher wages. To buttress her argument, she tries to prove that domestic servants earn more than schoolteachers or factory workers. If she had made her calculations correctly, however, she would have come to the opposite conclusion — that even the best paid class of servants in a highly paid region of the United States for domestic service (cooks. Boston), earn less than her poorly paid schoolteachers. It will be useful to examine her argument in some detail, since it has remained the basis for the common myth that household workers have always been relatively well paid. She states her central thesis as follows: The wages received in domestic scrvice arc relatively and sometimes absolutely higher than the average wages received in other wage-earning occupations open to women (Salmon 1972: 93). She tries to prove this proposition by comparing the total value of the servants' wages (cash plus room and board) with the value of a schoolteacher's wage (cash only). Aware that different types of servants have different average wages (her Table XII presents the breakdown), she begins by selecting an average weekly wage for female servants, but uses the average of the employers' estimates, $3.23 per week, rather than the average of the employees' estimates, $3.11. She assumes that servants receive a paid holiday, so the $3.23 per week becomes $ 167.96 per year. She estimates that the value of room and board for one year is $250, so the total value of earnings in cash and kind equals $417.96 which she generously rounds to $420. Using the lower figures on wages here would mean an annual wage of $411.72 in cash and kind (Salmon 1972:98). Now she turns to compare the servants with teachers. T o d o so, she abandons her $420 per annum estimate and selects that highest paid category of servants, cooks, for her comparison. Since cooks earn $4.45 per week, their yearly recompense might be $4.45 x 52 weeks + $250 of room and board = $481.40. Inexplicably, however, Salmon increases that value of room and board (only four pages later!) to $275, so her total value of cook's recompense is $506.40 per annum (Salmon 1972: 102). Now she tackles the teachers. She claims to use the data in her Table XVI, which shows an average annual salary for teachers of $628.35 per annum, which she mysteriously rounds down to $620 only two pages later (Salmon 1972: 100, 102). Now she subtracts from the $620 wage, the sum of $285 for room and board (it creeps up mysteriously too) to leave $335 in cash! To give the reader the impression that wages are roughly equal for servants and teachers, she adds the value of room and board to the cook but subtracts it from the teacher! Of course, had she stayed with her estimate four pages earlier, that

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an average servant earned the equivalent of $417.96 per annum, and compared that with $628.35 per annum for the teachers, readers might disagree with her central premise, that servants are as well paid as other women. Her less than casual errors seem to suggest that her whole " s t u d y " of domestic service is actually a polemic against paying servants more. The whole focus of her inquiry can then conveniently shift to her main point: that the problem with servants is attitude, not wages. Salmon's study was considered authoritative by her contemporaries, who simply cited her findings or tried to replicate them in their own areas. For example, in Isabel Eaton's 1899 survey, Negro Domestic Service in the Seventh Ward Philadelphia, she remarks: Domestic service, however, is generally acknowledged to be well paid, as compared with other occupations which are open to women. A cook receiving $ 4 . 5 0 a week, the average pay in Boston, can save as much in a year as the average teacher in American public schools, as is shown by a comparison of the average teacher's salary, based on 6512 records 7 . . . (Eaton 1899: 446).

Her footnote 7 refers to Salmon's Domestic Service. Over and over, Eaton compares her survey findings with Salmon's, at times somewhat puzzled that Philadelphia's black servants are so different from the "national averages" found by Salmon. Most of the studies tried to show that domestic servants were better paid than other women workers, even if the logic was not particularly straightforward. Mr. Leeds in his 1912-1914 study of Pennsylvania housework, for instance, quotes the 1910 Maine study of domestic servants with obvious approval. Close scrutiny of the Maine study reveals some awkward findings. In the Maine survey, 1500 families were surveyed and 291 responded, employing 333 servants among them. The average servant's wage was $4 per week, and room and board in Maine also averaged $4 per week. Yet this $4 per week average includes hourly and live-in workers — 197 out of 249 workers were paid by the hour. Their modal wage was 15