History Of Women In The United States Domestic Ideology And Domestic Work 2 V

Author : Jeanne Boydston
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Home and Work written by Jeanne Boydston and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1990 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of a two hundred year period, women's domestic labor gradually lost its footing as a recognized aspect of economic life in America. The image of the colonial "goodwife," valued for her contribution to household prosperity, had been replaced by the image of a "dependent" and a "non-producer." This book is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. More particularly, it is a history of women's unpaid domestic labor in the context of the emergence of an industrialized society in the northern United States. Boydston argues that just as a capitalist economic order had first to teach that wages were the measure of a man's worth, it had at the same time, implicitly or explicitly, to teach that those who did not draw wages were dependent and not essential to the "real economy." Developing a striking account of the gender and labor systems that characterized industrializing America, Boydston explains how this effected the devaluation of women's unpaid labor.