The Economic Significance of Family Work

Living standards varied enormously among women, determined not only by family background but by marital status. On a day-to-day basis, most women tended to family and home—as managers of domestic servants, if not as workers.

The Married Women’s Property Acts passed in many states after 1848 represented a straightforward extension of liberal political theory, gradually giving women control over inherited wealth and their own market earn­ings.³⁹ Members of the National Woman Suffrage Association offered a more radical critique, raising concerns about lack of economic remuneration for housework and childrearing.⁴⁰ In an article in The Revolution, Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that women who surrendered themselves to their family’s needs deserved decent egalitarian compensation and that the work of wives and mothers was unique only because it was ‘‘unpaid, unsocialized, and unrelenting.’’⁴¹ Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor in the United States, contested the vocabulary of dependence, assert­ing that, ‘‘The theory that a wife who... bears her fair share of the joint burdens, is yet ‘supported’ by her husband has been the bane of all society.’’⁴²

Nineteenth-century common law required that a husband support his wife, but the meaning of support was nowhere clearly defined, and many women were forced to beg their husbands for money.⁴³ In 1873, an article in The Woman’s Journal explicitly demanded wages for housework.

Another writer pointed that if housewives were to adopt the eight-hour- day that trade unions were demanding for their members, many workers would be forced to go to bed without their supper.⁴⁶ Feminist proposals for a shorter working day anticipated late twentieth-century debates over family policy.⁴⁷ Yet few of today’s activists realize that their late nineteenth-century counterparts argued that men and women alike would welcome paid employment that required only a few hours per day, and such an arrange­ment would also allow men to assume more responsibilities for family care.⁴⁸ Coops and cohousing also came under discussion, under the rubric of ‘‘cooperative housekeeping”.⁴⁹