ebooks Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom by Richard H. King in History

Description

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 The image of the colonial "goodwife;" valued for her contribution to household prosperity; had been replaced by the image of a "dependent" and a "non-producer."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