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(Download PDF) Women Have Always Worked A Concise History Alice Kessler Harris Online Ebook All Chapter PDF
(Download PDF) Women Have Always Worked A Concise History Alice Kessler Harris Online Ebook All Chapter PDF
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Women Have
Always Worked
Editorial Advisors
James R. Barrett, Julie Greene, William P. Jones,
Alice Kessler-Harris, and Nelson Lichtenstein
A CONCISE HISTORY
Second Edition
ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS
Acknowledgments ix
1 The Meaning of Work in Women’s Lives 1
2 Household Labor 21
3 Working for Wages 61
4 Women’s Social Mission 109
5 Changing the Shape of the Workforce 147
6 Equality and Freedom at Odds 176
Notes 209
Index 225
Dotha Bushnell lived on a Connecticut farm in the early 1800s, among the
last of generations of American women who worked in households that
produced all the necessities of survival. Her son, Horace, lamenting the
disappearing past, wept over the “frugal, faithful, pious housewife” who
lived in an age when “the house was a factory on the farm; the farm a grower
and producer for the house.” All of a household’s members were harnessed
together “into the producing process, young, old, male and female, from
the boy that rode the plough horse to the grandmother knitting under her
spectacles.”1
Nobody then or now could wonder if Dotha Bushnell worked. Whether
she was an enslaved woman who worked in the fields, or an indentured
servant or the mistress of a plantation household, a woman had a job to
do. In preindustrial societies, nearly everybody worked, and almost nobody
worked for wages. But with industrialization, the harness yoking house-
hold members together loosened. As production began to move out of the
household into factories, offices, and stores, those who got paid for the new
jobs were clearly workers. At the same time, the kinds of work women did
at home changed dramatically. The remaining tasks of the household, such
as caring for children, preparing food, cleaning, and laundering, were not
so clearly defined as work. In separating the jobs necessary to maintain the
household from the jobs done for pay, the Industrial Revolution effected
not only a shift in the tasks assigned to workers of both sexes, but a shift
in perceptions of what constituted work for each. Women who maintained
the home and did not collect wages were no longer identified as workers.
Their home roles seemed shaped by love, or commitment, simply the nat-
ural product of biological difference. We might consider whether, in our
new postindustrial or information society, as the tasks of men and women
once again converge, perceptions of what constitutes work have once again
changed.
In the preindustrial period, almost everyone did what could, in one sense,
be called domestic work. As servants, slaves, or family members, their tasks
revolved around the household, which constituted the center of production.
Among family members, women as well as men derived identity, self-es-
teem, and a sense of order from their household places. For the enslaved and
servants, whose work lives centered in other people’s families, household
tasks were nevertheless the source of survival. For the most part, the core
family and its extended members consumed the goods and food produced
in this unit, trading what little there was left to make up for shortages.
There seems to have been a rhythm to the work performed in this pre-
industrial environment, in harmony with the seasons in the countryside
In the pre-revolutionary period, everyone did what could, in some sense, be called
domestic work. This drawing depicts life around 1776. (Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division)
and with family needs in both town and country. By the sixteenth century,
much of Europe had what we would now call an unemployment problem:
too many workers and too few jobs. To feed, clothe, and shelter the popula-
tion at minimal levels required fewer workers than the numbers of people
available. As a result, work was spread out. The evidence suggests that
traditional role divisions—which assigned to women internal household
tasks and care of gardens, dairies, and domestic animals, as well as small
children—allowed men a good deal more freedom than their wives. Men,
more than women, benefited from a growing labor surplus. Women’s tasks
tended to be less seasonal and more regular. Over the span of a year, men
had fewer onerous and regular responsibilities.2
The transition from this relatively self-sufficient domestic economy to
dependence on trade took hundreds of years and developed at different
speeds in different areas. The first inroads occurred when the commer-
cial revolution of the thirteenth century created a market for manufactured
goods and encouraged craftsmen and their families to concentrate their
energies on producing for cash. Artisan families, who had previously made
and sold their own products, began to produce for merchants who bought
in bulk and sold to distant places. In these family industries, women, who
were generally excluded from formal apprenticeships, could nevertheless
become skilled craftworkers by ‘stealing’ the trade from male family mem-
bers. They were partners in every sense of the word. Women cooked and
laundered for apprentices; they performed some of the tasks of produc-
tion; in most places the law acknowledged a wife’s right to the business
if a husband died. The garden plot still produced food supplies, and wives
and widows supervised and trained young unmarried women to perform
household work. If labor within these artisan families seemed relatively
balanced, it was far from idyllic. Work within the household, in the shop,
and on the farm was always hard. Poor crop yields or sickness could bring
even comfortable households to the edge of starvation.
As trade developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a subtle
change came over family industry. Merchants, who had at first been con-
tent to take what was available and sell it, soon began to demand prod-
ucts made to their own specifications. Instead of gathering the products of
local artisans, they “put out” their own orders to cottages throughout the
countryside. Workers lost control over what they made. They still retained
control over their time. People who worked in their own cottages would not
be rushed. They did more or less work as other tasks called, and sometimes
they wasted materials. As orders increased, however, merchants required
faster and more reliable production. Effective supervision of workers could
be obtained only if the labor force were concentrated in one place. And to-
ward the end of the eighteenth century, the development of steam-powered
machinery required a labor force able to move where the machines were,
adding urgency to the demand for a factory workforce.
Slowly and painfully the laboring poor were persuaded to give up their
own loosely jointed and self-imposed definitions of work. In sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century England, land that had been held in common for
generations, as well as some that had traditionally been leased by families,
was taken over by large landowners for their own use. This process, called
enclosure, meant that some farm families were forcibly ejected while others
no longer had common pasture. Ultimately, they could not survive on the
land. Driving men, women, and children from farms made them available
for work in towns. But they were reluctant workers. Employers could per-
suade them to show up for work regularly only by holding back wages or
tying them to contracts that ran for as long as twenty-one years. Sometimes
employers beat inattentive workers, especially children. Frequently the state
passed laws to help employers create a reliable workforce. In England and
France, harsh laws against vagrancy forced people to take jobs against their
own inclinations. Those who would not submit might be branded or jailed
and later deported to colonies in far-off places.
property upon marriage, gave a husband claim to all of a wife’s wages, and
turned over the children to him should she commit any sexual impropriety or
seek to live separately. A “lady’s” family was to be the only sphere in which she
could shine, her only occupation. Schools included her only peripherally in the
lower grades and generally excluded her from advanced academic study. If a
woman were forced by necessity into paid employment, she generally found
herself relegated to the most menial and poorest paid tasks: a confirmation
of the injunction that she ought not to be in the workforce at all.
In the absence of an identity derived from wage work, woman’s identity
was grounded in her home role. Especially for middle-class women, status,
even self-esteem, came through men, giving truth to the old saying: man
does, woman is. While many, perhaps most, women derived gratification
from husbands and children, the evidence indicates that substantial num-
bers of women hungered for greater self-determination and resented their
inability to achieve in their own right. Margaret Fuller wrote in 1843, “Many
women are considering within themselves what they need that they have
not, and what they can have if they find they need it.”18 Yet lacking oppor-
tunities for economic self-sufficiency, only a few exceptional women could
achieve success by male standards. Some of the most successful, like Sarah
Josepha Hale, a widow who edited a widely read magazine called Godey’s
Lady’s Book, and the author Sarah Payson Willis Parton (better known as
Fanny Fern), earned their livings by advocating a female reticence they did
not themselves practice.
Author: A. H. Bergholm
Abraham Poppius
Language: Finnish
Elämäkerta ja runot
Kirj. ja toim.
A.H. BERGHOLM
A.H.B.
SISÄLLYS:
I. ELÄMÄKERTA.
II. RUNOT.
Jos lie tämä vaikuttanut, tai Poppius muutenkin päätti tällä kertaa
jättää papintuumansa, lopputulos on, että hän edelleenkin jäi
Turkuun lukujansa jatkamaan ja tuskinpa ensinkään kirjoitti Porvoon
konsistoriumille.
»Jag och Germund hafva hela vintern som kött och blod varit
oskiljaktiga contubernaler, lefvat och arbetat under ett tak, såfvit i en
säng och spelat under ett täcke, så att hvad jag i alla möjliga
afseenden säger om mig, gäller och till alla delar om honom.»
[»Suurin pyrintöni olisi nyt, että sen ohella kuin olisin suorittanut
Kandidaattitutkinnon, samalla viimeinkin olisin päässyt varmalle
pohjalle filosofiassa, joka voi eksyttää ihmisen kaikellaisilla teillä
aivan kuolluksiin,» — —.]
Grubben luennoista uskonnon filosofiassa toivoi hän paljon ja
Geijeriin oli hän aivan ihastunut: »Man kommer alldeles ånyo född
från hans timmar». [»Tulee ihan uudestasyntyneenä hänen
tunneiltaan».]
ja seuraavassa kirjeessä: