Prevailing ideas concerning gender bore little relation to the experience of those women who worked for wages at least some time in their lives. They did so despite severe disadvantages. Women could not compete freely for employment, since only low-paying jobs were available to them. Married women still could not sign independent contracts or sue in their own name, and not until after the Civil War did they, not their husbands, control the wages they earned. Nonetheless, for poor city dwellers and farm families, the labor of all family members was essential to economic survival. Thousands of poor women found jobs as domestic servants, factory workers, and seamstresses. Early industrialization enhanced the availability of paid work for northern women, as the spread of the putting-out system in such industries as shoemaking, hatmaking, and clothing manufacture allowed women laboring at home to contribute to family income even as they retained responsibility for domestic chores.
An image from a female infant’s 1830 birth and baptismal certificate depicts a domestic scene, with women at work while men relax.
For the expanding middle class, however, it became a badge of respectability for wives to remain at home, outside the disorderly new market economy, while husbands conducted business in their offices, shops, and factories. In larger cities, where families of different social classes had previously lived alongside one another, fashionable middle-class neighborhoods populated by merchants, factory owners, and professionals like lawyers and doctors began to develop. Work in middle-class homes was done by domestic servants, the largest employment category for women in nineteenth-century America. The freedom of the middle-class woman— defined in part as freedom from labor—rested on the employment of other women within her household.
Even though most women were anything but idle, in a market economy where labor increasingly meant work that created monetary value, it became more and more difficult to think of labor as encompassing anyone but men. Lydia Maria Child wrote a popular book, The Frugal Housewife, published in 1829, that sought to prepare women for the ups and downs of the market revolution (one chapter was entitled “How to Endure Poverty”). Child supported her family by her writing and became a prominent advocate of antislavery and of greater rights for women. Her diary reveals that in a single year she also sewed thirty-six pieces of clothing, prepared more than 700 meals, and spent much time supervising household help.
By any reasonable definition, Child worked—at home and as a writer. But discussions of labor rarely mentioned housewives, domestic servants, and female outworkers, except as an indication of how the spread of capitalism was degrading men. The idea that the male head of household should command a “family wage” that enabled him to support his wife and children became a popular definition of social justice. It sank deep roots not only among middle-class Americans but among working-class men as well. Capitalism, said the newspaper Workingman’s Advocate, tore women from their role as “happy and independent mistresses” of the domestic sphere and forced them into the labor market, thereby undermining the natural order of the household and the authority of its male head.
No More Grinding the Poor—But Liberty and the Rights of Man, a labor movement cartoon of the 1830s. The devil and a millionaire conspire to buy an election with money (in the box at the lower left), while an honest workingman hands his ballot to a female figure of liberty. The worker’s motto is “Liberty, Equity, Justice, and The Rights of Man.”
The Shoemakers’ Strike in Lynn— Procession in the Midst of a Snow-Storm, of Eight Hundred Women Operatives, an engraving from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, March 17, 1860. The striking women workers carry a banner comparing their condition to that of slaves.