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THE LABOR OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION: HOUSEHOLD WORK AND GENDERED POWER IN THE HISTORY OF CAPITALISM, 1870–1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2016

Rudi Batzell
Rudi Batzell*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
*
[email protected]
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Extract

  • • Susan Porter Benson, Household Accounts: Working-Class Family Economies in the Interwar United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).

  • • Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  • • Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man's Reward: Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 2014).

  • • Katherine Leonard Turner, How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century, California Studies in Food and Culture 48 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

  • • Karol K. Weaver, Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region, 1880–2000 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).

  • • Wendy A. Woloson, In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Type
Special Issue: The History of Capitalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , July 2016 , pp. 310 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2016 

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References

NOTES

1 Sven Beckert, “History of American Capitalism” in American History Now, eds. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 314–35.

2 The main historiographical stream in the history of capitalism has provided compelling new histories of finance, risk, and debt, including Louis Hyman, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

3 For a recent summary of the broader field of labor history, see Leon Fink, Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Fink, Leon, “The Great Escape: How a Field Survived Hard Times,” Labor 8:11 (Mar. 20, 2011): 109–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Economics and economic history have largely focused on questions of productivity and performance, ignoring questions of power. Addressing this silence should be one of the major tasks of the history of capitalism. Adam Ozanne, Power and Neoclassical Economics: A Return to Political Economy in the Teaching of Economics (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016).

5 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013).

6 Although beyond the scope of this review, some of the most innovative work on households, gender, labor, and capitalism traces the experiences black families through emancipation and reconstruction. Susan E. O'Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife & Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction, Women in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina, Women in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

7 With particular attention to “work” and “labor” outside the masculine Fordist factory, see a recent attempt to push scholars to think broadly about what the domain of labor history includes. Andrea Komlosy, Arbeit: Eine globalhistorische Perspektive: 13. bis 21. Jahrhundert (Wien: Promedia, 2014).

8 The move toward the “history of every day life” offers insights to experiences of power and labor beyond the shop floor, but also risks losing site of the “synchrony” of institutions and structures across the political economy. Lüdtke, Alf and Templer, William, “Polymorphous Synchrony: German Industrial Workers and the Politics of Everyday Life,” International Review of Social History 38:Supplement S1 (Apr. 1993): 39–84 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Fraser, Nancy, “Behind Marx's Hidden Abode,” New Left Review, II, 86 (Apr. 2014): 55–72 . Fraser is building on a long tradition of (too often neglected) feminist political economy; see Folbre, Nancy, “Exploitation Comes Home: A Critique of the Marxian Theory of Family Labour,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 6:4 (Dec.1, 1982): 317–29Google Scholar as well as Folbre, Nancy, “Of Patriarchy Born: The Political Economy of Fertility Decisions,” Feminist Studies 9:2 (July 1, 1983): 261–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laslett, Barbara and Brenner, Johanna, “Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives,” Annual Review of Sociology 15 (1989): 381–404 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); and Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

10 Fraser, “Behind Marx's Hidden Abode,” 61.

11 Fraser, “Behind Marx's Hidden Abode,” 61.

12 Louis Hyman has suggested in a recent interchange that tracing “the movement of capital within capitalism makes this historiography distinct. Putting capital at the center of the story stitches together divergent subhistories.” Yet as a reply Elizabeth Tandy Shermer noted, “an alarming trend in the scholarship lumped under the history of capitalism” is that a “focus on the world of finance actually undermines … ‘larger questions of everyday lives,’ because not all those questions are best answered through the world of finance.” “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of American History 101:2 (Sept. 1, 2014): 517 Google Scholar, 519. In his thoughtful afterward to Capitalism Takes Command, Jean-Christophe Agnew similarly wondered where the resistance of “wage workers, their households, and their communities” fit in the volume, noting that class conflict retreated to “a distant thunder,” producing an “anonymous” history with a strikingly altered, but also “flattened landscape,” 278–79. Michael Zakim and Gary John Kornblith, Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). See also Sklansky, Jeffrey, “Labor, Money, and the Financial Turn in the History of Capitalism,” Labor 11:1 (Mar. 20, 2014): 23–46 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A primary aim of the recent conference on “The Global E. P. Thompson,” was to interrogate the absence of labor history in particular, and social history more generally, within the history of capitalism. Batzell, Rudi, Beckert, Sven, Gordon, Andrew, and Winant, Gabriel, “E. P. Thompson, Politics and History: Writing Social History Fifty Years after The Making of the English Working Class,” Journal of Social History 48:4 (June 1, 2015): 753–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Nancy Fraser, “Behind Marx's Hidden Abode,” 68.

14 The classic and unsurpassed expression of this deep and varied research tradition is David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For a recent effort that can be read in this tradition, see Alexander Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

15 A powerful critique of the still hegemonic declensionist narrative comes from the work of James Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York: Routledge, 2001).

16 Fraser, “Behind Marx's Hidden Abode,” 66.

17 For many years, starting with Aileen Kraditor's foundational work, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920, research on the suffrage movement largely focused on the ideas and alliances of the national leadership. See Newman, Louise M., “Reflections on Aileen Kraditor's Legacy: Fifty Years of Woman Suffrage Historiography, 1965–2014,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14:03 (July 2015): 290–316 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Only recently has attention shifted to the significance of local political activity at the state and municipal level, providing a far richer picture of how women began to wield increasing electoral power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rebecca J. Mead, How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Lisa G. Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

18 A still-relevant review of the accomplishments limits of women's history through the 1980s is found in Linda Kerber, K., “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History,” The Journal of American History 75:1 (1988): 9–39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

20 Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Madonna Harrington Meyer, ed. Care Work: Gender, Labor, and the Welfare State (New York: Routledge, 2002).

21 Glenn, Forced to Care, 5.

22 Glenn, Forced to Care, 7.

23 Glenn, Forced to Care, 22, 24.

24 Glenn, Forced to Care, 91.

25 Glenn, Forced to Care, 96, 99.

26 Glenn, Forced to Care, 99.

27 Glenn, Forced to Care, 105.

28 Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Boston, 1880–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Elizabeth Hafkin Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of American Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987).

29 Katherine Leonard Turner, How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 7.

30 Turner, How the Other Half Ate, 40.

31 Turner, How the Other Half Ate, 40–45.

32 Greenwood, Jeremy, Seshadri, Ananth, and Yorukoglu, Mehmet, “Engines of Liberation,” Review of Economic Studies 72 (Jan. 2005): 109–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ramey, Valerie A., “Time Spent in Home Production in the Twentieth-Century United States: New Estimates from Old Data,” The Journal of Economic History 69:1 (Mar. 2009): 1–47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Turner, How the Other Half Ate, 17, 30–32.

34 Michael K. Rosenow, Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015). Demographic research, matters of life, sexual practice, fertility, and child-bearing, as well as death, as highlighted in Rosenow, is another important avenue for further work in the history of capitalism. From British history, a powerful work for U.S. historians to draw inspiration from is Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class, and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

35 Turner, How the Other Half Ate, 59.

36 Turner, How the Other Half Ate, 58.

37 Turner, How the Other Half Ate, 29–30.

38 Turner, How the Other Half Ate, 34.

39 Turner, How the Other Half Ate, 35.

40 Tracey Deutsch, Building a Housewife's Paradise: Gender, Politics, and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).

41 Turner, How the Other Half Ate, 139.

42 Turner, How the Other Half Ate, 139.

43 Stanley Engerman and Claudia Goldin, “Seasonality in Nineteenth Century Labor Markets,” Working Paper (National Bureau of Economic Research, January 1991), http://www.nber.org/papers/h0020.

44 Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man's Reward: Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 2014), 73.

45 Lewinnek, The Working Man's Reward, 12. Despite the ideological shadow obscuring women's labor as work, households remained productive spaces, and women provided the labor so that households could “sell subsistence,” through gardening, selling vegetables and eggs, taking in sewing or laundry, or taking in boarders. See the excellent article by DeVault, Ileen A., “Family Wages: The Roles of Wives and Mothers in U.S. Working-Class Survival Strategies, 1880–1930,” Labor History 54:1 (Feb. 1, 2013): 12 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Christine E. Bose, Women in 1900: Gateway to the Political Economy of the 20th Century, Women in the Political Economy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001). The invisibility of women's household labor to state officials was contested by early feminists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who wrote that “Women's work in the home differs from men's gainful pursuits in the market place” only in that it was “unpaid, unsocialized, and unrelenting.” Nancy Folbre, Who Pays for the Kids?: Gender and the Structure of Constraint, (New York: Routledge, 1994), 181.

47 Lewinnek, The Working Man's Reward, 152–53.

48 Lewinnek, The Working Man's Reward, 158, 170.

49 Karol K. Weaver, Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region, 1880–2000 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 5. More focused on families, see Emily K. Abel, Hearts of Wisdom: American Women Caring for Kin, 1850–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

50 Weaver, Medical Caregiving, 61, 65.

51 Weaver, Medical Caregiving, 62.

52 Weaver, Medical Caregiving, 66.

53 Weaver, Medical Caregiving, 74–76.

54 Weaver, Medical Caregiving, 76.

55 Weaver, Medical Caregiving, 76–78. The history of capitalism, attentive to social reproduction, might draw insights from the history of science and medicine. Further work on the history of childbirth, literally labor, from the perspective of the history of work would be most welcome. See, for example, Judith Walzer Leavitt, Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750 to 1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). A starting point for such a reconsideration can be found in the work of feminist political economist Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 1st ed. (New York: Autonomedia, London, 2004).

56 Wendy A. Woloson, In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

57 Woloson, In Hock, 89.

58 Woloson, In Hock, 86.

59 Woloson, In Hock, 106, 110.

60 Woloson, In Hock, 94.

61 Hyman, Debtor Nation; Levy, Freaks of Fortune; Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street.

62 Benson, Household Accounts, preface.

63 Benson, Household Accounts, 7.

64 Benson, Household Accounts, 169.

65 Household strategies have featured prominently in studies of capitalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in particular the work of Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). Social reproduction, as a category for understanding the political economy, makes it clear that work and gendered power remain central issues in the history of capitalism, in the twentieth century and beyond.

66 Benson, Household Accounts, 82, 93.

67 Benson, Household Accounts, 104–5.

68 Benson, Household Accounts, 116.

69 Benson, Household Accounts, 123

70 Benson, Household Accounts, 127, 133.

71 Benson, Household Accounts, 95.

72 Benson, Household Accounts, 138.

73 Benson, Household Accounts, 104.

74 Benson, Household Accounts, 104.

75 Cavalcanti, Tiago V. De V. and Tavares, José, “Women Prefer Larger Governments: Growth, Structural Transformation, and Government Size,” Economic Inquiry 49:1 (Jan. 1, 2011): 155–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carruthers, Celeste K. and Wanamaker, Marianne H., “Municipal Housekeeping: The Impact of Women's Suffrage on Public Education,” Journal of Human Resources 50:4 (Oct. 2, 2015): 837–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lott, John R. Jr. and Kenny, Lawrence W., “Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?,” Journal of Political Economy 107:6 (Dec. 1999): 1163–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Classics by now, but still worth careful consideration, are the works of Folbre, Nancy, “Exploitation Comes Home: A Critique of the Marxian Theory of Family Labour,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 6:4 (Dec. 1, 1982): 317–29Google Scholar. Folbre, Nancy, “Of Patriarchy Born: The Political Economy of Fertility Decisions,” Feminist Studies 9:2 (July 1, 1983): 261–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Folbre, N., “The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Economic Thought,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 16:3 (Spring 1991): 463–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Claudia Dale Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). The ration of women's earnings to men's was as low as 0.3 in the early nineteenth century, but rose from 0.46 to 0.56 in the years from 1890 to 1930, 62.

78 Lara Vapnek, Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 35.

79 Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

80 Benson, Household Accounts, 56.

81 Tomas Cvrcek, “When Harry Left Sally: A New Estimate of Marital Disruption in the U.S., 1860–1948,” Demographic Research 21:24 (Nov. 10, 2009): 719–58.

82 Cvrcek, “When Harry Left Sally”: Table 3, 738–41.

83 Benson, Household Accounts, 17.

84 Benson, Household Accounts, 17.

85 Benson, Household Accounts, 17.

86 Benson, Household Accounts, 22.

87 Benson, Household Accounts, 28.

88 Benson, Household Accounts, 30.

89 Benson, Household Accounts, 40.

90 Benson, Household Accounts, 46, 48.

91 Benson, Household Accounts, 48.

92 Beckert, Empire of Cotton; Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told.

93 Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Boston, 1880–1960 (New York: Viking, 1988).

94 Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 84–86.

95 R. Emerson Dobash, Women, Violence, and Social Change ( New York: Routledge, 1992), 4.

96 “Intimate Partner Violence: Consequences,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [Accessed December 19, 2015] http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/intimatepartnerviolence/consequences.html. The shifting extent and role of intimate partner violence in the labor of household social reproduction is a topic explored through the local police court records of Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Sheffield, and Liverpool in my dissertation in progress, “The Global Reconstruction of Capitalism: Class, Corporations, and the Rise of Welfare States, 1870–1930.”

97 Boundary struggles over social reproduction were often articulated in terms of struggles for control of borders in national states. Batzell, Rudi, “Free Labour, Capitalism and the Anti-Slavery Origins of Chinese Exclusion in California in the 1870s,” Past & Present 225:1 (Nov. 1, 2014): 143–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 Stanley, Amy Dru, “Republic of Labor,” Dissent 62:4 (2015): 160–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; James Livingston, Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York: Routledge, 2001).

99 Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

100 Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mother: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992); Orloff, Ann Shola, “Gendering the Comparative Analysis of Welfare States: An Unfinished Agenda*,” Sociological Theory 27:3 (Sept. 1, 2009): 317–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101 Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

102 Pleck, Domestic Tyranny, 137, 139.

103 Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers.

104 Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 450–51.

105 Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 452.

106 Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 465.

107 As Nancy Folbre writes, “Both the expansion of markets and the enlargement of state participation in the economy empowered women and youth just enough to destabilize the patriarchal organization of social reproduction, but not enough to generate a non-patriarchal system that might fairly and efficiently meet the needs of children and other dependents,” Folbre, Who Pays for the Kids?, 248.

108 Mead, How the Vote Was Won, 17.

109 Cavalcanti, Tiago V. De V. and Tavares, José, “Women Prefer Larger Governments: Growth, Structural Transformation, and Government Size,” Economic Inquiry 49:1 (Jan. 1, 2011): 155–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carruthers, Celeste K. and Wanamaker, Marianne H., “Municipal Housekeeping: The Impact of Women's Suffrage on Public Education,” Journal of Human Resources 50:4 (Oct. 2, 2015): 837–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lott, John R. Jr. and Kenny, Lawrence W., “Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?,” Journal of Political Economy 107:6 (Dec. 1999): 1163–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

110 Folbre, Who Pays for the Kids?, 119.

111 Exciting new work on gender and politics is already moving in this direction, unpacking a narrative focused on the ideas and alliances of the national suffrage movement to examine the emerging local political power and electoral practices of women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See, for instance, Mead, How the Vote Was Won; Materson, For the Freedom of Her Race.

112 Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 77.