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Women's Work

Industrial labor saw a shift in gender relationships. During the colonial period, gender played a significant role in the types of work performed, though both women and men shared many duties, including housework. Men often worked as farmers and may have chosen from a broad array of other professions from which to derive all or part of their incomes. The ability to earn a living was closely tied to masculine status, and was a condition of community membership.

Housewives during the colonial period worked in a restricted environment. Middle class and elite women often worked as household managers, and a great deal of women’s work focused on growing or preparing food. Most of their labor centered around the home and the immediate surrounding area. Their responsibilities included maintaining families and connected them to their communities through bargaining activities, charity activities, and the raising of children. Housework could often involve servants and family members who often performed many duties. As such, it is important to recognize households and adjacent work properties (e.g., gardens, milkhouses, laundries) as essential work centers.

Despite the relatively restricted conditions under which women worked during the colonial and early Federal periods, some women found opportunities to gain control of their working conditions. Widows often found themselves in charge of their late husband’s business, as in the case of Anne Catherine Green of Annapolis. Women also often found work as midwives or medics and performed such crafts as beer or cider brewing, textile processing, and teaching. Women may have worked in some capacity as craftspeople, producing such articles as shoes and straw hats under the supervision of male craftsmen in their household, but this service was not publicly recognized sometimes since men tended to conduct the business end of the production operation such as sales.

During the transition period, women initially continued to produce or contribute to the production of goods in this manner but industries, especially the textile industry, began to contract women to work on their own through a system known as piecework. Factory work eventually brought an increasing number of girls and women into the public workplace.

The owners of the mills instituted an ideology of paternalism that disciplined and regulated the gendered behaviors of workers. Initially, the operators of Boott Mills exclusively hired young unmarried girls from rural backgrounds as factory labor in their textile factories. These young women were housed together in boarding houses where they were closely watched. Behaviors such as “reading, singing, drinking, meetings, leaving work, and gambling” were prohibited as unsuitable to their performance as a disciplined labor supply.

The industrial era ushered in changes for children. While children always represented some degree of labor in performing errands or tasks, with industrial labor they became a portion of the workforce as well. Early nineteenth-century small-scale industry employed children. Child labor has been defined as the wage earning of boys and girls under the age of fourteen. Children represented a cheap labor force. Children were sometimes recruited from poorhouses, but a more ready supply was obtained from employing the entire family.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the working-class norm saw children finishing six years of elementary education prior to starting work unless the father was unable to work. Still, the employment of children and the nature of that labor was dependent on industry, social relations, family dynamics, and current economics. For instance, more children tended to leave school to work during periods of economic depression.

Shifts in beliefs about the role of children in work/labor are seen in material culture and offer a line of inquiry to understanding these beliefs within the context of industry and social relations. For instance, the presence of toys recovered from nineteenth-century working-class tenement deposits from the neighborhood of the Five Points in New York City suggests some children had a degree of freedom from work and could participate in childhood activities.

As the household-based production system of the eighteenth century was gradually replaced by the industrial system, women’s roles in production changed. Under the craft system, women maintained the household and raised children, but also spent time at home assisting their working husbands or male relatives produce goods. As new production technologies developed, many women continued to help produce goods in their homes, but in greater quantities and at a greater speed.

Many of the job openings were in occupations that can be seen as a commercialization of women’s household roles such as domestic service, textiles, or serving. Companies increasingly drew women and children out of the home and into labor centers, as they tended to be an inexpensive and efficient source of labor who readily took to factory discipline since few were skilled in a traditional craft.

Though women’s work experiences retained many pre-industrial features including primarily a sexual division of labor, their removal from the home significantly altered their societal roles. Companies also significantly altered the structure of daily events and chores by removing women and children, the traditional foundations of the home and family, from houses for a considerable amount of time during the day.

For other women, the shift to the industrial system corresponded with the rise in spatial divisions of labor with men working outside of the home, possibly in factory settings, and women managing the home and children. The dynamics of this shift changed most aspects of gender relationships and was tied to class identity. Still, whether or not a woman worked outside of the home impacted the time and energy she had to maintain her family and home, the complete removal of men from the household during the day also significantly altered the duties and time women spent maintaining their households.

Subsequently, changes in the performance of household labor practices occurred. Both at home and in the workplace, the change to an industrial economy altered gender identities, both masculine and feminine, in ways visible to archeological inquiry and essential to understanding current and past conceptions of gender identity.