Women’s Informal Market Work in Massachusetts, 1875–1920
Married women’s entrance into the market economy proceeded at a slow but steady pace between 1890 and 1910. That, at least, is the impression given by conventional census measures of the percentage with “gainful occupations,” which practically doubled in both the United States as a whole and in the heavily industrialized state of Massachusetts (see Table 1). This impression is misleading on at least two counts. Declines in self-reporting and enumerator bias may have overstated the increase in married women with gainful occupations. More important, dwindling opportunities for informal market activities, such as industrial homework, provision of services to boarders, and participation in a family farm or enterprise, may have countervailed increases in formal market participation. In Massachusetts, at least, married women’s specialization in non-market domestic labor probably increased.
Cloth, Butter and Boarders: Women's Household Production for the Market
This article presents an historical framework for analyzing Amer ican women's household production for the market from the late eighteenth cen tury to the early twentieth century. It argues that women's household production — particularly the making of cloth and butter and the taking in of boarders — was a crucial economic factor in both urban and rural families, maintaining with in them a simple commodity mode of production. With the disappearance of this type of household production women moved from a household income to a wage income and into the capitalist mode of production.
The Planter's Wife: The Experience of White Women in Seventeenth-Century Maryland
F OUR facts were basic to all human experience in seventeenth-century Maryland. First, for most of the period the great majority of inhabitants had been born in what we now call Britain. Population increase in Maryland did not result primarily from births in the colony before the late i68os and did not produce a predominantly native population of adults before the first decade of the eighteenth century. Second, immigrant men could not expect to live beyond age forty-three, and 70 percent would die before age fifty. Women may have had even shorter lives. Third, perhaps 85 percent of the immigrants, and practically all the unmarried immigrant women, arrived as indentured servants and consequently married late. Family groups were never predominant in the immigration to Maryland and were a significant part for only a brief time at mid-century. Fourth, many more men than women immigrated during the whole period.' These facts immigrant predominance, early death, late marriage, and sexual imbalance created circumstances of social and demographic disruption that deeply affected family and community life. We need to assess the effects of this disruption on the experience of women in seventeenth-century Maryland. Were women degraded by the hazards of servitude in a society in which everyone had left community and