The History of Women in the United States: Vol 5, part 1 The Intersection of Work and Family Life

Today, with the majority of adult women in the paid labour force, the issue of women's combination of work and family life-work and motherhood, in particular - is much in the news, as though it were an unprecedented phenomenon. Historians of women have shown, however, that women's combination of productive economic activity and childbearing has been more the norm than the exception in past time; only a small stratum of prosperous women, for a relatively short period of years in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were ever able to devote themselves wholly to child care and housekeeping. What is unprecedented, in our own time, is the extent to which women's work is performed outside of the household rather than in or around it, and for a wage or salary rather than for barter or "in-kind" services. The articles in the volume detail how women of various ethnic and racial groups have managed the necessary combination of economic and familial tasks, in both rural and urban settings. The coverage, from Native American and slave women in the early nineteenth century, through pioneers and immigrants, to modern college graduates in the mid-twentieth century, gives a compelling overview of the persistent weightiness and consequence of women's economic roles.