Domestic Work and the Labor Question in the Gilded Age United States

This paper reconstructs women's place in the "labor question" in the late 19th-century United States by restoring the centrality of debates over paid domestic work.  Drawing on labor investigations undertaken by journalists, social reformers, and government statisticians, in Boston, New York, and Chicago, this paper examines how middle-class reformers separated domestic service from other forms of wage labor and how working-class women contested this formulation. To the surprise of middle-class labor reformers, hundreds of thousands of women who needed to earn money chose jobs in "factory hell holes" rather than domestic positions in "good homes."  Some even went so far as to compare service to slavery; many rejected domestic work as violating their independence.  The material presented here restores the agency of working-class women and invites us to reconsider the content of women's labor history.  The earliest historians of women's work in the U.S., such as Edith Abbott, supported protective labor legislation for female industrial workers.  However, by arguing that productive labor had left the home and that women must inevitably follow by going "out to work," Abbott and others helped erase the ongoing reality of women's paid and unpaid domestic labor.  By adding domestic work back in to the history of women's labor we can better understand the intersecting formations of gender, class, and race across time and space.  We can also consider the consequences of reformers and the state establishing the identity of "workers" as those employed in industry, not in households.