Women in Industrializing America: The Legacy and Lessons of History

Women inIndustrializingAmerica: TheLegacyandLessonsof History Susan D.Becker.The Origins of the Equal RightsAmendment: American Feminism Between the Wars.Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.300 + viipp. Daniel E.Sutherland.Americans and Their Servants: Domestic Service in t~e United States from 1800to 1920.Baton Rouge: Louisiana StateUniversityPress, 1981.222 +xv pp. Winifred D. Wandersee. Womens Work and Family Values,1920-1940. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1981.165pp. Frances H. Early Theindustrial revolution in the West created a more rigid and extreme sociosexualdivision in society than had existed in pre-industrial times. The capitalistnature of the revolution not only brought into being a new class system,it also modified gender arrangements in important ways. As men, building upon their already substantial base of patriarchal power and privilege, arrogatedfor themselves the public sphere of production and statescraft, womenwere accorded the private sphere of reproduction and homemaking. 1 A legitimizing ideology for the exclusion of women from participation in theeconomy and the modern state, except in a marginal way, emerged in thecourseof the nineteenth century stressing a separate but "complementary" woman'ssphere centering on the role of Mother. Termed variously by historians as "the cult of true womanhood," "the woman-belle ideal," and ''virtuouswomanhood," the ideology associated with woman's sphere was class-based: the true woman in capitalist America was physically frail, emotionally volatile, intellectually limited, yet morally pure and innately maternal,a state of supposed grace which only middle-class or upper-middleclasswomen were expected fully to experience. 2 The fact that women were divided among themselves along class (and racial and ethnic) lines in industrializing American society is crucial to understandingthe past. Just as important, however, is awareness of a countervailingtendency : the efforts of women, as a separate group in American Canadian ReviewofAmerican Studies,Volume 15,Number 2,Summer1984,199-209 200 FrancesH.Early society, to comprehend and confront together their common oppression. History shows that the "ideal" sociosexual division of the industrial erawas never completely accepted by American women. The tension betweenthe forces pushing women apart and those drawing them together is an important theme of American women's history. It is a major concern, either explicit or implicit, in contemporary historiographic literature on women andwill serve as the thematic thread weaving together the books reviewed here. * * * The home-bound womanhood ideal notwithstanding, many womenwere gainfully employed outside the home in post-Civil War America. Oneimpor· tant area of employment for women was domestic service: according toDavid Katzman, in Seven Days a Week, in 1870one out of every two wage-earning women labored full-time in the homes of more fortunate middle-class women. 3 Katzman ably demonstrates that the class nature of the society, reinforced by the class-based ideology of true womanhood, effectively destroyed bonds of womanhood and sisterhood between servant and mistress. In nineteenth· and early twentieth-century America domestic servants perceived themselves to be, and were perceived byothers to be, among the most degraded representa· tives of America's working class and of American womanhood (pp. 161-83). The most recent study of domestic servitude should build upon and extend the scholarly knowledge already available. Disappointingly, David Suther· land's Americans and their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States from 1800to 1920breaks no new ground. In the preface Sutherland declares that his book will concern "American domestic service in its broadest sense: servants, employers, reformers, and their mutual servant problems" (p.xiii, emphasis mine). Mutual, because according to Sutherland, "Traditionally. the servant problem had been defined as a shortage of good servants. But there was also a shortage of good employers. Both servants and employers expected too much, both gave too little. This created servant problems without end" (p. 8). Sutherland describes the duties and evolving natureof domestic service in urban areas east of the Mississippi. He discusses the expectations of mistresses and servants, provides a statistical occupational profile of servants in the period 1870-1920,expounds upon the servant/ mistress relationship, and details the various attempts of reformers (employ· ers or their representatives) to solve "the servant problem." The study con· eludes with what the author deems to be a happy ending, the introduction on a large scale of labor-saving machinery into middle...