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Journal of Women's History 11.3 (1999) 17-21



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Women, Work, and Family:
The View from the United States

Thomas Dublin


It has been twenty years now since the appearance of Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott's overview of the interaction of women's work and family life in England and France since the early eighteenth century. The passage of time and ensuing scholarship provide a vantage point for thinking about the issues they raised in Women, Work, and Family, as well as the current state of scholarship on the impact of the growth of industrial capitalism on women's family and economic roles.

As an American social historian interested in women's wage labor and the industrial revolution, I have been engaged with Tilly and Scott's ideas since they first began to develop their argument in a pair of journal articles that appeared in 1975 and 1976. 1 Their argument took exception to two perspectives that competed with one another at the time: one, associated with the work of historian Alice Clark, argued that the onset of industrial capitalism led to a decline in women's circumstances; the other, articulated by Edward Shorter, viewed as liberating for women the increase of their wage employment with the industrial revolution. 2 Both these approaches stressed dramatic change over time, although they were diametrically opposed in their characterization of this change. In contrast, Tilly and Scott chose to stress the continuities in women's work across the divide between preindustrial and industrial economies in early modern and modern Europe.

The first point worth making about their book is to express appreciation of the authors' audacity for writing a broad synthetic work, especially given the state of scholarship in the mid- and late 1970s. The first undergraduate course I taught was a survey entitled "Women and Work in the United States," offered to Wellesley College undergraduates in fall 1975. I had spent much of my previous summer reading in the Schlesinger Library, preparing for that course. There were a number of "old classics" in the collection, Alice Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck in European history and Edith Abbott and John R. Commons in American history, but very little from the perspective of the "new" social history. 3

Tilly and Scott staked out a wide interpretive framework, sought to ground their argument in what historical writing was available, introduced a great deal of structural evidence drawn from census enumerations of French and English cities and recent work in historical demography, and told a story that stressed historical continuities over the course of two [End Page 17] hundred and fifty years. While their book had a broad overall story line, they also emphasized variations in the circumstances of women influenced by geography, city size and economic base, class position, and stages in the life cycle.

I was at once impressed by Tilly and Scott's formulation and yet skeptical. Reading their work raised a number of questions in my mind: Did we really know enough at that point to support the broad argument they made for the transitions from a family economy to a family wage economy and then a family consumer economy? Did their conceptual model adequately permit agency for women as individuals or in their capacities as family members? Did their broad model constitute a "one-size-fits-all" approach that needed considerable tailoring in specific national settings?

Since the first appearance of Women, Work, and Family, I have written two books about working women in the nineteenth-century United States. Those two studies, Women at Work and Transforming Women's Work, explore the experiences largely of native-born white women in New England during the early industrial revolution. 4 They have permitted me to examine the usefulness of Tilly and Scott's conceptual framework and their interpretation of the interplay of women, work, and family within the industrial revolution. In this essay, I trace my own engagement with their analysis and reflect on the more general utility of their approach. I have become a sympathetic and...

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