Women, Work, and Family Revisited

When it first appeared in 1978, Women, Work, and Family by Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott was, as they claimed, "like a map of relatively uncharted territory." ¹ It remained so for some time. Nine years later, in the introduction to the second edition, its authors rightfully claimed that "If . . . new questions have been raised, new lines of research proposed and undertaken, they have taken off from rather than left behind the arguments and documentation in this book." ²

The publication of Women, Work, and Family made those of us struggling to do women's history look more critically at earlier theoretical postulations regarding women in the past. It did so by challenging prevalent conclusions about English and French women in preindustrial, industrializing, and industrialized times with documentation that proved such conclusions false. For instance, Tilly and Scott showed us how the misleading image of the mill girl as the definitive representative of women's experience with French and English industrialization hid a more complicated picture. They gave us good reasons to heed their warning that the practice of extrapolating from middle-class women's experience to the experience of women in general was not helpful. Drawing attention to serious gaps in existing data, Tilly and Scott also pointed the way toward such tasks as improving measurement of fertility or studying the role of alcohol in working-class life.

Tilly and Scott's deployment of economics, anthropology, and demography encouraged women's historians to enter productive partnerships with academic disciplines other than our own. Women, Work, and Family's careful examination of historical data not only in England and France as nations but also about different areas within these two countries set new standards for comparative studies by historians who toil in a variety of national and regional terrains. But it is the book's insistence that women's changing activity, in this case, work, must be studied within an overall context and its brilliant recognition of the family as the most important setting for females in preindustrial, industrializing, and industrialized eras which made Women, Work, and Family the unique gem that it is.

The close connection between family strategies and women's work has been and will continue to be a key point of departure for much subsequent scholarship. It certainly influenced the labor history of Japanese women I researched and wrote in the 1980s and early 1990s, as did the book's comparative framework.

But it is now 1999. Despite my continuing appreciation of Tilly and Scott's fine study, it no longer offers answers to the kinds of questions that plague me. And increasingly I am troubled by omissions in its topography of women's labor, both in the aggregate and in the different patterns observed in the cities studied.

I will deal with my second discontent first. Although nonremunerative productive labor, reproductive labor, and consumption by women and their families were integral parts of their analysis, Tilly and Scott's major focus was on wage-earning work. Compared to prior theorization, the book moved away from polarities and toward interconnections, as the authors claimed. But the sharp division erected between productive work and reproductive work undermined the interconnections. Welcome descriptions of mothers' reproductive labor in wage-earning families helped this reader understand something about the different kinds of "work" that made "work for pay" possible. But the study offered much less information about similar domestic contributions made by daughters and other family members of both genders. If reproductive work is not charted as clearly as productive work, the aggregate of women's work experience and the varieties of female work experiences may well be distorted. Perhaps, as Marilyn Waring argued in Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women Are Worth, the arbitrary division between productive work and reproductive work hides more than it reveals. ³ It may be time to drop this artificial distinction. Even in the (formerly?) hidebound discipline of economics...