Figuring Women's Work: The Cultural Production of Care and Labor in the Industrial U.S.

Abstract

Scholars conventionally begin their investigation of U.S. labor history with industrialization, focusing on forms of industrial labor, union organization, and labor legislation, to the exclusion of work performed in the “private sphere”: domestic, service, and care labor. But by presuming that these forms of “women’s work” were outside the market and the interests of labor, scholars obscure a vast array of historical possibilities that precede our present economic and social order. This dissertation reads against this prevailing tendency in labor and working-class studies to pose the question: what if the antecedents of our present culture and economy may be found not merely in the industrial past, but in the nineteenth-century home? After all, whether in the gig and service economies, or in white-collar workplaces, the vast majority of working people now engage in some form of service, care, and affective labor. Figuring Women’s Work seeks to denaturalize our relationship to work, revealing that labor is a historically contingent political concept in order to expand the scope of what counts as work and open further lines of inquiry into both working-class studies and U.S. literary and cultural studies. To pursue its hypothesis, this dissertation performs a genealogical investigation of service labor, beginning in the antebellum period when housewives and their servants struggled over the meaning of domestic labor in a slaveholding republic, and continuing through the early twentieth century as forms of women’s work were commercialized in the public sphere. In this context, social anxieties about the relationship among gender, race, economic dependency, and labor were articulated in literary forms like the seduction novel and servants’ tale, by leaders of social movements, and in legal battles that sought to distinguish market from domestic relations. These social tensions, each chapter argues, found symbolic resolution in the cultural idealization of a figure of labor—whether the celebration of the housewife as a pillar of democratic society, the Mammy as a selfless caregiver, the “office wife” as a model of industriousness and accommodation, or the sweated immigrant homeworker as a pitiable and romantic object of the philanthropic housewife’s charity. Reading literature written by working women, including Catharine Beecher, Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Willa Cather, Anzia Yezierska, and Alice Childress, I demonstrate how the figures of women’s work were forged in relation to each other in order to apprehend the elaborate and racially segregated system of women workers engaged in the labor of social reproduction. Whereas conventional approaches to labor treat domestic work and service as “invisible,” Figuring Women’s Work argues instead that the domestic labor relations that emerged in the antebellum home were described by a metaphorics of kinship, modeled on the myth of the “plantation family” that figured master and slave as parent and child. Within the cultural mythology that developed, housewives were imagined as “second mothers” to their childlike, foreign, and racialized charges, in a relationship of mutual obligation and affection. Even as women’s work was commercialized, and the labor of social reproduction was increasingly performed outside of the home, the notion that women should perform out of a sense of duty to others, rather than in pursuit of economic self-interest, persisted. The metaphorics of kinship, the idea that workers should see themselves as a “part of the family” was adapted to public workplaces like offices, businesses, and retailers. Now, a century later, the cultural imperative to perform an affect of “self-denying benevolence,” a demand first issued by nineteenth-century housewives to their slaves and servants, is widely felt by working people across industries and classes who, dominant cultural ideologies suggest, should labor out of “love” and love to labor.