Women in Industrializing America: The Legacy and Lessons of History

• Published in: Canadian review of American studies 1984-07, Vol.15 (2), p.199-209
• Main Author: Early, Frances H
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0007-7720; 1710-114X
• DOI: 10.3138/CRAS-015-02-06

Susan D. Becker. The Origins of the Equal Rights Amendment: American Feminism Between the Wars. Westport, Conn,: Greenwood Press, 1981.300 + vii pp. Daniel E. Sutherland. Americans and Their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States from 1800 to 1920. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981. 222 + xv pp. Winifred D. Wandersee. Women's Work and Family Values, 1920-1940. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981.165 pp. The industrial revolution in the West created a more rigid and extreme sociosexual division in society than had existed in pre-industrial times. The capitalist nature 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, arrogated for themselves the public sphere of production and statescraft, women were accorded the private sphere of reproduction and homemaking.1 A legitimizing ideology for the exclusion of women from participation in the economy and the modern state, except in a marginal way, emerged in the course of the nineteenth century stressing a separate but "complementary" woman's sphere centering on the role of Mother. Termed variously by his- torians as "the cult of true womanhood," "the woman-belle ideal," and "virtuous womanhood," 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-middle- class women were expected fully to experience.2