Home and Work

Reviews / Votes

A provocative analysis of women's long-ignored economic activity in the Early Republic and the rhetorics that surrounded it. Ideal for undergraduate courses in women's and labor history and essential for graduate students in American history. Philip Scranton, Rutgers University Boydston's thoughtful, stimulating, and carefully researched study has taken us a large step forward in our understanding of the history of early American women's work. Journal of Economic History Boydston's focus on women's unpaid labor in the home within the broad context of changes in the antebellum northern economy sets her work off from a myriad of other books...Boydston has achieved a goal that many women's historians strive toward: she has demonstrated that only through examining the 'women's sphere' in its most classic sense can we understand the shape of American history in the antebellum years. American Historical Review Boydston, in her quiet, analytical way, delivers suggestive or unconventional ideas at about one per page...Brief, brilliantly complex, consistently engaging, her book will influence scholars of the subject for years to come. Choice Boydston's study of housework stands out in the recent and growing literature on the subject for the details she provides, but more so for the profound questions she raises about the valuing of labor. Pennslyvania Magazine of History and Biography Boydston makes ambitious arguments that are predicted on a belief in a changing ideology. Journal Of The Early Republic This valuable study...provides a useful vehicle for assessing how the field has evolved in the United States since the end of the 1960's. International Review of Social History