Maurine Weiner Greenwald

Calling home : working-class women's writings : an anthology

This unique collection evokes the little-heard voices of the women who form the very underpinnings of our society.

From Hired Hand to Day Worker: Household Labor in the United States, 1800–1920

After decades of studies of industrial wage earners, historians have recently added other groups of workers to their research agenda. Sales clerks, office workers, telephone operators, nurses, and finally domestic servants are receiv ing long-overdue attention. Domestic service merits scholarly examination for a number of reasons. According to the federal census, household employment was the numerically most important field of work for women until 1940. Women are also impor tant in the history of household labor as employers and reformers. Technolog ical change and industrialization have redefined the nature of housework, as has been the case in other paid work, but in unique ways. Domestic service is also integrally related to the critical indexes of social change: urbanization, economic development, the abolition of slavery, immigration, and war at home and abroad. Domestic service can then be profitably examined from the points of view of work, family life, womens experience, ethnic, and black history.