Women's Work, Part 2: That's Women's Work (A History)

Episode Topic: That's Women's Work (A History)

How did some kinds of labor in the U.S. – care work, teaching, and domestic chores, for example – come to be seen as properly the concern of women, while other kinds of work, like business careers and scholarly pursuits, became coded masculine? In this episode, listen in to a conversation with Dr. Dan Graff, Director of the Higgins Labor Program at Notre Dame, Professor of History, and teacher of the popular course, “Gender at Work in U.S. History,” to consider where Americans’ idea of gendered “separate spheres” came from and its lasting power.

Women’s Work is sponsored on ThinkND by the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise & Society at the University of Notre Dame and Notre Dame Women Connect.

Featured Speakers:
- Chris Hedlin, University of Notre Dame
- Daniel Graff, Ph.D., Director of the Higgins Labor Program, University of Notre Dame

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/8c6075.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Women's Work. 

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Transcript

Introduction to Women's Work Series

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 0:06

Welcome to Women's Work, a series about the working lives and literary works of U. S. women. In this series, we'll take up questions like, where did Americans get the idea that certain types of work are properly women's work, while others are properly the sphere of men? How is work gendered in women's literature, women's work or works in another sense? How are feminist writers and thinkers recasting what it means to do meaningful work? I am your series host, Chris Hedlund. I teach and help direct the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise, and Society. The program brings together students who are studying both business and something in the arts, humanities, or social sciences, and helps them ask big questions about work and the economy. Questions like, what makes work meaningful? Or, what makes an economy just? This particular ThinkND series is based on an undergraduate course I have developed by the same name, Women's Work. The course and the series are made possible through the support of ThinkND, ND Women Connect, the Notre Dame Alumni Association, and a digital learning sprint that I received through the Office of Digital Learning and their campus partners. If you find the content that we're talking about here interesting, I hope that you'll consider interacting with the Women's Work course in other ways, such as volunteering to do an informational interview with a student, or participating in our shared READ program in conjunction with the alumni group Notre Dame Women Connect. You can find more information about those opportunities and others through the ThinkND website. All right, let's talk about women's work. So I am very pleased to be joined today by Dr. Dan Graff, director of the Higgins Labor Program at Notre Dame's Institute for Social Concerns, and also a professor of the popular course Gender at Work in U. S. History. I've asked Dan to join me today to talk about the origins in the U. S. of women's work as a concept. So where did our culture today get the idea that Some types of labor like child rearing, domestic chores, or teaching are properly the concern of women, while other kinds of work, say business careers or scholarly pursuits, have been coded masculine. How have Americans views of work as gendered changed over time, and what might the past teach us about reducing gender biases in our workplace? Now, I knew that as a labor historian, Dan would be just the person to Think through these questions with me. Dan, thanks so much for being here.

Understanding Labor History

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 2:31

thanks for having me, Chris. I should say I have a joint faculty appointment. one foot in the Institute for Social Concerns and one foot in the History Department, where I specialize in U. S. labor history, as you said. I'm excited for the conversation. Interested in learning.

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 2:46

Lovely, lovely. So before we dive into the real material, I want to start with a question about you. As you just said, you are a labor historian. So tell us, what does that mean?

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 2:56

Labor history as a field, is really about the study Not just of work itself, but really the study of those who work for others. labor history is a subfield of the larger discipline of history. It's rooted in, and was birthed in the era of the 1960s and 70s when a lot of the, what we call the new social history emerged. The, the commitment of historians to not just study generals and presidents and wars and diplomacy, but also ordinary people. sometimes it was called history from the bottom up, and whether that was women's history, labor history, African American history, and other subfields, they really came out of, the social tumult of the 1960s and 70s when there were lots of questions about who counts in American history and what does it mean to try to envision and enact an egalitarian, inclusive, and democratic society. So historians went back to the past and started looking at some of those questions. more historically. And so labor history is the study of work. It's also the study of how people have thought about work and the meanings people have, attributed to it. And it's a great field. the vast majority of history, people's working lives. People's awake lives have been spent performing work of some kind or another, and society doesn't function without work. really work intersects with everything, and if you study labor history, you're learning a lot about, a particular place, time, its politics, its culture.

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 4:33

So cool. So can you share then the course that you teach that we're focusing on today, the Gender at Work in U. S. History? where did your inspiration for that course come from? Like, how did you become interested in that? And then, can you give us the, bird's eye summary? What is that course about?

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 4:47

I've been teaching it for about five or six years. actually received a course development grant from the Gender Studies program here at Notre Dame. But the origin was that I was increasingly interested in, and my students were, when I taught labor histories that were more conventionally structured and conceptualized, centered maybe on the rise and fall of the labor movement, maybe, the sort of construction and then destruction of slavery. the sort of narratives of women's work and the sort of ideas about gender seem to follow a much different timeline, and didn't map very well all the time on these more conventional ways of thinking about labor history, and as I struggled to update my courses like U. S. labor since 1945 or American labor history to 1945, found that it was really hard to dislodge that old narrative. and be much more inclusive, especially of women's labor and their perspectives. So I decided I needed to de center, the familiar anchor points in labor history and, develop a new course that would then, I hoped, send me back to, transform the way I taught about labor history more generally, which it really has. So that, that's the origin of the interest. I would also say a personal interest. I have two daughters. those are my two children who are now young adults, and I was really interested in their experiences, their opportunities, and trying to get a handle the history of gender at a time in the last, 20 years when I think there's been lots of changes and destabilizations in traditional gender roles. And I felt my students were interested in the same thing. So the course, Gender at Work in U. S. History, has a double meaning. It is a labor history course, so we look at the history of the relationship between work and gender, basically from colonial encounters to the near present. So it's a really long in history. But then it's also, the term gender at work has the second meaning that gender has been omnipresent, even if contingent and contested throughout American history, so that gender is always there, structuring the way people think, structuring the way they behave, structuring the they, envision, how they fit in. And, I wanted my students to understand the centrality of gender throughout American history, continuities as well as changes, and then focus on the main theme of, gender operating at work, whether that's in the unpaid workplace of the home, the paid, workplace of the factory, and all points in between.

Challenges in Studying Labor History

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 7:31

So cool. I'm struck as you're speaking about how you talk that like a focus on gender was challenging what you were seeing in previous is it's the key touch points within labor history. And then also that labor history is challenging some of the key touch points and Regular history, if we want to call it that, focus on rulers and wars and such. What do you see, what are some of the challenges of studying workers, and especially then thinking about women workers within U. S. history?

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 8:00

Yeah, so any, study of the past is a challenging and the further back you go, the harder it is to find sources, right? The bread and butter, of historians methodology is seeking out an archive, finding sources produced in the past so that we can figure out what was going on. When you look at, workers. that's bigger challenge than looking at a study of a prominent historical figure like Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, left voluminous records,

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 8:31

Sure.

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 8:31

and public, who worked for others, Didn't have the time, to be leaving records, didn't have the resources to be doing that, and often didn't have, the literacy to do that as well, depending on when and where we're talking about. So the challenge for labor historians, especially because we want to understand the experiences and perspectives of those who did work for other people, It can be a real challenge because they don't have, we don't have the diaries, we don't have the letters, we don't have, just much of the sources, even newspapers, the sort of basic core of doing 19th century U. S. history, there are, Some labor papers, and there are newspapers that have discussions of work, but still the focus of who's doing the writing and reporting and editing, as well as the topics covered, are largely not through the eyes of working people. So the challenge is finding sources, and then Figuring out how to read sources through the eyes of people who are observing or commenting on or complaining about working people. And you have to then read those against the grain. A major source in the early 19th century, for example, are British travelers. who just flooded the United States and wrote tons of what we would call travel logs, travel guides, reporting back to those, middle class and upper class readers in Britain, what is going on in this crazy new republic of the United States that broke away from us. And that's a great source for, with working people because these elite British travelers were perpetually shocked, at, and even outraged at the interactions they would have with working people who they expected deference from, and an understanding of class relations where they felt they were not receiving that. So those are great sources, but again, they're through the eyes. of, a population that has very particular ideas about who's supposed to do what work, how those people are supposed to act. And, so it's a challenge not just to find sources about working people, but also responsibly read them to try to get an understanding of what was really happening. Oftentimes, working people in the American past show up when they cause somebody else trouble. in a court record, in a newspaper editorial, in a travelogue, in a law, right? so yeah,

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 11:02

Totally. How interesting. It strikes me as you're speaking that, I hear you saying that, finding an archive of texts that will represent the folks you're studying is one of the difficulties. I'm also struggling with that. Struck that potentially defining work, could be a challenge that, like thinking about work as a moving target, like something that's always contingent. can you offer insights into that? Maybe specifically thinking about in the context of gender, how you would see defining work itself as a challenge?

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 11:30

And you had asked earlier, and I'll link it to this, you had asked earlier, especially is it harder to find women workers sources? And the answer is yes. the early America and the young United States, a very patriarchal society, where, The culture was organized in the households, those households were headed by men who were designed to hold the property, and possess the labor of their dependents, the term was called, which would be their wives and children and anyone else working for them. Men are much more prevalent in public sources because they're operating in politics, in this earlier era than women. So the challenge of finding women's voices is even greater than finding working men's voices. but I would say, societies throughout human history have been organized around gender. Gender has been a fundamental way, that the society was organized. What it meant to be a man, what it meant to be a woman, what they were supposed to do, how they were supposed to act, how they were supposed to dress. these were very fundamental ways that people ordered society and understood it. one of the really fascinating, things to, to realize the contingency of gender is that while gender has almost been omnipresent throughout human history, that like every society seems to have an understanding of gender, what that has meant in those different societies at different times, Has varied widely. So when English colonists encountered Algonquin peoples, say, in what became Virginia in the 17th century, they were really weirded out by the understandings of gender and what men and women were supposed to do in terms of work. societies in North America, for the most part, women were assigned the role of not just reproductive labor that was familiar to the English of giving birth, raising children, home, feeding, families, but also growing the crops that fed those families. So women were responsible for, and in a sense, owned the corn crops that fed their cultures. And that was an affront to English men in particular, who saw themselves as responsible for farming, in the English imaginary and in households in England. Women would work gardens, near the house. They would grow crops too that would feed their families. But the sort of staple crops or the major crop that might be commercially viable and traded and sold was men's work. So there's a real disconnect here. Both these societies have a strong sense of gender, and both were completely alienated by the other side's understanding of gender, which they thought was an affront to order and civilization. so that, that's like a classic example where you see the clash, of, understandings of gender, and then using those understandings as a way to defend domination and replacement. the English decided, look, these Indian peoples are uncivilized because the men are lazy and let their women grow the crops, so they don't really have a right to this land because they're not creating a civilized, Christian society where men do this work and women are designed to do other work. So gender is wrapped up in the colonial project and conflicts over land and resources. and the other thing I would say, if I can elaborate more, Chris, in thinking about early American households is that, There was a strong division of labor so that men worked more, what they would say, abroad if they were, say, a sailor and went on ships, if they worked, hauling timber or cutting down timber, they would work abroad from the home more than women would, and that included growing crops on the property if they had it, and women were designed to stay closer to the home, taking care of children, END CREDITS growing, I'm sorry, yeah, growing garden food, but also cooking and cleaning and, sewing and mending. but so there was a clear gender division of labor in early American society, there was a Strong understanding that men and women were both working. It's you do this work, I do this work. and women's work was always quite adaptable too. So if a man was away from the home, the woman was seen as the deputy husband, the wife of that household who was able to step in and represent the man. if her husband was a merchant say, or trading, crops for other goods. but there was a real sense of, everybody's busy and everyone's working. So that's something that actually changed in the 19th century after the revolution where the understandings of work and who's doing it actually become transformed. so strong gender division of labor in colonial and early America, but a recognition that, Both genders are working for the household success.

The Story of Lana Sawyer

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 16:42

I want to talk about the 19th century in a bit because that's my own interest, but I want to dwell for just a touch longer on like the early republic, so late 1700s.

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 16:51

Yeah,

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 16:52

from talking with you in the past that you've, you shared a story about a seamstress, that Lana Sawyer, I believe, was the name. Can you share that story with us and what does it tell us about women workers in the early republic?

Class and Gender in Early America

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 17:04

John Wood Sweet has written a wonderful, book called The Sewing Girls Tale. and ama I'll use the word amazing more than, wonderful. Because it, it's a troubling story about the rape of a young, a working class woman, Lana Sawyer in New York City in the 1790s, right after the birth of the nation. But the amazing thing about it is that this was an era when, women, very rarely took men to court, for rape, especially if the alleged rapist was someone from what was called the gentleman class, and this was the case in this trial. So Lana Sawyer was a young single woman. Living in her parents household, working as a seamstress, contributing to her family's subsistence. I met a man on the street who then, fooled her, adopted a false identity, ended up keeping her away from her home and raping her. And then what was interesting is that she refused to stay quiet or go quiet and enlisted her stepfather, whose help she needed, in this very traditional patriarchal society, needed his help in order to file a claim, which they did. And it was a very, Notorious trial because the, the rapist was found not guilty by a jury of his peers. And his peers, because at this point, the legal system was very much directed toward protecting property interests and those who owned property. And so he was found not guilty by a jury that was largely made up of other gentlemen. and yet that was not where the story ended. Because working class New Yorkers were very upset about this trial, it surfaced in the newspapers only after there were political organizing and the tearing down of a brothel where this incident had taken place by a group of working class men. So what was really interesting is it's a new thing in all sorts of ways. It's a novel lawsuit that a working class woman would accuse an elite man. It's novel in the sense that it does show up in the press because normally newspapers wouldn't cover something like this. They might cover if a, an enslaved man was accused of raping a white woman. That would make the newspapers in 1790s New York, but not a gentleman's rape. That would be left private. So this made the papers because it's spilled out into the streets. The interesting thing is that Lana Sawyer seems to show some. new agency in the new republic of women pushing for rights, especially working women. the irony and somewhat of the tragedy here is that Lana Sawyer herself became more invisible as the trial and then the aftermath went on and her stepfather who was also behind the lawsuit and behind the sort of political activity, some called mob activity, that destroyed some property in the wake of this. was, he and other working class men saw this as an affront on their own honor, their ability to protect their own family members. So it became a story of working class men versus elite men. and Lana Sawyer disappeared from the historical record and the historian was unable to find her after the trial, except a very couple mentions, and she moved out of New York to Philadelphia. So it's a wonderful portrait of the way gender operated at this time in American history, showing both The constraints on women's activity generally, but also cracks in the seam of the labor systems and the relationship of working people to politics. and I assigned it for the first time this semester. It's a pretty new book. My students ate it up. it was the first book that we read. So I was really gratified that they got a lot out of it. At least two of them told me they purchased the book for their mothers after they read it. And I thought that was really cool.

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 21:08

High praise.

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 21:09

Yeah.

Women’s Influence Beyond the Household

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 21:10

Cool. Yeah, one of the, it's just striking me as you're talking that like one of the themes that seems to come out of this text is that It's impossible to think robustly about gender and work without adding class as a variable, maybe we would say race then too as a variable and I know one of the other texts that you teach in the class, is Seth Rockman's Scraping By, which describes working class Baltimore and the rise of the domestic service industry, roughly same era, I believe. so can you describe some of the phenomenon that Rockman is observing?

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 21:42

Yeah. Another great book. A more challenging read because it is very ambitious in what that book is trying to do. So it, while The Sewing Girl's Tale focuses strictly on the 1790s, a sort of moment snapshot in time in New York City, Seth Rockman's book is from the 1790s, basically to the, through the 1840s. So it looks at that era. of the sort of four decades or so after the American Revolution, when the United States is very young and growing economically at a very rapid clip. And as Rockman shows us, a place like Baltimore is one of those headquarters of the new American nation where, Lots of vibrant economic opportunity, lots of people seizing new opportunities in this new political environment, really rejecting deference to old ways of doing things. And so the story is often told this is such a the opening of American society and people moving physically all over the place as well as moving up and down the class ladder because, all the old constraints seem to be gone. And there's the deployment of new technology, the deployment of new ideas about how to organize labor and make money. But what Rockman does in the title Scraping By, suggests this. He's what does that story look like if we focus on those who were considered unskilled workers, whether those were, men working on dredging the harbor, in day labor positions, those enslaved African American men and women who were working as domestic servants for others. those free African Americans because Baltimore, was in a slave state, but, had the country's largest free black population coming out of the revolution, because Maryland didn't end slavery statutorily, but lots of Maryland slave owners. their slaves out of a spirit of revolutionary equality, and a lot of enslaved Americans claimed their own freedom by running away during the revolution or in the post revolutionary years. so he looks at un so called unskilled labor, and really tries to look at all these different populations and how they navigated this new economy of opportunity. And what he says is I'm not saying This isn't an era of rapid economic growth and transformation and opportunities for some, but it was contingent upon the denial of those opportunities for others. And so when we think of America becoming this open and free society, He's if you worked for someone else and you didn't have a skill, that didn't really apply to you. women's wages and job opportunities in the new republic were very limited. So more and more women had to find in cities wage labor jobs in order to help sustain their families, but they were really relegated to domestic service primarily or working as seamstresses he really shows the intersections, interestingly, of the new capitalism, you might say, that is increasingly dependent upon wage labor or features wage labor, which was new at the time. This idea that you hire someone to work for you for a certain number of hours and you pay them for that rather than owning the person, it's labor temporarily if it's an indentured servant or permanently if it's an enslaved person. So wage labor itself is new, but what Rockman shows it's some of the old, hierarchical relationship between master and slave and husband and wife, was really exported onto the new capitalist economy so that these unskilled wage laborers were not expected to have many rights. They could be terminated at will. They, didn't have an expectation of upward mobility. it's a complicated story. That really challenges the students and others, I would say, to think about when we tell the story of the rise of American democracy and more and more men getting the right to vote in this era. How does that gel with the continuities of sort of denials of market freedom that many workers were experiencing? And not every story is the same. It mattered if you were enslaved or free, if you were a woman or a man, if you were a white or a but they're all interacting within this, open, unsettled environment where employers, or masters really hold all of the cards under the law and custom.

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 26:19

Yeah, thanks, Dan. Yeah, can we I'm going to turn from that to the 19th century for a bit. I, so I'm a 19th century literary historian as you know by training. so when I hear the words gender and work, like the phrase separate spheres like pops into my head like instantaneously. so I just, I want to think with you a little bit about the ideology of separate spheres, like where did it come from, lasting power, whether it's, So maybe starting place, can you summarize, what would you say if you were to summarize the ideology of separate spheres in the 19th century? What are we talking about? Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

The Evolution of Women's Work in the 19th Century

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 26:56

the sort of persistence and transformation of gender identities in the new Republican period. separate spheres is an ideology. that arose to help explain and celebrate the growing, primarily Northern middle class, rooted economy, of aspiring merchants and lawyers and their wives. And Separate Spheres was a model that like, took the traditional understanding of a gender division of labor. Men are out and abroad and public facing, women are private facing, taking care of the home. invested that with a new, ideology that was really, men go out and abroad and they work for wages, or they derive incomes. They become the breadwinners in the proper household while women have no role in the, in the public sphere. in terms of voting, in terms of participating in politics, or in an ideal scenario in terms of labor market participation. So this is like a middle class ideology for the properly functioning, household. it's like taking the old patriarchal household, but the ideological change there is that In the successful households, women are asked to do less and less traditional work that they did in the colonial era because as the economy commercializes and more things are commodified, who can are purchasing things like soap and candles and clothing, outsourcing from the household, that form of domestic labor, they're still performing. The domestic labor of cooking, cleaning, raising children. So there's a lot of continuities, but there's also some real change in affluent households. And that invests the separate spheres idea with this new understanding that somehow In a successful household, men are working, and you know they're working because they're leaving the home and making money, right? So cash is what shows you're a worker, in a sense. While women staying home, and not wage working, not engaging in the outer sphere and having perhaps more time to spend on things like child care and maintaining the house, but not engaging in production of goods, suddenly There's not just a gender division of labor, but a gender definition of labor, so that men work, and women in proper households don't work. care is not work. Child care is nurturing and loving and, investing in the next generation to replace you. and so is taking care of your family by feeding them, Perhaps by keeping their clothes clean, these sorts of things. But so somehow stuff that had always been done by women in the household, but would have been seen as work. That's part of the work. A woman's work is never done is a phrase that dates back to the colonial era. in this new gender separate spheres, ideology. The proper woman is not working because what she's spending her time on is not work. And also that applied in, in what you might call the religious and voluntary realms. This is a rise in the early to mid 19th century of middle class and upper class women, starting to devote time to their societies, not just their households. So this is the irony of being in this private, separate sphere. They start to see they're responsible for the communities. moral stature, the communities and their faith communities and larger communities, proper functioning. So they get involved in things like trying to wipe out prostitution, worrying about, people drinking too much, perhaps engaging in things like anti slavery activism, or, fighting against Indian removal. so it, The politics point in different directions, but these women are working in their homes, but it's not called work. And then they're working outside their homes, but in, areas that they're not paid, where they're doing volunteer work, in their churches and in their organizations. And so this is the origin of where we get this idea that men work and women don't. you still get when I ask my students, what do your parents do for a living? My dad's a lawyer. My mom doesn't work. that's less and less familiar in Dual income, culture, but you still will hear that, and they don't mean to be negative. They've just inherited the idea that a stay at home mom or stay at home parent is not a worker, and that's one of the things I try to get. my students understand that the roots of that thinking are in the 19th century, when a very aspiring, middle class is starting to define what's proper for a household. and most American households couldn't match that. adult women, wives, and daughters are engaging in wage labor increasingly, if intermittently, and over time, and different, sporadic bursts. so it's an ideology as much as it's a reality. and it's really a major shift. And my advisor, Gene Boydston, my beloved late advisor, historian at the University of Wisconsin, was the one who really articulated this 19th century North from a, Understanding that there was a gender division of labor to an actual gender definition of labor. ever since that ideological move, women who've worked for wages or in the public sphere have faced the challenge of overcoming that somehow they're out of place. They're not in the right place because that violates that old separate spheres ideology of what a proper woman, should be doing. That was

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 32:55

Okay.

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 32:55

long.

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 32:56

no. it's so interesting to me. I think the, thinking about that, yeah, the way that during the 19th century, work that women had been doing all along, child care, chores, things around the house, then suddenly, like you said, became seen as not work. it's nurturing. It's loving, a word that's also coming to mind. I think about separate spheres as influence. So that like women being told like what is the, like in fact, so I'm thinking about Catherine Beecher, who's a key figure for advancing this ideology that In fact, women have, it might seem like they're limited in what they can do, but they have the most important role of all, which is influence. yes, men are the ones who will go out and vote and they'll become the doctors and the lawyers and whatever, but women, you are raising them as children and preparing for them for those roles. so thinking about a reframing of what women's most important role in society is in terms of that. influence rather than maybe something out in the public sphere. I'm curious, I know when I talk about this with students, one of the questions students will ask is is this feminist? so like thinking about on the one hand, this seems like it's celebrating women, like at a time when in general labor that's happening in the households is the Kind of invisible or denigrated it's carving out a place that like women are in charge. They have the influence. They're in fact doing the most important work. on the other hand, it feels like influence is drawing the short straw when it comes to power in society. so what would you say to that question if a student asked you like, so is separate spheres, is this a feminist ideology?

Republican Motherhood and Its Impact

Catherine Beecher and Women's Activism

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 34:24

I would definitely do the historian's typical answer. Actually, it's complicated. and I would say it's, it points in both directions. in some ways, separate spheres ideology of the 19th century emerged from what historian Linda Kerber, has called Republican motherhood, this notion that emerged out of the fight for American independence. where patriot men asserted that politics was a men's world, a men's realm, we might have thrown off the king and are establishing a republic, but a republic really should be about, male citizens, debating politics. Public and political ideas. but, there was a lot of agitation by women to rethink their role in the Republic in this hothouse of all these debates about citizenship and the old historian's line that the American revolution wasn't just about, home rule. against Britain, but it was also about who should rule at home, which is why you have all these debates about, and whether it should be ended at this time, and whether working men who didn't own property should be able to participate in politics, and they, generally successfully were able to win that argument over a handful of racialized very much. So the Republican motherhood idea that women in the. The home were endowed with new importance because a republic, future was contingent upon successfully teaching the next generation of men and women were charged with, raising the men, young men, their children, their sons, and their households. So Republican motherhood cut both ways too, right? imbues, women with a new role, but it's firmly within the privacy of the household. And you could say that continues up in this separate spheres model, but. Influence was something, as you were saying earlier, if the idea was it was also supposed to take place in privacy in the household, not in public, that were, it spilled over, right? the people who articulate ideologies of hierarchy and exclusion in, in a republic like the United States have rarely been able to control those ideas or how they're used or interpreted by others. And, John Adams said the famous line that the contagion of liberty during the American Revolution flowed in unintended directions. And by that he meant, unintended by him and the fellow signers of the Declaration of Independence, but he might have meant his wife, Abigail, who was a pretty firm, arguer for including women in the republic and re envisioning their role. but he was seeing this everywhere, these debates. I think in terms of, influence lots of women. The fact that women in these northern cities in particular begin forming all these organizations to try to perfect or reform society or protect the vulnerable, that is already a feminist sign that women should have the power to engage in those public debates. They might say, we're not trying to get elected to Congress, but we are, to influence our husbands and sons also means we have the right to influence our church communities our city councils and our states. And so there is a movement to push beyond. Separate spheres starts to get pushed on. though it's like in the name of that ideology. We're not saying we're the same as men. We're saying that we are better than men and care about the moral guardianship of the nation. And therefore we need to claim that obligation and right. And for some women that led to aggressive, assertive anti slavery politics, to women's rights, protest movements and other things. For others. It was a much more, like, how do I do this within the confines of the separate spheres model? Catherine Beecher ends up representing one pole of that, but she herself is an illustration of those tensions, because early in her career, she was at the forefront of this, women's campaign against Native American removal during the, Jackson presidency. And, it's called by the historian Mary Hershberger, who did a great article on this years ago, the first national women's petition campaign where women signed petitions to Congress, asking them not to, push, Native Americans off their which is what was happening and what ended up happening. And Catherine Beecher was one of the handful of women, she wrote this petition, but kept her name anonymous. And this spread like wildfire across the country, and women in all sorts of communities were sending petitions to Congress, alarming many congressmen. This has never been done before, why are women doing this? What are their men not doing that are keeping their women away from politics? and it was nearly successful as part of the movement to stop Indian removal. It didn't, but it led many women, including Beecher's sister, Harriet Beecher, later Stowe, to, get very much more actively involved in fighting slavery and engaging in more directly political things. Beecher herself had what I think we can only call as a nervous breakdown, trying to keep her identity secret and not be outed as the originator of this campaign, and she removed herself from the effort, re emerged a couple of years later as who you were describing earlier, Chris, which was this leading, public intellectual, of all things, on the need for women not to be involved in politics, that is not a role that they should have, and including fighting slavery. She herself, and this is, one of these classic ways that women fighting against, women's expansion of rights in public, you might argue somebody like Phyllis Schlafly is a more modern version of this, were very public political figures arguing against their own genders, or even need to be involved in that realm. It's a cautionary tale, I think, about do we think about what's feminist or not? And we need to be very careful about, realizing what feminism looked like in this period versus today. Lots of people for women's workers rights in the late 19th, early 20th centuries not fighting to end gender sex typing of jobs. They were fighting to improve women's workers hours and pay within those sex typed jobs. And they weren't even attempting to eliminate what you might call the gender division of labor in households where they were responsible for all the unpaid labor, even if they were working for wages, but they were interested in trying to push for things like child care and other ways to support. So I've had students ask me, are those women feminists, or only the ones who were directly challenging women's exclusion, say from the elite professions or getting into male typed work? Are those only those considered feminists? And, My answer is no. They're both feminist in very different ways and often fighting each other, throughout the 20th century.

The Industrial Revolution and Women's Labor

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 41:52

Yeah, I feel like talking to students about multiple feminisms is just something that feels hard to, overemphasize how important that is. I loved when you mentioned the line about, ideas are hard to control, right? That, you could think you're doing one thing and then it can be taken up in a lot of different ways. I was also struck when you said that the idea, There's like a mismatch between idea of separate spheres versus what's happening in reality. and it strikes me that like just separate spheres as an idea or a story had a pretty limited scope. Like this made a lot of sense to Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Basically white middle class Protestant New Englanders, but outside of that, this didn't really match up with many women's experiences of the world, people were already out working, and I'm thinking about how the, cry about women's place being within the home, nurturing the children is happening at the same time as the Industrial Revolution. So I guess, can you reflect a little bit on that? Basically at this time in the 19th century, how many women actually are working inside the home versus outside of it? How did the industrial revolution change the way people were thinking about women's work in the U. S.?

Challenges and Progress in Women's Wage Labor

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 42:54

Yeah, so in some ways, I think, women were always working inside homes, right? And they continue to do that. So that didn't really change for working people. who couldn't afford to hire other working class women to work in their homes. women's wage labor participation rates do, go up in the 19th century, largely for unmarried women. throughout the 19th century, say by like the turn of the 20th century, like 20 percent of, American women at any given age, given point, I think, are, engaging in wage labor, but it's always so determined by age and, marital status and if one had children or not. So it's, it, you really have to look at it in terms of these multiple factors. In general, you could say from the industrial revolution up to the 21st century, You could chart a gradual path of more and more women engaging in wage labor. and that's definitely true, but there've been periods of upsurge, like World War II, retrenchments after the war, where actually fewer women were wage working in the early 1950s than had been in the twenties and thirties briefly. But the overall story is. More and more women participating in paid labor. If you're looking at a group like African American women, they were always higher than white women's participation. And that's in some ways because they weren't unable to conform to the breadwinner model because their husbands in an era of the 19th century, when in the vast majority of American men and women did marry, and lived in households, sometimes not just nuclear households, often multi generational. But African American men were marginalized in the paid labor force in terms of what jobs they could access and the pay that they got that, working class black households almost always had to have multiple income earners dating back to the, the days of slavery, if it were a free African American family. So it's a complicated story. It certainly is. One of rising labor force participation for women, so that now it's nearly equal to men, but the, I was going to say something else about, about that story, but maybe it'll come to me. I'm sure we can edit this part out.

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 45:09

No, great.

The New Deal and Women's Rights

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 45:09

because of the separate spheres ideology and the sort of gender definition of labor that had preoccupied middle class imaginations and got pushed onto the larger culture and policy makers, I think the challenge was that even though more and more American women each decade were engaging in paid labor out of necessity, They were never able until, certainly after the Civil Rights Act, and I think we're still fighting this, but never able to be seen as secure and legitimate, so that arguments made against raising the wages, say, of a factory worker who was a woman in Chicago in the 1890s would be, she's working for pin money was the term. That is like a decorative accessory, not for her livelihood because she should be married. I don't know if she is or not, but she should be. And if she is, she should be working in the home. So she's already like an anomaly or a threat to order. And that was used to justify low wages. It was also often, unfortunately used. Working class men who were threatened by the need for their women to have to engage in paid wage labor, who were like, saw that as a, attack on their honor and status. So there's often working class men who, who are in the labor movement, who are the most forceful public presence of working people in public debates. They're arguing against, like a system that relies on more women engaging in paid labor. So there's all this sort of multiple challenges from men as men and men as employers and men as fellow workers. against working wage earning women, and so it's a really strong uphill battle, and yet women really start to make some gains in the late 19th, early 20th century, in alliance with the middle class women who come out of these more affluent areas, who see the need for sort of gender solidarity. And that they have an interest in working class women's issues, not just their own. So somebody like Jane Addams of the Settlement House movement, allying with trade unionists in Chicago. That's a major step forward in trying to redefine the rights of women. And later it's those Ideas, limiting hours for workers, making workplaces more safe, making city streets more safe for people, improving sanitation, those ultimately show up in the New Deal revolution of the thirties, and they're degendered in many ways. That just becomes like the maternalist impulse of how to protect women workers in the progressive era. In some ways was a wedge strategy by social feminists saying, now we can apply in the new deal workplace safety to everyone who works minimum wages for all Maximum hours and so that's a gendered story too And it's something i've learned in teaching this course that you cannot understand the new deal Without understanding how central gender was to it and women's activism was to the passage of the social security act You The Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Act. Hard to stop me, Chris, once I get started.

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 48:38

no, I would love for you to talk. I tend to forget that things exist after the 19th century because that's where my own work stops. So I'd love if you could talk just a little bit more about that New Deal moment, what you see so significant about that.

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 48:51

because the New Deal in most labor histories and in larger general political histories of the U. S., the New Deal is seen as a watershed, both generally for the relationship of American citizens to the state, because the state the first time assumes responsibility for much of the security of the American people. Banking reform, housing reform, and also in terms of labor rights. So the New Deal transforms the relationship of the federal government to ordinary people and says, yes, government is responsible in some ways for you. And at the workplace, it says, we need To change the American workplace, employers have too much power. They're more likely to be corporations now employing thousands of people. we need to recalibrate power and bring American democracy from politics to the workplace. They created these laws that empowered workers to form unions and the federal government gave protections so that they could do that and collectively bargain to try to increase wages and workplace safety and contracts. But the federal government also created a compulsory social security system that many of us are familiar with because it still exists today. We pay into it and we pull out of it. as well as established a minimum wage and overtime pay, outlawed child labor in the Fair Labor Standards Act. So the New Deal was really a revolution in transforming the relationship of state and citizen, but also employer and worker, because the federal government intervened for the first time and said, we're not going to let employers and workers just sort it out. And a lot of that impulse of those laws Came out of the earlier efforts of, what we would call maternalist progressive era reformers, from trade unionists like Agnes Nestor and, and, Alice Schneiderman. I I'm getting her name or her first name wrong. with, with folks like Jane Addams and Florence Kelly, more prominent women reformers from affluent backgrounds, they had said we need to tame American capitalism in, at the turn of the 20th century. And the way that they were able to start doing that was by trying, getting laws passed to regulate the number of hours a woman could work in a day or a week in the name of protecting women's health. especially the future society because women would likely give birth, right? So in the name of these traditional gender ideals, advocating for a role for state and federal government and often directing it to, to protect women workers. So maximum hours, minimum wages, sometimes, safety at work, these sorts of things. it's complicated how much those progressive era reformers that it should only apply to women, but the politics of that era infused with this separate spheres ideology and this notion that men didn't need. government to protect them. They needed to be independent and manage their own relationships with other men. this became the avenue through which some of these reforms were adopted. And so I call that, following other historians, a sort of maternalist welfare state that then When the economy crashes in the 1929, the greatest crisis in American capitalism, and the federal government decides under FDR, we need to rethink how American capitalism operates. They began to adapt many of those earlier ideas, but apply them more generally so that the minimum wage was not about for women workers. It was about for all private sector workers. and the same goes for, The Social Security Act compulsory system. Now, there's all sorts of intended and unintended gender consequences, as well as racialized ones of the New Deal, so it's by no means a utopian labor movement from a modern sense. Domestic workers and farm workers were excluded from all three of the New Deal labor laws. as a price to pay for getting white southern support to pass the laws at a time when there was massive black disenfranchisement in the south, and white southerners were very afraid that these laws were going to completely upend the racial order, much more than they were concerned about the gender order. but the New Deal, I think, should be seen as Building on the primarily women reformers, along with allies like Father John Ryan, great Catholic priest pushing for these laws at the turn of the century too, who came up with the idea of the living wage. So it wasn't just women, but not the story that it's centered on women's activism in communities and settlement houses and trade unions and engaging very politically even before suffrage in 1920, misses a big part of the story and, that's personified by the first female cabinet member. FDR, appoints, Frances Perkins, who comes out of that movement and is a big ally of Florence Kelly and Jane Addams, as the Secretary of Labor. And she's the only cabinet member, I believe, who's served, continuously all through, through all four of his terms.

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 53:59

All right.

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 54:00

But it made sense that He pulled someone out of the progressive era reforming community to serve as Secretary of Labor and oversee and help pass these new laws that protected working people in the name of both empowering them through unionization, but also protecting them through things like social security and fair labor standards. Yeah.

Modern Reflections on Women's Work

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 54:24

Cool. we've talked about like a 1790s moment. we've talked about like 1850s ish. We've talked about New Deal era. if you were to say what's happening today within women's work that you think, historians looking back will say this is what's defining our moment, what would you see as most important?

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 54:41

I would first say we, we jumped over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. So if we say we're

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 54:47

Yeah,

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 54:49

the outlawing in 1964 of discrimination based on race, sex, ethnicity, religion is fundamental to, the birth of a, of the sort of modern feminist movement and, the ways in which gender hierarchy has been addressed and not addressed are really rooted in that law and it's, potential as well as its limitations. So I think we're still living in that era where women have increasingly, become more fully economic equals to men in many ways. And yet so many of the continuities persist in terms of who's do who's performing a household, unpaid household labor in, heterosexual couples, families, women still are doing way more of that. Women still only make 80 cents to the dollar of men. So there's a lot of persistence that's rooted in these histories, to me, I would say we're at a moment. And I'm both profoundly disappointed and even shocked that this wasn't a major debate in the political campaign. And ironically, I think I only heard JD Vance really bring it up. but I think the care, these ideas about the care economy and the arguments that, in a modern economy, we need to make sure that if we want full labor force participation by men and women, which is what we're seeing, we've got to reconcile that with the unpaid labor needs of households. does that mean paid child care as a right and a policy of the federal government, not just if you're able to afford it? does that mean more, robust programs for elder care, and supporting American households at that level. So I think that's the next frontier is, in an era where are the laws in the United States do not support households ability. to maximize participation in the paid labor force by the adults in the household. It's not set up that way, and it's an outlier amongst most other nations that the U. S. would consider peer nations, whether it's in, Western Europe or Japan. so I think, that's the issue now that is, The elephant in the room, that is not getting nearly enough attention. I got a lot of attention early in the Biden administration and then dropped from the radar, but I think the, that young Americans are really going to push, not just for full equality at the workplace by all genders, but I think, Ways to, support working people as human beings, not just those who punch a clock or, engage in, in paid labor, but who have other lives and responsibilities.

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 57:38

and just like thinking about care work, I think that's something that I know talking with students know is often on their mind of trying to reconcile, maybe on the one hand, basically feeling like they're in a lose situation. Our students are saying like, okay, if I were to, Decide that I want to be at home as a caretaker, or if I don't have the choice and I feel like I need to be home as a caretaker, then I'm accused of not doing real work, or I'm not feminist, or I'm, like students at Notre Dame, like I'm not taking advantage of my degrees. On the other hand, students who say they choose to work outside of the home, or they have to work outside of the home, then they're accused of not being real women, or they're not family oriented, so it's feeling like they're in a lose. how would you say, Yes. Studying history, like the history of women's work, can that lend us any help in sorting through that lose situation?

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 58:23

I think so. I think, studying the ways in which women try to navigate these issues in the past, because, there were debates since the new deal about federal, childcare plans and short lived experience. experiments during World War II because the federal government in the country was relying on paid labor of women while more men went to fight the war. So there have been debates in the past where we can look back and see how that was articulated and what happened and why. But one thing I think that looking at history can help here is this. Throughout American history, women's labor. And women's roles have been way more adaptable, despite the sort of ideological, straitjacket that women have been placed in, politically and economically over the years, On the ground, women's labor and, I guess women's work to support their households has been, adaptable in the sense that women were constantly breaking gender stereotypes when men were away, or men got killed at war, or in a factory, or, all sorts of other things, so women's labor has been adaptable and helped American communities Endure, resil through, if that's a verb, massive periods of crisis, whether they were, economic transformations like the industrial revolution or geopolitical crises like world wars. And I think what we need to see now is men's adaptability. it's not that there aren't many men who are already engaging in being stay at home dads, say, Lots of my students much more talk about that than did a generation ago. but men haven't, the, this, the stereotyped role of what men are supposed to do and the sort of cultural constraints on that don't permit an adaptability that would really benefit. I think it's what we need less as women to figure out how to do more and how to navigate home versus work, wages versus unpaid labor, fulfillment. and professional success versus, taking care of my family. need, a more equitable sort of understanding of how men and women both need to be navigating that in ways that make it more sustainable. And I think men have to get really involved in pushing for that. And that's going to require a major cultural change. I think men have changed. Way less, in terms of gender expectations and the roles that they play throughout American history. even though we've seen rapid changes in what women have been allowed to do, but women have borne the burden of navigating. The fallout of, okay, you're doing new things now, but you're still doing old things too. And so I think, a political coalition that expects much more from men and re envision men's places in paid labor and in the unpaid labor of the home is what's necessary.

The Role of Literature in Understanding Women's Work

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 1:01:24

Yeah, that just really resonates. that, that brings to the end of the questions I had for you. Dan, was there, were there things that were on your mind coming into this conversation that haven't come up yet that you might like to say to close?

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 1:01:35

I would like to ask you a question, Chris, that's about, literature, and I'm curious, as a historian, I sometimes use fiction, say, as primary sources to help my students understand ideas, but I'm wondering what you would say about, The use, the utility of literature about women's work, say in the 19th century that you think maybe, offers windows into, understanding that we might not get from other kinds of sources that historians typically use.

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 1:02:09

Yeah, I guess the thing that's coming to mind first is the, interaction between fiction and culture being a two way street, that fiction shapes the culture and then culture shapes the fiction. and so I, I think back to when you were talking about the difficulty of finding sourcing or archives to describe what was happening in women's, working women's lives, and how fiction itself can provide an, insights into that, those spheres and what those relationships looked like and those as lived experiences and whole people. so that's the first thing that's coming to mind. the other thing that's coming to mind is, like the pedagogical function of fiction, like the teaching function. and like going back to the Separate Spheres ideology as an example. so we talked about Catherine Beecher, talked a little bit about Harriet Beecher, Ben Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe as an author. and one of the things that strikes me like when I read her texts is that oh, she's teaching the ideas that Catherine Beecher has written out in her treatise on domestic economy. So if, in fact, a treatise on domestic economy is a little more than you want to, stomach on just, a casual afternoon. You can read a novel where, in fact, you can know which characters are good based on how clean their houses are, like, when it comes to the female characters. And so it's thinking about why that is, for Stowe, to keep a good house is, in fact, a moral duty. That's a religious duty for a woman. And when I teach fiction or use fiction, I'm interested in the ways that, ideas can become ingrained in a social consciousness, and certainly thinking about women reading fiction by the mid 19th century. in the very early U. S., to read fiction was considered, scandalous, especially for women. this was, novels will pull women away from their Bibles and, keep them from, reading what they should, and I'm in the next, I won't spoil too much from the next episode of this podcast, which will be about women's fiction, but, by the mid 19th century, more acceptable for women to be reading fiction, and yeah, the idea that you could, learn social, societal expectations by reading some of these texts, that, that part, that function of literature is very interesting to me.

`Concluding Thoughts on Gender and History

dan-graff--he-him-_1_11-13-2024_130531 1:04:14

That's great. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, I'm struck that, people understand their lives through narratives, right? They understand, they tell stories about their own lives and the lives of their families and communities. And it's such a powerful way that humans understand the world. and I think, published or unpublished literature of fiction, right? Written down, a perfect way to reinforce that and show what you were talking about, that dialogue between culture and fiction. So I think that's great. the only other thing I would say is one thing I run across, in teaching, American history generally, is this sort of idea that, people who study, say, gender in history are, reading back into the past, concerns that weren't there, so that applying a presentist text. approach to the past and nothing could be further from the truth. what's really interesting is that gender is everywhere in the records left behind. Gender controversies, gender assumptions, gender declarations. And so Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries were wrestling with, gender as a way to understand the world and as a way to play. to put people in particular places, and that's always been happening. It happens in different debates and over different goals, you might say, and with different resolutions at different times, but, people who are interested in studying what we care about today. Going back in the past and trying to understand how Americans thought about and thought about that before, what historians do, whether it's about war, whether it's about, politics, whether it's about gender and culture. And the study of gender in history should need no defense, but that's an often misinformed one that people are like, Oh, you're not studying. what people cared about back then. we're going to the primary sources and this is what they cared about and we're talking about. I encourage people to, to read history and engage in history. It's a great way to open one's mind just like fiction reading is to get you out of whether it's a comfort zone or the way you think about how the world operates you accidentally conclude that's the way it must operate. History is a perfect antidote to that, where you see how people. did and thought about things differently than we do. It's a great, exercise in humility as well as empowerment in that sense. Things haven't always been this way. They don't always have to be then the way they are now too,

chris-hedlin_1_11-13-2024_130531 1:06:36

Thank you so much, Dan. I'm just, yeah, so grateful for your insights. and thank you audience members too for joining us for women's work. on behalf of me and ND Women Connect and ThinkND, I'm just, yeah, so grateful for you joining in our conversation. I'll, I hope that you visit thinknd. nd. edu to learn more about this topic and other things. until next time, inspire your mind and spark conversations.