"Butter and Egg Money" Indeed

Carol Groneman & Mary Beth Norton, eds. 'To Toil the Livelong Day:" America's Women at Work, 1780-1980. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987. 305 pp. Joan M. Jensen. Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women 1750-1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. iv + 271 pp. illus. Historians of women have long acknowledged that women's unpaid work within the home too often has been ignored. These two volumes indicate that women's work as producers for the commercial market has also been vastly underrated. Together they call for a re-evaluation of women's role as workers, and result in today's working mother seeming the historical norm, rather than an exception. What appears more and more historically exceptional is the view of women primarily as consumers and managers of items of consumption, whose only production is reproduction

Consumption (sociology · Economic history · Economics · Haven · Norm (philosophy · Political science · Reproduction · Social science · Sociology · Work (physics · American Environmental and Regional History · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law