Home Collections Women at Work: Manual Labor Manual Labor
Pre- and Non-Industrial Labor Outwork
Factory Labor: Textiles Factory Labor: Other
During the colonial era and until the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the economy of the northeastern United States was largely based upon self-sufficient family units that made or grew what they needed and sold or bartered what they could not consume. At that time, local economies supported small-scale cottage industries in which both men and women produced goods in their homes while also tending to their farms and children. Although traditional, gender-based divisions of labor dictated women's tasks, the contributions of wives and daughters were vital to the economy of pre-industrial communities. Their work was often recorded in family or shop accounts. When the United States' agrarian-based economy evolved into an industrial and urban one in the mid-nineteenth century, the new economic structure greatly altered the way work was managed and performed. Most notably, the home ceased to be the center of production. The transition was neither immediate nor complete. First, 'factory' owners, most notably in the shoe and textile industries, distributed materials to be processed in the home. Nineteenth-century rural women took in materials from local merchants to produce cloth, clothing, straw bonnets, and shoes for cash and for store credit. This form of industrialization came to be know as | |
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