Labor as Love: Housework, Emotional Labor, and the Market, 1870-1920

This paper examines how wives’ household labor was recast beginning in the late nineteenth century, as married women’s reliance on their husbands for economic support appeared increasingly mercenary.  In the early nineteenth century, wives supposed economic dependency had “pastoralized” the antebellum household, recasting the home from a locus of production to a sphere of serenity and repose.  By the end of the century, however, a broad consensus emerged among social reformers, feminists, and political economists that wives’ economic dependency rendered them valueless. Conservative critics maintained that that wives’ lack of productivity was a marker of the nation’s “civilization.” Feminists likewise viewed middle-class wives as “parasites,” but urged them to reclaim their former productivity by entering into the paid labor force. Others, such as political economists, looked to the new discipline of “domestic science” to revive wives’ domestic purpose. 

As they urged wives to reclaim a productive purpose, all three groups rejected the concept that a wife was a “servant” to her husband.  Instead, they celebrated contrasting visions of marriage as an affectionate partnership. Drawing on a range of published and archival sources, the paper examines the shift away from conceptualizing the value of household labor as “service.” This redefinition rejected the most conspicuously hierarchical elements of the antebellum model of marriage, celebrating marital love and affection as the marker of spousal parity. Despite this language of quasi-equality, however, the paper argues that wives’ emotional labor justified rather than undermined their economic dependence on their husbands.