Domestic Labor

Domestic Labor. Since the Colonial Era, domestic labor has been a significant contributor to economic production and development in America. While domestic labor encompasses a wide range of market and nonmarket activities, this essay will focus on three major productive elements: household manufactures for home consumption; industrial outwork, a form of waged labor conducted in the home; and independent production within the home for sale in wider commodity markets.

Household manufactures for home consumption prevailed as a system of domestic labor in rural areas prior to the era of industrialization. With the emergence of mechanized textile, shoe, and garment production after 1830, household manufactures declined steadily. With the growth of the factory system in the nineteenth century (initially concentrated in New England and the Middle Atlantic states), household manufactures declined in those regions, while remaining substantial in the South and Middle West. The rapid expansion of commercial markets for items previously produced within the home substantially reduced household manufacturing across the United States. American families after World War II rarely produced goods at home for their own consumption.

Independent production within the home for sale in broader markets declined at the same time. Such independent production was more commonly concentrated in cities than in rural areas. In the first half of the nineteenth century, independent male weavers or shoemakers often worked in their own homes, drawing upon the unpaid labor of family members for certain steps in the production process. Women dressmakers and laundry workers also brought work home and commonly sold their services to a varied clientele. Technological developments and the steady commodification of goods and services undermined independent production within the home. Increasingly individuals who performed such work at home were displaced by wage workers employed in urban factories and shops that took advantage of machinery or economies of scale to undersell homeworkers.

Industrial outwork, by contrast, has had a much longer and more significant history. For almost 150 years, a substantial share of industrial wage work was performed in workers' homes. From the emergence of the first factories in the 1790s until the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, employers found it economical to give out work to be performed outside of factories or workshops. Rural and urban residents alike were drawn into a system of dispersed contracting out, earning wages for domestic labor performed with raw materials owned by their employers and producing goods for sale in distant markets.

Industrial outwork flourished initially in rural communities, as wives and daughters in farming families supplemented farm income by laboring for textile mills, storekeepers, or middlemen who distributed raw materials throughout the countryside and sold the finished cloth, hats, and shoes in widely dispersed markets. The first water‐powered cotton spinning mills typically expanded production by putting out yarn to be woven by members of farming families. Handloom weaving on an outwork basis grew significantly in New England in the early nineteenth century, but declined after the mid‐1820s with the adoption of the power loom. Farm women turned to braided straw hats and palm‐leaf hats as an outwork occupation, and by 1837 more than fifty thousand women and children were employed on a part‐time basis in Massachusetts alone. At about the same time, farm women also worked at binding and stitching shoe uppers. By mid‐century a decentralized hybrid system had developed with much of shoebinding done by women in their own homes while male artisans working in small urban shops did the shoemaking itself. Domestic labor in boot and shoe manufacturing declined sharply after the Civil War with the more complete mechanization of shoemaking and the adoption of steam power in urban factories.

In the Gilded Age, the garment industry became the leading employer of homeworkers. In Boston, for instance, clothing manufacturers put cut goods into rural communities; by 1870, Boston employers paid some two million dollars in wages to a workforce of about fifty thousand New England farm women. By then, however, urban homework in the garment industry dwarfed its rural cousin. In Boston, New York City, and Philadelphia, home employment in the needle trades came to be known as the “sweating” system, as women and children in urban immigrant families earned meager wages from employers whose exploitative practices led them to be known as “sweaters.” By the early twentieth century, the impoverishment of immigrant families and the squalid conditions within which they worked and lived concerned Progressive Era reformers who lobbied to outlaw tenement‐house production and child labor in manufacturing.

While rural outwork had been a part‐time occupation for members of farming families in the Antebellum Era, its later urban counterpart was full‐time and highly exploitative, depending on a system of underpaid subcontracting that forced workers to put in long hours during peak seasons simply to survive. The low wages and long hours of homeworkers, in turn, undermined wages and employment in factories and workshops. State and local efforts to regulate or outlaw homework were typically stymied by court rulings, such as Lochner v. New York (1905), which protected workers' putative right to “freedom of contract” under the Fourteenth Amendment. Only when Congress enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act in the New Deal Era did industrial outwork become largely unprofitable. Afterward, the federal government's enforcement of wage and hours regulations on homeworkers and the outright ban of homework in a number of industries sharply limited these practices.

Industrial outwork, while exploitative, has nonetheless had a certain appeal for individuals and families that have sought to work within its bounds. In an economic system in which the wages of male household heads were (and often still are) insufficient to support a family, outwork permitted the employment of children and married women to supplement family income. Homework has also permitted women homemakers to combine housekeeping, cooking, and child rearing with wage‐earning activities. Homework has had a certain rationality for urban immigrant families in the United States for the past century, but it has been a logic based on the inadequacy of state regulation of wages and hours of labor.

At the end of the twentieth century industrial outwork made a comeback with the growth of an underground, largely immigrant economy in the garment trades of New York, Los Angeles, and other large cities. In the 1980s, the Ronald Reagan administration rescinded the laws against homework in several industries and cut back on regulatory enforcement. These steps, coupled with the growth of telecommuting among white‐collar clerical workers, led to a resurgence of homework. Whether this form of domestic labor will see continued growth depends on future technological changes and legal struggles. Homework, then, is an issue that refuses to go away.
See also Agriculture: 1770s to 1890; Clothing and Fashion; Consumer Movement; Early Republic, Era of the; Economic Regulation; Homework; Immigration; Kelley, Florence; Labor Markets; Mass Marketing; Textile Industry; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

Rolla Tryon , Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640–1860, 1917, reprint ed. 1966.
Eileen Boris and Cynthia R. Daniels, eds., Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home, 1989.
Gregory Nobles , Merchant Middlemen in the Outwork Network of Rural New England, in Merchant Credit and Labour Strategies in Historical Perspective, ed. Rosemary E. Ommer, 1990, pp. 333–47.
Thomas Dublin , Rural Putting‐Out Work in Early Nineteenth‐Century New England: Women and the Transition to Capitalism in the Countryside, New England Quarterly 64 (1991): 531–73.
Eileen Boris , Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States, 1994.
Thomas Dublin , Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution, 1994.

Thomas Dublin