Quotes by Jeanne Boydston

The distinction between paid labor and housework implied in working-class mens yearning for the domestic ideal persisted in later-nineteenth-century analyses of womens unpaid labor and was eventually replicated in Capital. Because wives work was laregely unpaid, and because husbands came to the marketplace as the possessors of their wives labor, Marx did not address the role of housework in the labor exchange that led to surplus value. Neither did he attend to the dynamics that permitted the husband to lay claim, in the price of his own labor, to the value of his wifes work.

Historians have generally described the coming of industrialization in terms of changes in paid work. The transformation has been framed as one from a community of comparatively independent producers to a class of wage workers.