Review 2: 19th Century - Book Report/Review Example

Bodyston employs familiar settings in defining the housework done by women in the pre-industrial America. With evident examples borrowed from letters and diaries she covers the labor of women from sewing, cooking, and cleaning to tending animals and gardens and making beer, cider, butter, and cheese. Women provided or were involved in the production of goods for local barter or direct family consumption (Boydston, 105). Inasmuch as crucial individuals in the economy (and entire) family, Boydston further argues that their role in driving the economy did reflect to social or political power.

Overall, the society or communities remained entirely patriarchal. Boydston’s depiction of women’s housework during the antebellum days is more annoying. Women of the nineteenth century in recent and classic scholarly editions have been indicated as having escaped from their economic duties. In a disproportionately picturesque stage, Boydston successfully destroys this notion. Housework never lost productive or tedium value. Middle-class women in the urban settings, even with their hired domestic workers, spent most of their days ceaselessly mending and sewing clothes, attending to needs of their children, managing servants, shopping, making candles, preserving food, laundering and cleaning.

Working-class women in urban locations were involved in much the same trend, also for indirect remuneration, however, Boydston defines their additional involvements in scavenging and hawking and acting as the family’s bulwarks (Boydston, 218). On the other hand, women in farms continued to ensure endless basic productive responsibilities. The entire absence of acknowledging women’s struggle in the home (especially referring to their material support and contribution to the families) in late and mid-nineteenth century United States of America is a