Homemaker as Worker in the United States

Abstract

article examines the level of women's labor force participation (LFP) in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The primary conclusion is that for large groups of women actual levels of LFP have been high enough to prevent them from engaging exclusively in homemaking. Since the beginning of industrial expansion in New England in 1809, there have been roughly 125 years during which a majority or near-majority of adult women were not exclusively homemakers because of their high LFP. Adding up the LFP of women in industry, service occupations, and agricultural labor during the antebellum years, the high LFP of women during the War of 1812, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, and the years since 1955, representing the most current increase in women's LFP, leaves only about a third of the past 189 years as a period when the bulk of women's economic activities can accurately be described by the term homemaker So the social vi-