OUR MOTHERS'GRIEF: Racial Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of Families

Abstract

This article examines the nature and social organization of reproductive labor in the family among African-American, Chinese, and Mexican-American women in the United States during the nineteenth century. A brief description of reproductive labor of white families in colonial America is used as a point of contrast for examining reproductive labor among groups of racial ethnic women. The article pays special attention to the ways in which racial ethnic women's work in maintaining the family becomes a source of resistance to the cultural assaults of the dominant society. The concept of reproductive labor, when applied to women of color, must be modified to account for the fact that labor in the productive sphere was required to achieve even minimal levels of family subistence. Thus, in an historical era when the family roles of middle-class whites had been reshaped by industrialization, driving this group of women into a cult of domesticity, racial ethnic women were struggling with the "double day. "