The Valuation of Women's Work: Gender and the Market in a Dairy Farming Community during the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Farm families form an interesting case for the study of the relationship between the gender system and capitalism. In contrast to artisans, who were reduced to proletarian status during capitalist expansion, farmers retained their ownership of productive property; throughout the nineteenth century they produced not only their own subsistence but also commodities for sale in distant markets. Household and workplace were not separate; kinship-based authority relations governed labor as well. This fusion of the familial and the economic makes farm families' historical experience of capitalist transformation especially illuminating, for it reveals the interaction of gender with capitalist relations in a direct and relatively unmediated fashion. The ways that farm women and men participated in productive and reproductive labor were shaped by their own traditions of organizing work, not by the demands of the capitalist labor market that controlled their workingclass contemporaries. The expansion of commodity production that took place during the nineteenth century affected working relationships among women and men, but did not fundamentally transform them; rather than reshaping gender relations within the family, capitalist expansion provided a field upon which the contradictory dynamics of gender relations within farm families were played out. The valuation of women's work reveals the intersection of