Centering Women’s Work

Abstract: Histories of the early republic that enclose uncompensated or reproductive labor into a “non-economic” backdrop to the narrative of nation-building limit our understanding of the early United States by falsely dividing men’s work from women’s work and isolating market exchanges from the wide and deep social networks that made them possible. As a consequence, such histories presume that the state established value regimes that the people of North America lived by. Centering women’s work upends such assumptions by restoring labor and exchange to the social contexts that gave them commercial value and political potency. This essay analyzes examples of diverse women’s labors to demonstrate how an emerging national economy and its political boundaries depended on the power of kin and other connections.