Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford, 1990.

Summary
This book examines housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. Boydston argues that unpaid domestic labor was a central force in the emergence of an industrialized society in the northeastern United States'''. Through an analysis''' of the economic contributions that housewives made, and of the implications of rhetoric about housework’s decline as labor, she argues that the ideology of separate spheres obscured the ways that '''unpaid housework bolstered American capitalism. '''By clarifying the paradoxical status of housework and the nature of its changes in antebellum America, illuminates the intimated relationship between the gender and labor systems that characterized industrializing America. While domestic labor was recognized in the early colonial years and again during the Revolutionary War, they were exceptional to the larger economic trend in American society. America’s economic development led '''domestic labor to become invisible, especially as a result of growing market relations''' and the growth in the cash/exchange economy. “Over the course of the second quarter of the nineteenth century… Americans embrace[d] a growing conviction that housework was not really labor at all, but rather merely a new form of leisure reserved to married women.” (141) The paradigm of womanhood had shifted from the good wife to mother – that is from worker to nurturer. This ideology of “spheres” represented the final phase in the industrialization of housework – the denial that it produced any economic value at all. Boydston terms the invisibility of women’s labor “the pastoralization of housework.” By the 1820s and 1830s, economic life and labor were “spherized” such that women’s labor was ideologically separated from the “productive” labor of men. This notion was cemented in Americans’ imagination although housework was physically taxing, time-consuming, and supported family life and the emerging capitalist economy.

Example: Labor activists frequently invoked the rhetoric of the ideology of spheres and specifically pastoral images of the household to imply a sharp contrast between the cruel system of the factor which exhausts the mechanic and his physical and mental powers and the presumably rejuvenating powers of the home.

See also: Charles Sellers, Christopher Clark, James Henretta, Stuart Blumin