Home to Work
Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States

This book traces the history of industrial homework and its regulation over the last century.

Eileen Boris (Author)

9780521455480, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 27 May 1994

404 pages, 19 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.54 kg

"Eileen Boris's Home to Work is an extensive social-historical account of industrial homework regulation, which focuses on several key judicial decisions and legislative actions, as well as efforts by union leaders and reformers to abolish or reshape home labor." Contemporary Sociology

In the minds of most people, the home has stood apart from the world of work. By bringing the factory or office home, homework challenges this division. Home to Work restores the voices of homeworking women to the century-long debate over their labour. It provides a historical context to the Reaganite lifting of New Deal bans. Where once men's right to contract inhibited regulation, now women's right to employment undermined prohibition. Economic and political justice, whether based on rights to homework or rights as workers, will depend on homeworkers becoming visible as workers who happen to mother.

Abbreviations
List of illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction 'home, sweet home': gender, the state, and labor standards
Part I. Man's Freedom, Woman's Necessity: Jacobs and its Legacy: 1. 'A man's dwelling house is his castle': tenement house cigarmaking and the judicial imperative
2. 'White slaves of the cities': campaigns against sweated clothing
3. 'Women who work' and 'Women who spend': the family economy vs the family wage
Part II. Visions and Voices: 4. 'Soldiers of freedom', 'garments of slavery': patriotic homework
5. 'To study their own conditions': states' rights to regulate
6. 'Homework is a community question' the worlds of the homeworker
Part III. Engendering the New Deal: 7. 'To improve on business through law': homework under the NRA
8. 'Strike while the iron is hot': the politics of enactment, the perils of enforcement
9. 'Unknown to the common law': the fair labor standards act
Part IV. Homework Redux: 10. 'With a keyboard in one hand': white collars in the home
11. Deregulating 'the rights of women'
Index.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]