Cloth, Butter and Boarders: Women's Household Production for the Market

This article presents an historical framework for analyzing Amer ican women's household production for the market from the late eighteenth cen tury to the early twentieth century. It argues that women's household production — particularly the making of cloth and butter and the taking in of boarders — was a crucial economic factor in both urban and rural families, maintaining with in them a simple commodity mode of production. With the disappearance of this type of household production women moved from a household income to a wage income and into the capitalist mode of production.