ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a nineteenth-century feminist claim that legislatures refused to recognize and historians have since overlooked: the claim that wives were entitled to property rights in their household labor. In exploring the life and demise of this rights discourse, it offers a political history of housework at the dawn of the industrial era, and an account of the earliest feminist politics of women’s work. The feminist movement’s unrealized joint property demands thus shed light on the common law of marital status as it was evolving in the market economy of mid-nineteenth-century America. Feminists drew on conventional principles of liberalism to demand joint rights in marital property, but, in so doing, turned the liberal tradition to radically new ends. Feminists were able to assert the authority of their own daily experience against the logic of the separate spheres tradition by drawing on dissonant elements in the political culture from which the woman’s rights movement sprang.
