Over the course of a two hundred year period, women's domestic labor gradually lost its footing as a recognized aspect of economic life in America. The image of the colonial "goodwife," valued for her contribution to household prosperity, had been replaced by the image of a "dependent" and a "non-producer." This book is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. More particularly, it is a history of women's unpaid domestic labor in the context of the emergence of an industrialized society in the northern United States. Boydston argues that just as a capitalist economic order had first to teach that wages were the measure of a man's worth, it had at the same time, implicitly or explicitly, to teach that those who did not draw wages were dependent and not essential to the "real economy." Developing a striking account of the gender and labor systems that characterized industrializing America, Boydston explains how this effected the devaluation of women's unpaid labor.

This book serves to begin an important discussion about work, an activity that consumes most of our lives. Our work means a lot to us, even to those who do not enjoy the toil. This text investigates work from diverse worldviews, theories, and viewpoints, including cultural, religious, humanist, and Indigenous. It operates on the premise that our work lives can be more deeply understood and appreciated when exposed to perspectives of reality that are different from our own. Moving closer to understanding different ways of knowing and experiencing work will yield new insights about the intersection of relationships and crisis at work.

Although housework is acknowledged by social historians to be one of women's responsibilities, Hill is one of the few historians to focus on the household as the most important unit of production in the eighteenth century. She examines the work done by women in the family economy, including housework, agriculture, and manufacturing. She also considers a whole range of women's activities that have been largely ignored by historians, including domestic service, apprenticeship, and many occupations that went unrecorded in censuses. Highlighting the implications of the increasing division of labour according to sex, Hill considers how the changing nature of women's work influenced courtship, marriage, and relations between the sexes. She pays particular attention to the situation of spinsters and widows.

Childs discusses working-class family life and considers the changes that becoming a wage earner and a contributor to the family economy made to a youth's status within the home. He explores the significance of publicly provided education for the working class and analyses the labour market for young males, focusing on apprenticeship, future job prospects, trade unions, and wage levels. Childs investigates the patterns of labour available to boys at that time, including street selling, half-time labour, and apprenticed versus "free" labour, arguing that these were major factors in the creation of a semi-skilled adult work force. Turning to leisure activities among working-class youths, Childs looks at street culture, commercial entertainments, and youth groups and movements and finds that each influenced the emergence of a more cohesive and class-conscious working class.