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Actually, woman’s place had always been in the home, but during the pre-industrial era, the economy itself had been centered in the home and its surrounding farmland. While men had tilled the land (often aided by their wives), the women had been manufacturers, producing fabric, clothing, candles, s…

While it is hardly likely that these women were expressing pride in the work they performed under the ever-present threat of the whip, they must have been aware nonetheless of their enormous power—their ability to produce and create. For, as Marx put it, “labor is the living, shaping fire; it repre…

Proportionately, more Black women have always worked outside their homes than have their white sisters. The enormous space that work occupies in Black women’s lives today follows a pattern established during the very earliest days of slavery. As slaves, compulsory labor overshadowed every other asp…

they differed from their white counterparts only to the extent that their domestic aspirations were thwarted by the exigencies of the slave system