This chapter is centered on a reading of Sylvia Plath’s only novel The Bell Jar (1963). Locating that novel within its author’s confessional poetry this chapter describes the relationship between reproductive labor and the creative economy as framed by the capitalist world-system at a time of geopolitical and ideological contest with the socialist states. For Plath tragic affect is born from the convergence of creative and reproductive labor wherein both types of work are subject to a process of reification: the reification of human misery registering above all in the exhaustion of a lyric voice as it is buried under the weight of a commercially viable syntax. The chapter shows how Plath’s novel combines a pervasive mood of melancholy with critical self-reflection about creative labor wherein tragedy is ultimately displaced into the realm of affect.

This chapter opens the doors to kitchens and closets to recover how patients treated themselves at home. The chapter introduces a Lincolnshire man who moved to Jamaica in the 1700s to work as an overseer of a sugar plantation and relates how he came to rely on his own homemade treatments for treating his persistent pox. Because so few patients shared such intimate details in writing, the bulk of the chapter pieces together how patients produced and consumed home cures for the disease using 193 handwritten medical recipes, many penned by women. Recipes reveal the tedious and often costly labor of sourcing ingredients and making antivenereals at home. Marginal notes show that patients tried and tested these household cures, and a careful look at language and ingredients shows the moral assumptions embedded in the logic of how they were presumed to work. Long before the establishment of reforming institutions in the nineteenth century, recipes reveal how moral recuperation was a key ingredient of the disease’s cure.

In British colonial imagination, the Indian ayah was idealized as an inherently nurturing, maternal figure, selflessly devoted to British women and children. The ayah archetype was not just a comforting construct, but morally legitimized British colonialism. Legal and medical archives, however, provide stories of individual ayahs facing financial and sexual abuse, caste-loss anxieties, and abandonment, which are occluded in the highly sentimentalized British literary and visual archives. The cultural veneration of the ayah, the Introduction argues, erased the vulnerabilities of real-life colonial caregivers. The Introduction situates the history of colonial care work in the historiography of domestic labor in South Asia, Britain, and colonial empires more broadly. It emphasizes the importance of bringing together the gendered domestic histories of race and caste, which historians typically study separately. The Introduction furthermore explains how the book draws theoretical and methodological inspiration from South Asian postcolonial subaltern studies and African American black feminist intersectionality to decolonize the history of domestic labor in the British Empire.

A closer look at changes in women’s education, age of marriage, employment, and the reasons for the enduring value of women’s skilled domestic work. Women’s postrevolutionary legal position as second-class citizens exists in tandem with gains in women’s social status indicators: improvements in women’s literacy, later and more egalitarian age of marriage, lower fertility rates, and improved indicators of basic household consumption. Women’s stubbornly low contemporary participation rate in formal employment is complicated by the prerevolutionary prevalence of child labor, and postrevolutionary improvements in girls’ school attendance. Low rates of formal employment also mask women’s crucial contributions to household economies through social labor. Local food culture and the premium attached to women’s skilled home cooking provide the basis for social and economic networks that bypass state control. The common value of local food culture provides a foundation for social identity and a recognizable form of capital that offsets the frustrations associated with limited the opportunities of the formal market.

In twentieth-century Europe, work was related to individual freedom in different ways. Rationalized, large-scale production imposed disciplinary constraints on men and women and threatened to undermine their independence, yet other developments promised to safeguard independence and raised the prospect of choice. Moreover, the relationship between work and individual freedom was subject to diverging definitions and contrasting political agendas. Some of these definitions and agendas stemmed from the nineteenth century, but now had to be pursued under very different conditions. Others rose to prominence in the twentieth century, as capitalist, extreme-right, and Communist promises to enhance freedom at work competed with each other. These ambitious projects, however, were confronted with structural contradictions and subversive behaviors. The three major aspects treated in this chapter are how farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers endeavored to defend their economic independence at a time of capitalist pressure and Communist hostility; how millions of Europeans, having entered factories for want of a better alternative, strove to create a shop floor of their own; and, finally, how women (and, to a lesser extent, men) balanced chores and choices when carrying out domestic tasks and reflecting on their meaning.

Wright’s position within the American literary canon has been contested by feminist literary critics who take issue with the treatment of gender in his work. Wright’s women characters, both real and fictional, when examined within the breadth of his published and unpublished works contests this interpretation by demonstrating an archive of black women’s experience unlike any from the era. Wright’s oeuvre is composed of a complex array of black women who are portrayed as mothers, workers, leaders, activists, and theorists. They are representations of the world as it is. This lineage of black women (and Wright’s relationship to the real and fictional women in his life) also evolves alongside the author’s political consciousness.

This chapter examines the experiences of slaves in various sectors of the economy, including agriculture, manufacturing, mining and domestic labor, as well as banking, commerce and the state bureaucracy.

Each of these chapters contains a case study of a couple from the relevant country. Each includes a description of the everyday life of the couple with respect to the division of housework and childcare, a recounting of the history of their relationship and how it became equal, a discussion of how they balance paid work and family, and an analysis of the factors that facilitate their equality. Those factors include their conviction in gender equality, their rejection of essentialist beliefs, their familism, and their socialization in their families of origin. By showing how and why they undo gender, these couples provide lessons on how equality at home can be achieved.

Each of these chapters contains a case study of a couple from the relevant country. Each includes a description of the everyday life of the couple with respect to the division of housework and childcare, a recounting of the history of their relationship and how it became equal, a discussion of how they balance paid work and family, and an analysis of the factors that facilitate their equality. Those factors include their conviction in gender equality, their rejection of essentialist beliefs, their familism, and their socialization in their families of origin. By showing how and why they undo gender, these couples provide lessons on how equality at home can be achieved.

Each of these chapters contains a case study of a couple from the relevant country. Each includes a description of the everyday life of the couple with respect to the division of housework and childcare, a recounting of the history of their relationship and how it became equal, a discussion of how they balance paid work and family, and an analysis of the factors that facilitate their equality. Those factors include their conviction in gender equality, their rejection of essentialist beliefs, their familism, and their socialization in their families of origin. By showing how and why they undo gender, these couples provide lessons on how equality at home can be achieved.

Each of these chapters contains a case study of a couple from the relevant country. Each includes a description of the everyday life of the couple with respect to the division of housework and childcare, a recounting of the history of their relationship and how it became equal, a discussion of how they balance paid work and family, and an analysis of the factors that facilitate their equality. Those factors include their conviction in gender equality, their rejection of essentialist beliefs, their familism, and their socialization in their families of origin. By showing how and why they undo gender, these couples provide lessons on how equality at home can be achieved.

Each of these chapters contains a case study of a couple from the relevant country. Each includes a description of the everyday life of the couple with respect to the division of housework and childcare, a recounting of the history of their relationship and how it became equal, a discussion of how they balance paid work and family, and an analysis of the factors that facilitate their equality. Those factors include their conviction in gender equality, their rejection of essentialist beliefs, their familism, and their socialization in their families of origin. By showing how and why they undo gender, these couples provide lessons on how equality at home can be achieved.

Each of these chapters contains a case study of a couple from the relevant country. Each includes a description of the everyday life of the couple with respect to the division of housework and childcare, a recounting of the history of their relationship and how it became equal, a discussion of how they balance paid work and family, and an analysis of the factors that facilitate their equality. Those factors include their conviction in gender equality, their rejection of essentialist beliefs, their familism, and their socialization in their families of origin. By showing how and why they undo gender, these couples provide lessons on how equality at home can be achieved.

Each of these chapters contains a case study of a couple from the relevant country. Each includes a description of the everyday life of the couple with respect to the division of housework and childcare, a recounting of the history of their relationship and how it became equal, a discussion of how they balance paid work and family, and an analysis of the factors that facilitate their equality. Those factors include their conviction in gender equality, their rejection of essentialist beliefs, their familism, and their socialization in their families of origin. By showing how and why they undo gender, these couples provide lessons on how equality at home can be achieved.

Each of these chapters contains a case study of a couple from the relevant country. Each includes a description of the everyday life of the couple with respect to the division of housework and childcare, a recounting of the history of their relationship and how it became equal, a discussion of how they balance paid work and family, and an analysis of the factors that facilitate their equality. Those factors include their conviction in gender equality, their rejection of essentialist beliefs, their familism, and their socialization in their families of origin. By showing how and why they undo gender, these couples provide lessons on how equality at home can be achieved.

Each of these chapters contains a case study of a couple from the relevant country. Each includes a description of the everyday life of the couple with respect to the division of housework and childcare, a recounting of the history of their relationship and how it became equal, a discussion of how they balance paid work and family, and an analysis of the factors that facilitate their equality. Those factors include their conviction in gender equality, their rejection of essentialist beliefs, their familism, and their socialization in their families of origin. By showing how and why they undo gender, these couples provide lessons on how equality at home can be achieved.

Each of these chapters contains a case study of a couple from the relevant country. Each includes a description of the everyday life of the couple with respect to the division of housework and childcare, a recounting of the history of their relationship and how it became equal, a discussion of how they balance paid work and family, and an analysis of the factors that facilitate their equality. Those factors include their conviction in gender equality, their rejection of essentialist beliefs, their familism, and their socialization in their families of origin. By showing how and why they undo gender, these couples provide lessons on how equality at home can be achieved.

Each of these chapters contains a case study of a couple from the relevant country. Each includes a description of the everyday life of the couple with respect to the division of housework and childcare, a recounting of the history of their relationship and how it became equal, a discussion of how they balance paid work and family, and an analysis of the factors that facilitate their equality. Those factors include their conviction in gender equality, their rejection of essentialist beliefs, their familism, and their socialization in their families of origin. By showing how and why they undo gender, these couples provide lessons on how equality at home can be achieved.