From the Mill to the Home

Women’s Work and Separate Spheres in Henry C. Carey’s Political Economy

Abstract

The article investigates how Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879), the most influential nineteenth-century US economist, conceptualized the social role of women, the economic relevance of their work within and outside the family and the power relationships between the sexes. The article seeks to overcome the shortcomings of historiography, which only rarely investigated the contribution of nineteenth-century US political economy to the ideology of domesticity and never took into serious account Carey’s reflection on women’s work. Placing Carey’s early writings – especially his Principles of Political Economy (1837-1840), Essay on the Rate of Wages (1835) and The Past, the Present, and the Future (1848) – in the context of the history of capitalism and of the social history of women, the article argues that his political economy represented a relevant episode in the legitimation of women’s subordinate employment in US manufactures, in the definition of a doctrine of separate spheres and in the conceptualization of the relationship between the home and the state. Overall, the article maintains that, far from theorizing a greater equality among sexes, Carey’s political economy conceived the maintenance of sexual hierarchies as both a result and a necessary condition of capitalist development, with women having to remain subordinate to men whether working in the mill or in the home. Despite his support for an overall improvement in the condition and the treatment of women, then, Carey believed that such improvement could never undermine the patriarchal structure of US society. In highlighting the gendered dimension of Carey’s political economy between the 1830s and 1850s, the article shows how he theorized an inextricable connection between capitalist development and patriarchal relations in the family.