Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - From Fireside to Factory (c. 1916).djvu/17

 whether she made shirts and pants for her own husband and sons or whether she made them to be traded to the Indians, in either case she performed her work in her own or in some other person's home, surrounded by her own or by her employer's family. The home was the work-shop and the family was the working group. The conditions under which these early women workers plied their trades were the conditions of home and family life. Sometimes these domestic work-shops were quite extensive. In some households one could find the mother and her daughters and one or more hired women, all weaving cloth for sale. In the winter months, when the men of the family were released from labor in the fields, they, too, would help at the loom, and thus the entire household, by their combined efforts, could produce a considerable quantity of cloth. Now and then new looms were bought with the proceeds of the sales, and so the domestic work-shop was gradually enlarged and extended. Some families succeeded in manufacturing such large quantities of cloth or linen that the supply exceeded the demand in their immediate neighborhood, and their products were sent out in sailing vessels that carried fish to other ports.

Although men, as we have seen, sometimes participated in this domestic industry, it was mainly the work of women. The making of commodities, particularly of food and clothing, was woman's domain, her undisputed task, the very purpose of her life in the economic scheme of society. But although the colonial woman was essentially and always a producer, and although her productive work was often gainful in character, she was not an independent wage-worker in the modern sense of the word. Not the individual, but the family, was the economic unit, and the husband and father, as recognized head of the family, disposed of the earnings of the women. Married women and their unmarried daughters often worked away for years without ever controlling one cent of the money earned by their toil. By law and by the sanction of public opinion, the husband owned the wife's earnings, as well as all property given or bequeathed to her. But as the vast majority of women enjoyed the shelter of the home in one way or another, as they were clothed, housed and fed in return for their productive, domestic labor, and as