"The domestic function of the preindustrial woman had not needed ideological justification; it was implicit in the biological and political economy of her world. Someone had to keep the spinning wheel turning and the open-hearth fire constantly tended, and the nursing mother who could not leave her infant was the obvious candidate. In the domesticity of the preindustrial woman there was no sharp disjunction between ideology and practice. But the Revolution was a watershed. It created a public ideology of individual responsibility and virtue just before the industrial machinery began to free middle-class women from some of their unremitting toil and to propel lower-class women more fully into the public economy. The terms of domesticity were changed, and the pundits would not bring back the past."
Linda Kerber, 1980, 231
Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America
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