Our Mothers' Grief Racial Ethnic Women and the Maintenance of Families

• Published in: Journal of family history Vol. 13; no. 4; pp. 415 - 431
• Main Author: Dill, Bonnie Thornton
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.10.1988; National Council on Family Relations; SAGE PUBLICATIONS, INC
• Subjects: 19th century; African Americans; Asian cultural groups; Colonialism; Domesticity; Ethnic groups; Ethnic Minorities; Ethnicity; Family Roles; Family Structure; Family work relationship; Grief; Industrialization; Labor; Mexican Americans; Middle class; Minority Groups; Mothers; Nineteenth Century; Resistance; Social organization; United States of America; White people; Women; Womens Roles; Working women; United States > US
• DOI: 10.1177/036319908801300404
• ISSN: 0363-1990

This article examines the nature and social organization of reproductive labor in the family among African-American, Chinese, and Mexican-American women in the United States during the nineteenth century. A brief description of reproductive labor of white families in colonial America is used as a point of contrast for examining reproductive labor among groups of racial ethnic women. The article pays special attention to the ways in which racial ethnic women's work in maintaining the family becomes a source of resistance to the cultural assaults of the dominant society. The concept of reproductive labor, when applied to women of color, must be modified to account for the fact that labor in the productive sphere was required to achieve even minimal levels of family subistence. Thus, in an historical era when the family roles of middle-class whites had been reshaped by industrialization, driving this group of women into a cult of domesticity, racial ethnic women were struggling with the “double day.”