domestic labor

Gordon Parks’s most famous photograph, "American Gothic," was of a cleaning woman in Washington, D.C. She has a story to tell.

The second wife of Thomas Edison, she viewed domestic labor as a science, calling herself a "home executive."

The Black women and men who worked and slept in white homes are mostly invisible in the histories of suburbia.

The problem no longer has no name, and yet we refuse to solve it.

The “peaceful revolution” of rural electrification.

The Biden administration’s proposed “child allowances” draw on the feminist thought of Crystal Eastman, who advocated “motherhood endowments” 100 years ago.

The residence staff, many of whom have worked there for decades, balance their service of the First Family with their long-term loyalty to the house itself.

The heart-tug tactics of 1950s ads steered white American women away from activism into domesticity. They’re still there.

How Better Homes in America—a collaboration between Herbert Hoover and the editor of a conservative women’s magazine—promoted idealized whiteness.

In 1967, I was in the middle of one of the world’s buzziest stories.

The radical vision of Wages for Housework.

How Alex Tizon’s essay echoes a trope with deep roots in American history

Flora Rose and Martha Van Rensselaer lived in an open lesbian relationship and helped found the field of home economics.

For every moment of historical significance, there is a figure — often hidden — who fed the figures we do remember.

Judith Jones edited culinary greats such as Julia Child and Edna Lewis—and identified the pleasure at the core of traditional “women’s work.”

Caricatures of Irish immigrants—especially Irish women—have softened, but persist in characters whose Irishness is expressed in subtle cues.

40 years ago in Chicago, McMaid workers sparked a movement.

A cooking assignment helps illuminate the lives of Jewish women in the past for students.

"I idolized women like Marvel Cooke," Angela Davis tells Teen Vogue.

Revisiting "When Affirmative Action Was White," nearly two decades on.