What is Work?

Every society throughout history has defined what counts as work and what doesn?t. And more often than not, those lines of demarcation are inextricable from considerations of gender. What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies. Drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics, these essays explore the changing and often contested boundaries between what was and is considered work in different Euro-American contexts over several centuries, with an eye to the ambiguities and biases that have shaped mainstream conceptions of work across all social sectors.

?In the perspective of the preparation of the competitions, this book makes it possible to open the field of what constitutes the history of work and to build a critical point of view on its sources. It will also be of greater interest to those who want to write a reflective history of work, attentive to the categories that constitute it. Finally, at a time when the rapid development of teleworking promises to shift a large part of salaried activities to the domestic space, it offers a strong historical perspective to sharply address the pitfalls of the present.? ? Le Carnet du Mouvement Social

?One of the strong points of this volume is the excellent theoretical framework offered by its editors. They begin with a solid introduction that not only serves to present the contributions but also allows to pose questions and to raise the problems approached in this volume?This work of very high quality helps to understand the multiple forms of first female and then feminist mobilization regarding the definition and redistribution of the work accomplished by women in the domestic sphere.? ? Clio