Beginning as early as the late eighteenth century, growing widespread in Victorian times and increasing through much of the twentieth century, husbands and fathers demanded that wives and daughters be idle and decorative, proof of male power and economic success. The requirement of idleness, disguised as benignity, was a massive and malignant assault.

Oh, a Victorian housewife of means, not allowed to become a doctor or a marketing executive, might find herself executive nonetheless—managing a squad of nannies as well as a platoon of housemaids, cooks, gardeners, laundresses, grooms, and coachmen. But of course the majority of our ancestors were the laundresses, grooms, cooks, teachers, nannies, gardeners, and coachmen; others were subsistence farmers or hired hands in a society still largely agricultural—and in the work of an agricultural society, women worked as much as men did.

Contrast, with laundresses and farmwives, the lawyer’s daughter in 1919 or the businessman’s wife in 1884. With heroic exceptions, these women were denied not only the vote but the dignity of utility. They were permitted the vapors and forbidden education; they could not labor except for Lady Bountiful’s volunteering; they could not sew shirts or cook stews; they were allowed to make lace, play piano, paint watercolors, and pour tea.

When Emile Durkheim wrote the Division of Labor a century ago, he developed ideas out of Adam Smith into his original sociology of work. When he spoke of women he was horrifying. Of course “the division of labor” begins with physiology, because one mammalian gender tends to remain with the young that it bears while the other portion hunts and gathers and kills food; because one gender develops greater muscle mass than the other. But Durkheim does not stop with muscle mass: From Durkheim we learn the startling information—compounded of the imperialist (un-Darwinian) Darwinism of Herbert Spencer and the brain research of Paul Broca and others—that women’s cranial capacity is not only smaller than men’s but that modern women’s brains are smaller than ancient women’s because in the modern world less work is required of women. Broca’s work was seized upon by misogynists everywhere. (In an essay, Stephen Jay Gould has taken care of Broca’s methodology.) “The further we look into the past,” argues Durkheim, “the smaller becomes this difference between man and woman. The woman of past days was not at all the weak creature that she has become with the progress of morality.” As he continues, Durkheim has women specialize in the labor of feeling—a stereotype that persists:

It is certain that at the same time sexual labor is more and more divided. Limited first only to sexual functions, it slowly becomes extended to others. Long ago, woman retired from warfare and public affairs, and consecrated her entire life to her family. Since then, her role has become even more specialized. Today, among cultivated people, the woman leads a completely different existence from that of the man. One might say that the two great functions of the psychic life are thus dissociated, that one of the sexes takes care of the affective functions and the other of intellectual functions.