And “women must weep.”

It was the social division of labor, creating industrialism under imperialism, that removed work from middle-class women while it heaped factory labor on women of the working class. In the mills of Marx’s England, seven-year-olds of both sexes worked fifteen hours a day seven days a week; in dress shops women worked thirty hours without relief and died of exhaustion. In the agricultural countryside, enclosure expropriated peasants for industrial sheep farming, later replaced by deer parks. (Marx called deer “the fat cattle of the rich.”) Working men and women moved to cities, where wealth was created by the mills—and “In so far as machinery dispenses with muscular power, it becomes a means of employing laborers of slight muscular strength and those whose bodily development is incomplete, but whose limbs are all the more supple. The labor of women and children …” Thomas de Quincy—quoted by Marx—noted that “The numerical increase of laborers has been great, through the growing substitution of female for male, and above all, of child for adult labor. Three girls of 13, at wages of from 6 shillings to 8 shillings a week, here replaced the one man of mature age, of wages varying from 18 shillings to 45 shillings.” (Compare, in progressive American capitalism, the conversion of salaried employees into part-timers without benefits.) Thus as the farms broke up—where women worked in equality with men—men lacked jobs, poor women were exploited, and their prosperous sisters languished in an idleness without purpose.

My own family achieved the middle class only recently. If Kate in New Hampshire appeared to take satisfaction in the work of kitchen and house, Augusta in Connecticut was proud of keeping the dairy’s books. She and her sisters were hard-working and resourceful; having a father who worked with his hands, they were not required to languish. In the busy city they worked, clever enough to escape the factory for the office. Gussie’s sister Clara labored as a secretary—shorthand, filing, typing—in the gas company, then assisted the treasurer, and lived long enough to become an executive in the same company. After Augusta married Henry, who struggled to establish and expand the Hall Dairy Company, the family joked that she was the brains and he the brawn; jokes tell the truth: She handled the office (a room in the big stucco house they lived in, with a great desk and a green leather chair), doing the payroll and handling financial matters, while Henry with his fourteen- and sixteen-hour days bought milk, bottled and delivered it.