Abstract

"Free and Enslaved Women’s Labor at the Early US Mint"

Ann Daly, Mississippi State University (ann_daly@alumni.brown.edu)

In the early nineteenth-century United States, new forms of wage work led Americans to devalue women’s domestic work, arguing that only productive, public, and male workers contributed to markets. Historians have long argued that these gendered valuations of labor were historical phenomena to question the distinction between productive and reproductive labor. This paper builds on scholarship on capitalist markets’ reliance on female and household labor to argue that women’s work was instrumental to making money itself.
Using payrolls, census records, notarial records, architectural floorplans, and government correspondence, this paper reconstructs women’s work at and on behalf of the US Mint in the first half of the nineteenth century to argue that the institution’s workforce defied discursive distinctions between domestic and industrial labor. In addition to an industrial workforce of white, wage-earning men and women performing tasks traditionally associated with factory labor, the Mint relied on women doing work more often associated with households. In Philadelphia, outwork seamstresses sewed protective equipment for the institution at home. Likewise, mandates that officials live in the Mint meant that the buildings were also domestic spaces where enslaved and free women cooked, cleaned, and cared for children, all under the government’s purview. Labor performed by practically the full spectrum of working women found in the Early Republic, from wage-earning factory workers and outwork seamstresses to enslaved laundresses and slave-owning white women, converged in the making of a coin. Money defied divisions between home and work and production and reproduction from the moment it was made.