Introduction

For millennia, and even now, the vast majority of people worldwide have worked to survive, not to enjoy luxury goods or commodities that have nothing or little to do with survival, like buying frozen strawberries in the northern United States in January. Many men, women, and children around the world lived only one or two steps from frequent bouts with hunger and misery or existing in conditions that twenty-first century Americans now call poverty. People developed their most basic institutions such as marriage, family, and village as mechanisms for material, as well as psychological, survival.

Most of the population in the world lived in a "moral" economy prior to the entrenchment of the Industrial Revolution and wage/salary employment that began in earnest, first in the late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century in the Western world, including the United States. The moral economies in the pre-industrial world were characterized by people who bundled their livelihoods, ways of making a living, in a series of obligatory relationships. Historically, the majority of toiling people were economically "unfree" because they could not choose a "career" or an "occupation," but they had rights (of some sort) and duties. Slaves, however, had no legal rights; they remained outside of civic life and human rights. From the ancient world to the modern world, slaves, in the words of historian-sociologist Orlando Patterson, live a "social death."

Across the globe, most people who lived hierarchical societies with moral economies divided into social classes, castes, or other socioeconomic arrangements. They toiled as serfs, indentured servants, peasants, apprentices, or laboring people. They worked for aristocrats, landlords, slaveholders, royal bureaucrats, government officials, merchants, or other social higher-ups. Many were duty-bound to "donate" their labor to the village, manor, fief, government (the state), church, hacienda, or some other institutional entity that they did not own. Most people remained fixed to their work-social relationships. For example, a man or a woman born a peasant stayed a peasant.

People who lived in societies not divided hierarchically into socioeconomic strata were, too, duty-bound to clans, bands, tribes, or villages. They worked not for themselves, but for their particular local social units. For example, in most Native American nations in North America, men and women worked to meet the needs or to satisfy the good of their clans and villages.

Interestingly, for many pre-industrial centuries, people lived in moral economies that shunned the concept of accumulating personal wealth. Those who accumulated wealth did so, not to get rich or comfortable, but to improve one's social status. Often they gained status within their social group. For example, in pre-modern India where people divided along lines of caste, a person of a lower caste could attain much wealth and receive admiration by people within her or his caste, but that person remained a member of that lower caste. A poor individual of an upper caste still harbor feelings of superiority over a very rich lower caste person. In medieval Europe, Christian authorities shunned, at least in theory, the practice of using wealth to generate more wealth, for instance, charging interest on a loan. They allowed Jewish financial dealers to engage in such activities and then blamed all Jews for getting rich. In another example, Native American societies shunned concepts of accumulation of personal wealth and private ownership of productive property. But when Native American and Western European civilizations collided, the Western world "won" in part because of its effective military firepower, efficient social organizations, and values that supported such concepts as the accumulation of personal wealth.

The historical work alternative to a moral economy that emerged in the Western World was wage labor in an industrializing capitalist market economy. Wage labor has been around for millennia, but only with the rise and maturation of a modern market economy, especially with the modern, industrialized, capitalist market economy, did wage labor become the dominant condition of life for most individuals. People in market economies work because they need the money, but they are free to change their status and occupation or career.

Women in preindustrial Western societies found themselves in a curious position. Generally, they had fewer freedoms in the public sphere than women did in many preindustrial African and Native American societies. Preindustrial Western women had more freedoms than did women in some Asian societies. On average, women everywhere worked, and they worked harder and longer than the men did. Of course, like the men, women in the upper classes or the upper orders expended less physical energy at work than the women in the lower classes or strata did. Women of the upper strata employed servants or slaves to perform the drudgery. In some, mainly non-Western societies, women also engaged in economic production outside the household. For example, in many traditional African and Native American societies, women worked as the primary farmers, involved in planting, cultivating, and harvesting of crops or sold commodities at the local village- or city-square market.

Most importantly, much economic production in preindustrial societies, including what became the Western world, occurred within the household, and women played an important, if not a key, role in household production. Women's status underwent a series of convoluted shifts during the rise and entrenchment of the Industrial Revolution that stripped practically all forms of economic production from the household, leaving women with practically no or severely weakened legal control or voice in the production or distribution of commodities and wealth.