The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work of
Kinship
Micaela di Leonardo
Signs, Vol. 12, No. 3. (Spring, 1987), pp. 440-453.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0097-9740%28198721%2912%3A3%3C440%3ATFWOCA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H
Signs is currently published by The University of Chicago Press.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained
prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in
the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/journals/ucpress.html.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic
journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers,
and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take
advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
http://www.jstor.org
Wed Sep 12 14:59:44 2007
THE FEMALE WORLD OF CARDS
AND HOLIDAYS: WOMEN, FAMILIES,
AND THE WORK OF KINSHIP'
Why is it that the married women of America are supposed to write
all the letters and send all the cards to their husbands' families? My
old man is a much better writer than I am, yet he expects me to
correspond with his whole family. If I asked him to correspond with
mine, he would blow a gasket. [LETTERTO ANN LANDERS]
Women's place in man's life cycle has been that of nurturer, caretaker,
and helpmate, the weaver of those networks of relationships
on which she in turn relies. [CAROLGILLIGAN,In a Diferent
Voicel2
Feminist scholars in the past fifteen years have made great strides in
formulating new understandings of the relations among gender, kinship,
Many thanks to Cynthia Costello, Rayna Rapp, Roberta Spalter-Roth, John Willoughby,
and Barbara Gelpi, Susan Johnson, and Sylvia Yanagisako of Signs for their help with this
article. I wish in particular to acknowledge the influence of Rayna Rapp's work on my ideas.
'Acknowledgment and gratitude to Carroll Smith-Rosenberg for my paraphrase of her
title, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in NineteenthCentury
America," Signs:]ournal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 1(Autumn 1975):
1-29.
Ann Landers letter printed in Washington Post (April 15, 1983); Carol Gilligan, In a
Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Haward University Press, 1982), 17.
[Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1987, vol. 12, no. 31
Q 1987 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved W7-974018711203-0003W1.00
Spr~ng1987 I SIGNS
and the larger economy. As a result of this pioneering research, women are
newly visible and audible, no longer submerged within their families. We
see households as loci of political struggle, inseparable parts of the larger
society and economy, rather than as havens from the heartless world of
industrial ~apitalism.~And historical and cultural variations in kinship and
family forms have become clearer with the maturation of feminist historical
and social-scientific scholarship.
Two theoretical trends have been key to this reinterpretation of
women's work and family domain. The first is the elevation to visibility of
women's nonmarket activities-housework, child care, the servicing of
men, and the care ofthe elderly-and the definition of all these activities as
labor, to be enumerated alongside and counted as part of overall social
reproduction. The second theoretical trend is the nonpejorative focus on
women's domestic or kin-centered networks. We now see them as the
products of conscious strategy, as crucial to the functioning of kinship
systems, as sources of women's autonomous power and possible primary
sites of emotional fulfillment, and, at times, as the vehicles for actual
survival and/or political resistance?
Recently, however, a division has developed between feminist interpreters
of the "labor" and the "network perspectives on women's lives.
Those who focus on women's work tend to envision women as sentient,
goal-oriented actors, while those who concern themselves with women's
ties to others tend to perceive women primarily in terms of nurturance,
other-orientation-altruism. The most celebrated recent example of this
Heidi I. Hartmann, "The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle:
The Example of Housework," Signs 6, no. 3 (Spring 1981):366-94; and Christopher Lasch,
Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
Representative examples of the first trend include Joann Vanek, "Time Spent on
Housework," Scientijic American 231 (November 1974):116-20; Ruth Schwartz Cowan, 'k
Case Study of Technological and Social Change: The Washing Machine and the Working
Wife," in Clio's Consciousness Raised, ed. Mary Hartmann and Lois Banner (New York:
Harper & Row, 1974),245-53; Ann Oakley, Women'sWork:TheHousewife, Past and Present
(New York: Vintage, 1974); Hartmann; and Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of
American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). Key contributions to the second
trend include Louise Lamphere, "Strategies, Cooperation and Conflict among Women in
Domestic Groups," in Women, Culture and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and
Louise Lamphere (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), 97-112; Mina Davis
Caulfield, "Imperialism, the Family and the Cultures of Resistance," Socialist Revolution 20
(October 1974): 67-85; Smith-Rosenberg; Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, "Women-centered Kin
Networks and Urban Bilateral Kinship," American Ethnologist 4, no. 2 (1977):207-26; Jane
Humphries, "The Working Class Family, Women's Liberation and Class Struggle:The Case
of Nineteenth Century British History," Review of Radical Political Economics 9 (Fall 1977):
25-41; Blanche Weisen Cook, "Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian
Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman," inA Heritage of Her Own, ed. Nancy F. Cott and
Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979);Temma Kaplan, "Female Consciousness
and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 191Ck1918,"Signs 7, no. 3 (Spring
1982): 54546.
dl Leonardo 1 THE WORK OF KINSHIP
division is the opposing testimony of historians Alice Kessler-Harris and
Rosalind Rosenberg in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's
sex discrimination case against Sears Roebuck and Company. KesslerHarris
argued that American women historically have actively sought
higher-payingjobs and have been prevented from gaining them because of
sex discrimination by employers. Rosenberg argued that American women
in the nineteenth century created among themselves, through their
domestic networks, a "women's culture" that emphasized the nurturance
of children and others and the maintenance of family life and that discouraged
women from competition over or heavy emotional investment in
demanding, high-paid empl~yment.~
I shall not here address this specific debate but, instead, shall consider
its theoretical background and implications. I shall argue that we need to
fuse, rather than to oppose, the domestic network and labor perspectives.
In what follows, I introduce a new concept, the work of kinship, both to aid
empirical feminist research on women, work, and family and to help
advance feminist theory in this arena. I believe that the boundary-crossing
nature of the concept helps to confound the self-interestlaltruism dichotomy,
forcing us from an either-or stance to a position that includes both
perspectives. I hope in this way to contribute to a more critical feminist
vision of women's lives and the meaning of family in the industrial West.
In my recent field research among Italian-Americans in Northern
California, I found myself considering the relations between women's
kinship and economic lives. As an anthropologist, I was concerned with
people's kin lives beyond conventional American nuclear family or household
boundaries. To this end, I collected individual and family life histories,
asking about all kin and close friends and their activities. I was also
very interested in women's labor. As I sat with women and listened to their
accounts of their past and present lives, I began to realize that they were
involved in three types of work: housework and child care, work in the
labor market, and the work of k i n s h i ~ . ~
By kin work I refer to the conception, maintenance, and ritual celebration
of cross-household kin ties, including visits, letters, telephone calls,
presents, and cards to kin; the organization of holiday gatherings; the
creation and maintenance of quasi-kin relations; decisions to neglect or to
On this debate, see Jon Weiner, "Women's History on Trial," Nation 241, no. 6
(September 7, 1985): 161, 176, 178-80; Karen J. Winkler, "Two Scholars' Conflict in Sears
Sex-BiasCase Sets Off War in Women's History," Chronicle of Higher Education (February
5, 1986), 1, 8; Rosalind Rosenberg, "What Harms Women in the Workplace," New York
Times (February 27, 1986);Alice Kessler-Harris, "Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
vs. Sears Roebuck and Company:A Personal Account," Radical History Review 35 (April
1986): 57-79.
Vortions of the followinganalysis are reported in Micaela di Leonardo, The Varieties of
Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class and Gender among Calijornia ltalian-Americans (Ithaca,
N . Y . : Cornell University Press, 1984), chap. 6.
Spr~ng1987 1 SIGNS
intensify particular ties; the mental work of reflection about all these
activities; and the creation and communication of altering images of family
and kin vis-A-vis the images of others, both folk and mass media. Kin work
is a key element that has been missing in the synthesis of the "household
labor" and "domestic network perspectives. In our emphasis on individual
women's responsibilities within households and on the job, we
reflect the common picture of households as nuclear units, tied perhaps to
the larger social and economic system, but not to each other. We miss the
point of telephone and soft drink advertising, of women's magazines'
holiday issues, of commentators' confused nostalgia for the mythical American
extended family: it is kinship contact across households, as much as
women's work within them, that fulfills our cultural expectation of satisfying
family life.
Maintaining these contacts, this sense of family, takes time, intention,
and skill. We tend to think of human social and kin networks as the
epiphenomena of production and reproduction: the socialtraces created by
our material lives. Or, in the neoclassical tradition, we see them as part of
leisure activities, outside an economic purview except insofar as they
involve consumption behavior. But the creation and maintenance of kin
and quasi-kin networks in advanced industrial societies is work; and,
moreover, it is largely women's work.
The kin-work lens brought into focus new perspectives on my informants'
family lives. First, life histories revealed that often the very existence
of kin contact and holiday celebration depended on the presence of
an adult woman in the household. When couples divorced or mothers
died, the work of kinship was left undone; when women entered into
sanctioned sexual or marital relationships with men in these situations,
they reconstituted the men's kinship networks and organized gatherings
and holiday celebrations. Middle-aged businessman A1 Bertini, for example,
recalled the death of his mother in his early adolescence: "I think that's
probably one ofthe biggest losses in losing a family-yeah, I remember as a
child when my Mom was alive . . . the holidays were treated with enthusiasm
and love . . . after she died the attempt was there but it just didn't
materialize." Later in life, when A1 Bertini and his wife separated, his own
and his son Jim's participation in extended-family contact decreased rapidly.
But when Jim began a relationship with Jane Bateman, she and he
moved in with Al, and Jim and Jane began to invite his kin over for
holidays. Jane single-handedly planned and cooked the holiday feasts.
Kin work, then, is like housework and child care: men in the aggregate
do not do it. It differs from these forms of labor in that it isharder for men to
substitute hired labor to accomplish these tasks in the absence of kinswomen.
Second, I found that women, as the workers in this arena, generally
had much greater kin knowledge than did their husbands, often
including more accurate and extensive knowledge of their husbands' fami-
dl b o n d / THE WORK OF KINSHIP
lies. This was true both of middle-aged and younger couples and surfaced
as a phenomenon in my interviews in the form of humorous argumentsand
in wives' detailed additions to husbands' narratives. Nick Meraviglia, a
middle-aged professional, discussed his Italian antecedents in the presence
of his wife, Pina:
Nick: My grandfather was a very outspoken man, and it was reported
he took off for the hills when he found out that Mussolini
was in power.
Pina: And he was a very tall man; he used to have to bow his head to
get inside doors.
Nick: No, that was my uncle.
Pina: Your grandfather too, I've heard your mother say.
Nick: My mother has a sister and a brother.
Pina: Two sisters!
Nick: You're right!
Pina: Maria and Angelina.
Women were also much more willing to discuss family feuds and crises
and their own roles in them; men tended to repeat formulaic statements
asserting family unity and respectability. (This was much less true for
younger men.) Joe and Cetta Longhinotti's statements illustrate these
tendencies. Joe responded to my question about kin relations: "We all get
along. As a rule, relatives, you got nothing but trouble." Cetta, instead,
discussed her relations with each of her grown children, their wives, her
in-laws, and her own blood kin in detail. She did not hide the fact that
relations were strained in several cases; she was eager to discuss the
evolution of problems and to seek my opinions of her actions. Similarly,
Pina Meraviglia told the followingstory of her fight with one of her brothers
with hysterical laughter: "There was some biting and hair pulling and
choking. . . it was terrible!I shouldn't even tell you. . . ." Nick, meanwhile,
was concerned about maintaining an image of family unity and respecta-
bility.
Also, men waxed fluent while women were quite inarticulate in discussing
their past and present occupations. When asked about their work
lives, Joe Longhinotti and Nick Meraviglia, union baker and professional,
respectively, gave detailed narratives of their work careers. Cetta Longhinotti
and Pina Meraviglia, clerical and former clerical, respectively, offered
only short descriptions focusing on factors of ambience, such as the
"lovely things" sold by Cetta's firm.
These patterns are not repeated in the younger generation, especially
among younger women, such as Jane Bateman, who have managed to
acquire training and jobs with some prospect of mobility. These younger
Spr~ng1987 1 SIGNS
women, though, have added a professional and detailed interest in their
jobs to a felt responsibility for the work of kin~hip.~
Although men rarely took on any kin-work tasks, family histories and
accounts of contemporary life revealed that kinswomen often negotiated
among themselves, alternating hosting, food-preparation, and gift-buying
responsibilities--or sometimes ceding entire task clusters to one woman.
Taking on or ceding tasks was clearly related to acquiring or divesting
oneself of power within kin networks, but women varied in their interpretation
of the meaning of this power. Cetta Longhinotti, for example,
relied on the "family Christmas dinner" as a symbol of her central kinship
role and was involved in painful negotiations with her daughter-in-lawover
the issue: "Last year she insisted-this is touchy. She doesn't want to
spend the holiday dinner together. So last year we went there. But I still
had my dinner the next day . . . I made a big dinner on Christmas Day,
regardless of who's coming--candles on the table, the whole routine. .I
decorate the house myself too . . . well, I just feel that the time will come
when maybe I won't feel like cooking a big dinner-she should take
advantage of the fact that I feel like doing it now." Pina Meraviglia, in
contrast, was saddened by the centripetal force of the developmental cycle
but was unworried about the power dynamics involved in her negotiations
with daughters- and mother-in-law over holiday celebrations.
Kin work is not just a matter of power among women but also of the
mediation of power represented by household units.' Women often choose
to minimize status claims in their kin work and to include numbers of
households under the rubric of family. Cetta Longhinotti's sister Anna, for
example, is married to a professional man whose parents have considerable
economic resources, while Joe and Cetta have low incomes and no other
well-offkin. Cetta and Anna remain close, talk on the phone several times a
week, and assist their adult children, divided by distance and economic
status, in remaining united as cousins.
Finally, women perceived housework, child care, market labor, the
care of the elderly, and the work of kinship as competing responsibilities.
Kin work was a unique category, however, because it was unlabeled and
because women felt they could either cede some tasks to kinswomen
and/or could cut them back severely. Women variously cited the pressures
of market labor, the needs of the elderly, and their own desires for freedom
'Clearly, many women do, in fact, discuss their paid labor with willingness and clarity.
The point here is that there are opposing gender tendencies in an identical interview
situation, tendencies that are explicable in terms of both the material realities and current
cultural constructions of eender."
Papanek has rightly focused on women's unacknowledged family status production, but
what is conceived of as "family" shifts and varies (HannaPapanek, "Family Status Production:
The 'Work' and 'Non-Work' of Women," Signs 4, no. 4 [Summer 19791: 775-81).
di bonardo 1 THE WORK OF KINSHIP
and job enrichment as reasons for cutting back Christmas card lists, organized
holiday gatherings, multifamily dinners, letters, visits, and phone
calls. They expressed guilt and defensiveness about this cutback process
and, particularly, about their failures to keep families close through constant
contact and about their failures to create perfect holiday celebrations.
Cetta Longhinotti, during the period when she was visiting her elderly
mother every weekend in addition to working a full-time job, said of her
grown children, "I'd have the whole gang here once a month, but I've been
so busy that I haven't done that for about six months." And Pina Meraviglia
lamented her insufficient work on family Christmases, "I wish I had really
made it traditional . . . like my sister-in-law has special stories."
Kin work, then, takes place in an arena characterized simultaneously
by cooperation and competition, by guilt and gratification. Like housework
and child care, it is women's work, with the same lack of clear-cut agreement
concerning its proper components: How often should sheets be
changed? When should children be toilet trained? Should an aunt send a
niece a birthday present? Unlike housework and child care, however, kin
work, taking place across the boundaries of normative households, is as yet
unlabeled and has no retinue of experts prescribing its correct forms.
Neither home economists nor child psychologists have much to say about
nieces' birthday presents. Kin work is thus more easily cut back without
social interference. On the other hand, the results of kin work-frequent
kin contact and feelings of intimacy-are the subject of considerable cultural
manipulation as indicators of family happiness. Thus, women in
general are subject to the guilt my informants expressed over cutting back
kin-work activities.
Although many of my informants referred to the results ofwomen's kin
work-cross-household kin contacts and attendant ritual gatherings-as
particularly Italian-American, I suggest that in fact this phenomenon is
broadly characteristicof American kinship. We think of kin-work tasks such
as the preparation of ritual feasts, responsibility for holiday card lists, and
gift buying as extensions of women's domestic responsibilities for cooking,
consumption, and nurturance. American men in general do not take on
these tasks any more than they do housework and child care-and probably
less, as these tasks have not yet been the subject of intense public debate.
And my informants' gender breakdown in relative articulatenesson kinship
and workplace themes reflects the still prevalent occupational segregation-most
women cannot find jobs that provide enough pay, status, or
promotion possibilities to make them worth focusing on-as well as
women's perceived power within kinship networks. The common recognition
of that power is reflected in Selma Greenberg's book on nonsexist child
rearing. Greenberg calls mothers "press agents" who sponsor relations
between their own children and other relatives; she advises a mother
Spr~ng1987 I SIGNS
whose relatives treat her disrespectfully to deny those kin access to her
children?
Kin work is a salient concept in other parts of the developed world as
well. Larissa Adler Lomnitz and Marisol Perez Lizaur have found that
"centralizing women" are responsible for these tasks and for communicating
"family ideology" among upper-class families in Mexico City.
Matthews Hamabata, in his study of upper-class families in Japan, has
found that women's kin work involves key financial transactions. Sylvia
Junko Yanagisako discovered that, among rural Japanese migrants to the
United States, the maintenance of kin networks was assigned to women as
the migrants adopted the American ideology of the independent nuclear
family household. Maila Stivens notes that urban Australian housewives'
kin ties and kin ideology "transcend women's isolation in domesticunits."1°
This is not to say that cultural conceptions of appropriate kin work do
not vary, even within the United States. Carol B. Stack documents institutionalized
fictive kinship and concomitant reciprocity networks among
impoverished black American women. Women in populations characterized
by intense feelings of ethnic identity may feel bound to emphasize
particular occasions-Saint Patrick's or Columbus Day-with organized
family feasts. These constructs may be mediated by religious affiliation, as
in the differing emphases on Friday or Sunday family dinners among Jews
and Christians. Thus the personnel involved and the amount and kind'of
labor considered necessary for the satisfactory performance of particular
kin-work tasks are likely to be culturally constructed." But while the kin
and quasi-kin universes and the ritual calendar may vary among women
according to race or ethnicity, their general responsibility for maintaining
kin links and ritual observances does not.
As kin work is not an ethnic or racial phenomenon, neither is it linked
Selma Greenberg, Right from the Start: A Guide to Nonsexist Child Rearing (Boston:
Houghton MifRin Co., 1978), 147. Another example of indirect support for kin work's
gendered existence is a recent study of university math students, which found that a major
reason for women's failure to pursue careers in mathematics was the pressure of family
involvement. Compare David Maines et al., Social Processes of Sex Dqferentiation in
Mathematics (Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Education, 1981).
lo Larissa Adler Lomnitz and Marisol Perez Lizaur, "The History of a Mexican Urban
Family," Journal of Family Histoy 3, no. 4 (1978):392409, esp. 398; Matthews Hambata,
For Love and Power: Family Business in Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, in
press); SylviaJunko Yanagisako, "Two Processes of Change in Japanese-American Kinship,"
Journal of Anthropological Research 31 (1975):196-224; Maila Stivens, "Women and Their
Kin: Kin, Class and Solidarity in a Middle-Class Suburb of Sydney, Australia," in Women
United, Women Divided, ed. Patricia Caplan and Janet M. Bujra (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1979), 157-84.
'I Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategiesfor Survival in a Black Community (New York:
Harper & Row, 1974).These cultural constructions may, however, vary within ethnicIracia1
populations as well.
di b a r d o 1 THE WORK OF KINSHIP
only to one social class. Some commentators on American family life still
reflect the influence of work done in England in the 1950s and 1960s (by
Elizabeth Bott and by Peter Willmott and Michael Young)in their assumption
that working-class families are close and extended, while the middle
class substitutes friends (oranomie)for family. Others reflect the prevalent
family pessimism in their presumption that neither working- nor middleclassfamilies
have extended kin contact.I2Insofar as kin contact depends on
residential proximity, the larger economy's shifts will influence particular
groups' experiences. Factory workers, close to kin or not, are likely to
disperse when plants shut down or relocate. Small businesspeople or
independent professionals may, however, remain resident in particular
areas-and thus maintain proximity to kin-for generations, while professional
employees of large firms relocate at their firms' behest. This pattern
obtained among my informants.
In any event, cross-household kin contact can be and is effected at long
distance through letters, cards, phone calls, and holiday and vacation
visits. The form and functions of contact, however, vary according to
economic resources. Stack and Brett Williams offer rich accounts of kin
networks among poor blacks and migrant Chicanofarmworkers functioning
to provide emotional support, labor, commodity, and cash exchange-a
funeralvisit, help with laundry, the gift of adress or piece offurniture.13Far
different in degree are exchanges such as the loan of a vacation home, a
multifamily boating trip, or the provision of free professional servicesexamples
from the kin networks of my wealthier informants. The point is
that households, as labor- and income-pooling units, whatever their relative
wealth, are somewhat porous in relation to others with whose members
they share kin or quasi-kin ties. We do not really know how class
differences operate in this realm; it is possible that they do so largely in
terms of ideology. It may be, as David Schneider and Raymond T. Smith
suggest, that the affluent and the very poor are more open in recognizing
l2 Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Network, 2d ed. (New York: Free Press, 1971);
Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London:Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1957),and Family and Class in a London Suburb(London:Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1960).Classic studies that presume this class difference are Herbert Gans, The Urban
Villagers: Croup and Classin the Life of Italian-Americans(NewYork: Free Press, 1962);and
Mirra Komarovsky, Blue-Collar Marriage (New York: Random House, 1962). A recent
example is Ilene Philipson, "Heterosexual Antagonisms and the Politics of Mothering,"
Socialist Review 12, no. 6 (November-December 1982):55-77. Edward Shorter, The Making
of the Modern Family (NewYork:BasicBooks, 1975),epitomizes the pessimism of the "family
sentiments" school. See also Mary Lyndon Shanley, "The History of the Family in Modern
England: Review Essay," Signs 4, no. 4 (Summer 1979):740-50.
l3 Stack;and Brett Williams, "The Trip Takes Us: Chicano Migrants to the Prairie" (Ph.D.
diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1975).
Spr~ng1987 1 SIGNS
necessary economic ties to kin than are those who identify themselves as
middle class.14
Recognizing that kin work is gender rather than class based allows us to
see women's kin networks among all groups, not just among working-class
and impoverished women in industrialized societies. This recognition in
turn clarifies our understanding of the privileges and limits of women's
varying access to economic resources. Affluent women can "buy out" of
housework, child care-and even some kin-work responsibilities. But
they, like all women, are ultimately responsible, and subject to both guilt
and blame, as the administratorsofhome, children, and kin network. Even
the wealthiest women must negotiate the timing and venue ofholidays and
other family rituals with their kinswomen. It may be that kin work is the
core women's work category in which allwomen cooperate, while women's
perceptions of the appropriateness of cooperation for housework, child
care, and the care of the elderly varies by race, class, region, and genera-
tion.
But kin work is not necessarily an appropriate category of labor, much
less gendered labor, in all societies. In many small-scale societies, kinship
is the major organizing principle of all social life, and all contacts are by
definition kin contact^.'^ One cannot, therefore, speak oflabor that does not
involve kin. In the United States, kin work as a separable category of
gendered labor perhaps arose historically in concert with the ideological
and material constructs of the moral motherlcult of domesticity and the
privatized family during the course of industrialization in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. These phenomena are connected to the increase
in the ubiquity of productive occupations for men that are not organized
through kinship. This includes the demise of the family farm with the
capitalization of agriculture and rural-urban migration; the decline of family
recruitment in factories as firms grew, ended child labor, and began to
assert bureaucratized forms of control; the decline of artisanal labor and of
small entrepreneurial enterprises as large firms took greater and greater
shares of the commodity market; the decline of the family firm as corporations-and
their managerial work forces-grew beyond the capacities of
individual families to provision them; and, finally, the rise of civil service
bureaucracies and public pressure against nepotism.16
l4 David Schneider and Raymond T. Smith, Class Dqferences and Sex Roles in American
Kinship and Family Structure (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1973),esp. 27.
l5 See Nelson Graburn, ed., Readings in Kinship and Social Structure (NewYork: Harper
& Row, 1971), esp. 2-4.
l6 The moral motherlcult of domesticity is analyzed in Barbara Welter, "The Cult ofTrue
Womanhood, 1820-1860," American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (Summer 1966): 151-74; Nancy
Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Women's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New
di Leonardo 1 THE WORK OF KINSHIP
As men increasinglyworked alongside of non-kin, and as the ideology of
separate spheres was increasingly accepted, perhaps the responsibility for
kin maintenance, like that for child rearing, became gender-focused. Ryan
points out that "built into the updated family economy . . . was a new
measure of voluntarism. "This voluntarism, though, "perceived as the shift
from patriarchal authority to domestic affection," also signaled the rise of
women's moral responsibility for family life. Just as the "idea of fatherhood
itself seemed almost to wither away" so did male involvement in the
responsibility for kindred lapse."
With postbellum economic growth and geographic movement,
women's new kin burden involved increasing amounts of time and labor.
The ubiquity of lengthy visits and of frequent letter-writing among
nineteenth-century women attests to this. And for visitors and for those
who were residentially proximate, the continuing commonalities of
women's domestic labor allowed for kinds of work sharing-nursing, childkeeping,
cooking, cleaning-that men, with their increasingly differentiated
and controlled activities, probably could not maintain. This is not to
say that some kin-related male productive work did not continue; my own
data, for instance, show kin involvement among small businessmen in the
present. It is, instead, to suggest a general trend in material life and a
cultural shift that influenced even those whose productive and kin lives
remained commingled. Yanagisako has distinguished between the realms
of domestic and public kinship in order to draw attention to anthropology's
relatively "thin descriptions" of the domestic (female) domain. Using her
typology, we might say that kin work as gendered labor comes into existence
within the domestic domain with the relative erasure of the domain
of public, male kinship."
Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1977);and Ruth Bloch, "American Feminine Ideals in
Transition:The Rise ofthe Moral Mother, 17851815," Feminist Studies4, no. 2 (June1978):
101-26. The description ofthe general political-economic shiftin the United States isbased on
Harry Braverman, Labor and ,tfonopoly Capital:The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth
Century (NewYork:Monthly Review Press, 1974);Peter Dobkin Hall, "FamilyStructure and
Economic Organization:Massachusetts Merchants, 1700-1850," in Family and Kin in Urban
Communities, 1700-1950,ed. Tamara K. Hareven (NewYork:New Viewpoints,1977),3841;
Michael Anderson, "Family, Household and the Industrial Revolution," in The American
Family in Social-Historical Perspectice, ed. Michael Gordon (NewYork:St. Martin's Press,
1978),38-50; Tamara K. Hareven, Ainoskeag: Lfe and Work in an American Factory City
(NewYork:Pantheon Books, 19781,Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain: The Transformation
of the Workplace in the Twentieth Century (NewYork:Basic Books, 1979);Mary Ryan,
The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A
History of Wage-earning Women in the L'nited States (NewYork:Oxford University Press,
1982).
Ryan, 23132.
l8 Sylvia JunkoYanagisako, "Family and Household: The Analysis of Domestic Groups,"
Annual Reciew of Anthropology 8 (1979):161-205.
Spr~ng1987 1 SIGNS
Whether or not this proposed historical model bears up under further
research, the question remains, Why do women do kin work? However
material factors may shape activities, they do not determine how individuals
may perceive them. And in considering issues of motivation, of
intention, of the cultural construction of kin work, we return to the
altruism versus self-interestdichotomy in recent feminist theory. Consider
the epigraphs to this article. Are women kin workers the nurturant weavers
of the Gilligan quotation, or victims, like the fed-up woman who writes to
complain to Ann Landers? That is, are we to see kin work as yet another
example of "women's culture" that takes the care of others as its primary
desideratum? Or are we to see kin work as another way in which men, the
economy, and the state extract labor from women without a fair return?
And how do women themselves see their kin work and its place in their
lives?
As I have indicated above, I believe that it is the creation of the
self-interestlaltruism dichotomy that is itself the problem here. My
women informants, like most American women, accepted their primary
responsibility for housework and the care of dependent children. Despite
two major waves of feminist activism in this century, the gendering of
certain categories of unpaid labor is still largely unaltered. These work
responsibilities clearly interfere with some women's labor force commitments
at certain life-cycle stages; but, more important, women are simply
discriminated against in the labor market and rarely are able to achieve
wage and status parity with men of the same age, race, class, and educational
background.lg
Thus for my women informants, as for most American women, the
domestic domain is not only an arena in which much unpaid labor must be
undertaken but also a realm in which one may attempt to gain human
satisfactions-and power-not available in the labor market. Anthropologists
Jane Collier and Louise Lamphere have written compellingly on the
ways in which varying kinship and economic structures may shape
women's competition or cooperation with one another in domestic
domain^.^ Feminists considering Western women and families have
looked at the issue of power primarily in terms ofhusband-wife relations or
psychological relations between parents and children. If we adopt Collier
and Lamphere's broader canvas, though, we see that kin work is not only
women's labor from which men and children benefit but also labor that
women undertake in order to create obligations in men and children and to
gain power over one another. Thus Cetta Longhinotti's struggle with her
daughter-in-law over the venue of Christmas dinner is not just about a
l9 See Donald J. Treiman and Heidi I. Hartmann, eds., Women, Work and Wages: Equal
Pay for Jobs of Equal Value (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1981).
zn Lifmphere (n. 4 above);Jane Fishburne Collier, "Women in Politics," in Rosaldo and
Lamphere, eds. (n. 4 above), 8!3-96.
dl h u d o / THE WORK OF KINSHIP
competition over altruism, it is alsoaboutthe creation of future obligations.
And thus Cetta's and Anna's sponsorship of their children's friendshipwith
each other is both an act of nurturance and a cooperative means of gaining
power over those children.
Although this was not a clear-cut distinction, those of my informants
who were more explicitly antifeminist tended to be most invested in kin
work. Given the overwhelminghistorical shifttoward greater autonomy for
younger generations and the withering of children's financial and labor
obligations to their parents, this investment was in most cases tragically
doomed. Cetta Longhinotti, for example, had repaid her own mother's
devotion with extensive home nursing during the mother's last years.
Given Cetta's general failure to direct her adult children in work, marital
choice, religious worship, or even frequency of visits, she is unlikely to
receive such care from them when she is older.
The kin-work lens thus reveals the close relations between altruism and
self-interest in women's actions. As economists Nancy Folbre and Heidi
Hartmann point out, we have inherited a Western intellectual tradition
that both dichotomizes the domestic and public domains and associates
them on exclusive axes such that we find it difficult to see self-interest in
the home and altruism in the workplace." But why, in fact, have women
fought for better jobs if not, in part, to support their children? These
dichotomies are Procrustean beds that warp our understanding ofwomen's
lives both at home and at work. "Altruism" and "self-interest" are cultural
constructions that are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and we forget
this to our peril.
The concept of kin work helps to bring into focus a heretofore unacknowledged
array of tasks that is culturally assigned to women in industrialized
societies. At the same time, this concept, embodying notions of
both love and work and crossing the boundaries of households, helps us to
reflect on current feminist debates on women's work, family, and community.
We newly see both the interrelations of these phenomena and women's
roles in creating and maintaining those interrelations. Revealing the
actual labor embodied in what we culturally conceive as love and considering
the political uses of this labor helps to deconstruct the self-interestlaltruism
dichotomy and to connect more closely women's domestic and
labor-force lives.
The true value of the concept, however, remains to be tested through
further historical and contemporary research on gender, kinship, and
labor. We need to assess the suggestion that gendered kin work emerges in
concert with the capitalist development process; to probe the historical
record for women's and men's varying and changing conceptions of it; and
Nancy Folbre and Heidi I. Hartmann, "The Rhetoric of Self-Interest: Selfishness,
Altruism, and Gender in Economic Theor-,"in The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric, ed.
Arjo Klamer and Donald McCloskey(NewYork: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
Spr~ng1987 I SIGNS
to research the current range of its cultural constructions and material
realities. We know that household boundaries are more porous than we
had thought-but they are undoubtedly differentially porous, and this is
what we need to specify. We need, in particular, to assess the relations of
changinglabor processes, residential patterns, and the use of technology to
changing kin work.
Altering the values attached to this particular set of women's tasks
will be as difficult as are the housework, child-care, and occupationalsegregation
struggles. But just as feminist research in these latter areas is
complementary and cumulative, so researching kin work should help us to
piece together the home, work, and public-life landscape-to see the
female world of cards and holidays as it is constructed and lived within the
changing political economy. How female that world is to remain, and what
it would look like if it were not sex-segregated, are questions we cannot yet
answer.
Department of Anthropology
Yale University