The year 2026 marks the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the founding document of the United States of America. It is also the 250^th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations, Scottish economist Adam Smith’s founding work of modern economics. Both foundings frame the way we look at the world today, and so as we commemorate each, it is worth remembering what they suppressed as well as what they asserted. The Declaration famously made claims about the equality of “all men” that excluded women (and many men). Wealth of Nations, similarly, made iconic the factory division of labor needed to construct a pin but ignored the reality that pins at the time were made by and for female labor.[1]

Pin maker’s factory, as depicted in Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers 1762: Epinglier, Plate II. From Wikimedia Commons.

The inattentions to women in each of these founding documents are linked because political economy, as it emerged in the late eighteenth century and shaped the policies and political narrative of the United States, took for granted what economist Nancy Folbre calls “the economic infrastructure of families and communities” and focused instead on a particular kind of individual, free to pursue self-interest in his work and with his vote.[2] Since the early republic, ideas about what constitutes “the economy” and who constitutes “the nation” have failed to attend to female labors as the cornerstones they are. The caregiving crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic vividly exposed just one set of consequences of this inattention.[3]

What if we centered women’s work, an idea I explored in my contribution to the JER Roundtable, in our commemorations of 1776? The Revolutionary War would become a striking story of labor mobility. Eighteenth-century Haudenosaunee women managed their communities’ fields and longhouses, making their towns “female worlds” of production and reproduction. In 1779, George Washington directed Major General John Sullivan’s campaign in Seneca country to “lay waste all the settlements around,” specifically targeting the homes, cornfields, and orchards that represented female labor and the foundation of women’s authority in Seneca politics and diplomacy. Matrons whose ownership and oversight of food cultivation had given them a determinative voice in their societies had to grab what they could carry and run as American soldiers burned 160,000 bushels of corn and acres of vegetables and fruit.[4] As Seneca women fled into exile, taking their labor power with them and leaving ashes behind, they joined streams of women exiting one configuration of economic space and establishing new ones.

The “war against vegetables,” as some called the Sullivan campaign, made women’s work central to the emerging United States’ boundaries to the north and linked their labor to Native property dispossession. Mary Jemison, a white Pennsylvanian who had been captured and adopted by the Seneca during the Seven Years’ War, narrated her memory of this flight west with her children in a memoir published many years after the Revolution. Finding refuge with two Black men who had escaped from slavery into western Iroquoia, she husked corn to help them gather the harvest and was paid in kind: “I husked enough for them, to gain for myself, at every tenth string, one hundred strings of ears, which were equal to twenty five bushels of shelled corn. This seasonable supply made my family comfortable for samp and cakes through the succeeding winter.”[5] Corn was money; corn was food; women’s work and exchanges involving corn sustained their families and also established new, temporary community relationships.

The Camp Laundry, print, anonymous, British, 18th century (MET, 1971.600.20). From Wikimedia Commons.

If we center women’s work as we commemorate 1776, the most important division of labor was not on a factory floor but rather the gendered division of labor that set men to one constellation of tasks and women to another. Wealth of Nations ignored this fundamental distinction. Smith gave only glancing attention to women’s paid work to note it was precarious without asking why. He assumed women’s uncompensated endeavors rather than evaluating them. Long before any worker entered a pin factory or picked up an entrenching tool on the battlefield, he or she had been birthed, nursed, educated, fed, cleaned, and clothed. Those efforts—often termed reproductive labors but encompassing broad social values—were undertaken almost entirely by women because their societies deemed them “women’s work.” Like Haudenosaunee women’s agriculture and Jemison’s husking, this work, too, was fundamental to their societies’ endurance and their economies’ growth, whether it was formally exchanged in markets or not. It was a massive, relentless effort that women and men had to coordinate and could not afford to take for granted. How they reorganized those efforts to effect the political and economic transformations of the era is worth attention, if commemoration is to teach us anything about our own.

Endnotes

[1] Kathryn Sutherland, “Adam Smith’s Master Narrative: Women and the Wealth of Nations,” in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Kathryn Sutherland (New York, 1995), 101. On pins and the economic transformations of women’s dressmaking, see Marla R. Miller, The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution (Amherst, MA 2006), chapter 7.

[2] Nancy Folbre, Greed, Lust, and Gender: A History of Economic Ideas (New York, 2010), 13. See also Sumitra Shah, “Sexual Division of Labor in Adam Smith’s Work,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 28: 2 (June 2006): 221-41. Viviana Zelizer provocatively explores the ways that personal relationships shaped capitalism and vice versa. See, for example, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton, NJ, 2005).

[3] Lenore Palladino and Rakeen Mabud, “The Nation’s Moment of Truth: America’s Legacy of Devaluing Care,” Ms. Magazine, Apr. 29,  2021.

[4] Maeve E. Kane, Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries (Ithaca, NY, 2023), 188. See also Sarah M. S. Pearsall, “Recentering Indian Women in the American Revolution,” in Susan Sleeper-Smith et al., Why You Can’t Teach United States History without American Indians (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015) and Elizabeth Elbourne, Empire, Kinship and Violence: Family Histories, Indigenous Rights and the Making of Settler Colonialism, 1770-1842 (New York, 2022).

[5] Deh-he-wa-mis: or A Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison: Otherwise called The White Woman . . . Carefully taken from her own words by James E. Seaver, 3^rd ed. (Batavia, NY, 1844), 88.