Lavoro in casa, lavoro fuori casa: riflessioni del tardo Ottocento e di inizio Novecento

With the beginning of industrialisation, concerns over the negative effects of women’s work outside the home multiplied. However, there were also, particularly in the late 19th-early 20th centuries, tangible efforts and proposals, in some cases put forward by women themselves, to reconcile work at home with work outside the home. The first – quite widely known – laws for the protection of female labour gave rise to lively debate among women themselves, divided between those who considered the protective laws an important form of defence and those who denounced the consequent weakening of the position of women in the labour market. The proposals regarding housework are perhaps less known. They ranged from its virtual elimination thanks to collective organisation or technical modernisation, to rationalisation with application of Taylorist efficiency principles and/or the re-structuring of domestic spaces and furnishings. This paper supplies, without any claim to completeness, a brief anthology of texts representative of these debates and proposals.