The Contradictory Currents of Lucy Maynard Salmon’s Sociological Imagination

• In Event: 1563 - Gender Segregation and the Culture or Structure Quandary

Abstract

Lucy Maynard Salmon’s foundational text Domestic Service (1897) receives frequent mention in the literature on domestic work. Recognized for her intervention into the so-called “servant crisis” of the late 19thcentury, I argue that some of the more interesting analytical dimensions of Salmon’s work have been overlooked. This is in part because her structural analysis exists in tension with the reformist currents in her book, which are both more prominent and more often challenged. While Salmon participated in reform work, her book reveals her keen interest in using domestic service to understand how the household — and the work that upheld it — fit in to the larger economy and socio-historical structures. Published in the same year as Durkheim’s classic sociological study on suicide, Domestic Service was driven by a similar impulse toward creating scientific knowledge about the social dimensions of industrialization. However, by placing the household at the center, Salmon foregrounded questions of gender and status in uniquely sociological ways in the nascent stages of the discipline. This paper examines the contradictory currents of Salmon’s book and argues that Salmon’s conceptual reframing of household labor and gender roles is of import beyond the field of domestic labor during her time and beyond. This claim is based on a reading of Salmon’s text and archive that is informed by the dynamic body of scholarship that has persuasively placed the household and household labor — paid and unpaid — at the center of social analysis.

Author

• Light H. Carruyo, Vassar College