Kessler-Harris Response

Overall, I found essayist Kessler-Harris’ work “Stratifying by Sex” to be very historically informative, but not incredibly intriguing otherwise. I expected Kessler-Harris to draw a more provocative and bolder conclusion from the large amount of historical data that she gave, yet her concluding argument -- that changing family dynamics have left room for women’s role in the workplace to drastically change -- fell short of impressing me as a reader. I believe the tension between women in the workplace and women in the household has been very thoroughly addressed recently, and, unless the essayist that has chosen to write about this subject has something new and thought-provoking to suggest, their essay becomes a very repetitive and mundane. I also believe that, in addressing ‘working women’, Kessler- Harris centralized too much in white working women instead of looking at working women overall. The majority of post-Civil War black women, for example, were expected to work just as much as their husbands due to the need to bring in as much money as possible; an expectation that did not exist for many of their white counterparts. While she does make a brief mention of African American women in housework, I found her essay to focus too much on affluent white women – which does not initially present a problem until she titles her work “Understanding the History of Working Women”, which implies all working women. Thus, I found “Stratifying by Sex” to be very well researched, yet underdeveloped in its arguments.