The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

In the early 1870s officials in the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor began to link threats to the home and the wretched condition of the poor not to their moral failings or bad social influences but to the wage system. The consequences of low wages meant a man lost the benefits of home life. When a man could not support his wife, she was forced to labor, scrubbing floors or taking in laundry: “No cheerful smile greets a returning father whose six days earnings pay for but five days of meat.” Poverty “kills love and all affection, all pride of home … nay emasculates home of all its quickening powers.”