During the early years of settlement, women's energies were devoted to household production, and that work was deemed valuable by both men and women.
Women's household production increased during the first several decades
after settlement, and the period between 1800 and 1830 became the golden
age of household production. But by the second quarter of the nineteenth
century, as Washington County's farmers became more extensively involved
in commercial agriculture and as cash began to permeate the local economy,
women's household production began to decline and women's work for their
families became less visible. Women did not lament the change. Men, however,
were more concerned, and feared that women were abandoning productive and
"profitable" work. A growing number of men began urging women to take up
dairying, one of the few branches of female production that could be readily
marketed for cash. As household textile production declined, women were
encouraged to cultivate silk worms and manufacture silk, another marketable
commodity. Women, however, did not respond to these suggestions. In fact,
much of women's work had changed very little and remained an integral part
of the agricultural economy upon which the growth of the commercial center
of Marietta was based. Women did not reject the market, and in fact were
involved in the market in numerous ways. In fact, it was often the products
of women's labor that first brought cash into rural household. Rather,
women's work, like men's, adapted to changing market conditions and was
intricately tied to the growth of a commercial economy in early Ohio. Women
continued to engage in "profitable" work, but because their new forms of
work, unlike textile production and dairying, were not defined exclusively
as female work, women's work became less visible, and perhaps less appreciated.