During the late 1800s, belief in separate work spheres for men and women gained popularity in the United States. Before the nineteenth century, men, women, and children tended to work side-by-side in family-based agricultural production, often doing different chores, but cooperating in the mutual enterprise of running a farm or family business.
After the rise of industrialization, most men entered the paid labor force and worked away from home. A romantic ideal of separate spheres emerged to justify the economic arrangement of women staying home while men left home to earn wages.
Women came to be seen as pure, innocent, and loving, traits that made them ideally suited to the "private" sphere of home and family. The "cult of true womanhood" that became popular at this time elevated mothering to a revered status and treated homemaking as a full-time profession.
Men who were previously expected to be intimately involved in raising children and running the home were now considered temperamentally unsuited for such duties, and were expected to find their true calling in the impersonal "public" sphere of work. Men's occupational achievement outside the home took on moral overtones and men came to be seen as fulfilling their family and civic duty by being a "good provider."
This simplified account of the historical emergence of separate spheres ignores the partial and uneven pace of industrialization, the continual employment of working-class and minority women, and the many families that deviated from the ideal, but it underscores the importance of cultural myths in creating a rigid division of family labor.
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