Co-Operative Housekeeping

Melusina Fay Peirce (February 24, 1836 - April 28, 1923) was a feminist, activist, and self-identified sociologist who devoted much of her adult life to the "co-operative housekeeping" movement. She believed the oppression of women was grounded in the fact that women were largely unpaid for their life's work of keeping house. Peirce advocated for women to demand payment for their services from their husbands in order to achieve economic freedom and equality. She developed the co-operative housekeeping concept as a way to allow women to specialize in the individual spheres of housekeeping at which they excelled while delegating the remainder of their work to other housewives who would prefer to make those areas their own specialties. Peirce believed that the planning and development of communities around the co-operative housekeeping model would allow women to band together to get their work done more efficiently while earning their own money doing it. This text includes two separate works by Peirce. The first, Co-operative Housekeeping: Romance in Domestic Economy, was published in 1870 by John Ross and Company. The second, Co-operative Housekeeping: How Not To Do It and How To Do It (A Study in Sociology) was published in 1884 by James R. Osgood and Company. While the two works sometimes echo one another, the first work focuses on some of the minutiae of operating a housekeeping co-operative. The second work is a broader, more developed version of the author's co-operative housekeeping model. Additionally, her views on some matters evolved somewhat between the publication of the first work and the second text some fourteen years later.