Ebook: Women Volunteering: The Pleasure, Pain, and Politics of Unpaid Work from 1830 to the Present

“Before there were feminists, there were volunteers,” writes Wendy Kaminer in this landmark study of women volunteering in America. In a history of the volunteer tradition, Ms. Kaminer shows how volunteering gave rise to the nineteenth-century feminist movement, and in extensive interviews with todays volunteers she explores the relationship of volunteering, feminism, and family life for women in the 1980s. Ms. Kaminer concludes that there is still a place for volunteering in a feminist world.



Women Volunteering offers a bold, new feminist perspective on the controversial subject of unpaid work for women. If volunteering reinforced traditional notions of femininity, Ms. Kaminer argues, it also has been an essential source of work outside the home for married, middle-class women. This important book combines a thoughtful analysis of the politics of volunteering with a celebration of the contributions of volunteers to both the feminist movement and American community life.



Is volunteering good or bad for women? It has always been a double-edged sword. No wonder it has been so divisive. As a career choice, it has been used by women and against them — as a way of getting out of the house when they were not supposed to work for money and as a way to keep them there, denying them the power to earn their own living and with it the chance to live their own life, outside the institution of marriage. Volunteering has improved domestic life for women and, in doing so, prolonged its hold over them. It has also given women their political life, introducing them to the political process while allowing them only limited access to it and no direct control. It has turned “housewives” into campaign workers, activists, and community leaders, but left them outside, on the sidelines, marching on City Hall and clamoring for reforms by the men within who can afford to run for office and win. A century ago volunteering laid the groundwork for womens suffrage and the emancipation of women by bringing them out of the home and into the world of politics, civics, and social affairs, without ever challenging sex-based divisions of labor and wealth, in the family and the workplace, that have made women the second sex, dependent on men for their keep. From the beginning, volunteering has both liberated women and kept them in their place.



Wendy Kaminer graduated cum laude, from Smith College in 1971 and received her law degree from Boston University Law School in 1975. Her articles and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, in The Village Voice, and in Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography.