Women’s work: An exploration over time

What does women’s work look like through history? It could be a simmering pot of ale in a 17th-century kitchen, a crackling wartime radio broadcast urging women to serve, a corporate ladder climbed in sharp heels, a minimum-wage worker with three jobs or an Instagram post wrapped in the language of empowerment and hustle culture. Depending on where — and when — you look, women’s labor takes many forms. Studied in isolation, we miss the layers and the connections. When we look across time and media, we find deeper stories that tell us more about societal and cultural change (or stagnation), and reveal evolving ideas about work, gender and power.

With over 160 million digitized items spanning six centuries, ProQuest Digital Collections, available for trial here, brings together nine discipline-aligned archives in a single subscription. These collections give students, faculty and researchers access to rare and exclusive content across history, anthropology, literature, women’s studies, performing arts and more. With access, students and scholars can map how women’s labor has been documented, defined, politicized and remembered.

Labor Isn’t Just Economic — It’s Cultural, Social and Visual

Digitized primary source materials challenge us to think about what counts as labor, who gets to define it and how those definitions change over time. We aren’t presented with a single version of history. Instead, we’re invited to consider multiple viewpoints in historical context and draw our own conclusions.

We took ProQuest Digital Collections for a spin to explore the concept of “women’s work” across disciplines from literature and history to media studies, visual arts and performance.

Here’s a sampling of what we discovered:

The housewife as economist and healer

We began in 1637 with The English Housewife by Gervase Markham, found in ProQuest’s Early Modern Collection. At first glance, it reads as a domestic manual: a how-to for managing a household. But a deeper investigation reveals that his isn’t just a book of recipes or remedies, it outlines how women’s unpaid labor sustained the family and, by extension, the state.

Markham casts brewing, baking, healing and sewing not as private acts but as public services. The housewife, in his view, is an economist, a chemist, a civic agent. In a classroom discussion, it could be used to frame discussions about gendered labor long before the rise of industrial economies and long before women’s work entered wage data or census records.

When paired with later documents, it lays a foundation for asking: When did women’s work start “counting”? And why was it invisible for so long?

Education as empowerment: Enlightenment roots of labor equality

Fast-forward to 1792. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, available in the Gerritsen Collection, part of ProQuest One Women’s Studies, shifts the focus from domesticity to education. She argues that intellectual empowerment is essential for civic participation and, implicitly, for economic independence.

Students can compare Wollstonecraft’s ideals with the realities laid out in 1900’s How Women May Earn a Living, another Gerritsen text. The latter offers pragmatic career advice, charting “respectable” paths for income generation outside the home. Yet it’s deeply shaped by class and gender norms.

Placed side by side, these texts become more than historical footnotes, they become part of a long continuum: one that stretches from Enlightenment-era rights to 21st-century debates about equity and access.

Recruitment as strategy: Mobilizing women for war

World War II redrew the map of the workforce. With men overseas, women’s labor became a national necessity. A digitized Women’s Army Corps (WAC) recruitment plan, found in ProQuest Digital Collections, shows how U.S. government materials presented service as both duty and opportunity.

U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson said it plainly: “This war ceased long ago to be one fought by men alone. If we are to win, we must utilize every bit of our power — women as well as men.”

The WAC campaign targeted women through a carefully coordinated strategy of radio, print and public appearances. Recruitment was framed as modern, dignified and deeply patriotic.

Here, students can explore the intersections of policy, propaganda and identity. How were women persuaded to step into new roles? Importantly, how were those roles later remembered or forgotten?

Image-Making: Media, uniforms and aspiration

The story doesn’t end with enlistment. ProQuest One Visual Arts & Design includes many of the actual materials used in the WAC campaign: pamphlets, fashion features and magazine spreads. In postwar Vogue, for example, a feature titled “I Liked the WAC” showcases military service as a stylish and formative experience.

Uniforms weren’t just functional, they were symbolic. They communicated courage, competence and belonging.

This opens a path for classroom discussion: How do aesthetics and media shape public perceptions of labor? What does it mean to “wear” work, and how do uniforms communicate inclusion or exclusion in the workforce?

Ms. Magazine: Media and reframing of women’s work

Emerging in the 1970s, Ms. Magazine provided a groundbreaking platform that ignited public conversations about women’s labor, rights and identity. Unlike traditional media, which often confined women’s work to domestic or supportive roles, Ms. Magazine documented women’s labor, paid and unpaid, as central political and social issues. It brought critiques of workplace inequality, reproductive rights and economic independence directly into mainstream discourse.

Instructors can use Ms. Magazine articles and editorials found in ProQuest Digital Collections alongside wartime recruitment materials or early domestic manuals to trace how media evolved from reinforcing gender roles to actively challenging and redefining them. This addition highlights the shift from women’s labor as invisible or undervalued to a subject of activism, legislation and cultural transformation.

Theater as cultural critique: The cost of ambition

Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, available in ProQuest One Performing Arts, brings these themes to the stage. Its protagonist, Marlene, is a 1980s career woman who has “made it”—but at what cost? In a surreal dinner party scene, she hosts historical and mythical women, each recounting the personal sacrifices behind their public roles.

The play interrogates what it means to “succeed” in a patriarchal world and whether professional empowerment always aligns with feminist ideals.

Placed in conversation with WAC recruitment materials or early domestic manuals, Top Girls becomes a dramatic case study in the trade-offs of progress.

Culture and commentary: The “Girl Boss” era

In a 2018 Diva magazine profile, found in GenderWatch, the “Girl Boss” archetype gets a glossy spotlight. Here, labor is entrepreneurial. Identity is inseparable from branding. Feminism is filtered through the language of hustle and lifestyle.

Instructors can pair this and other modern pieces with Top Girls, creating a critical bridge between 1980s workplace feminism and today’s influencer economy. What remains consistent? What’s changed? And who gets left out of these narratives?

The Never-Ending Story

This journey has highlighted some of the rich, multifaceted history of women’s labor, but the story is far from complete. From brewing ale to breaking glass ceilings, from propaganda posters to performance art, women’s labor both reflects and reshapes our understanding of economics, identity, power, and progress.

By bringing together rare and diverse sources across centuries, ProQuest Digital Collections empowers students and researchers to trace this ongoing story across time, geography and discipline. It invites us to go beyond textbook summaries and into the raw, nuanced documentation of lived experience.

In a time of instant answers that may or may not be accurate, primary source archives offer something deeper. By connecting materials across disciplines, eras and formats, they reveal how many different stories can be woven into a single thread — and how much there still is to discover.

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