Tired of cooking every night? Meet Melusina Fay Peirce, the creator of a movement called Cooperative Housekeeping.
Fed up with the “dusty drudgery of house ordering,” Zina (as she was affectionately called), organized the women of her town — none other than Cambridge, Massachusetts — to form a cooperative and charge the men for their home management skills.
Need something hemmed? Hire the seamstress.
Need dinner? Pay the cooks.
Need your suit cleaned? Utilize the laundry services.
Born in 1836 as the second of nine children, Zina took over as caregiver for several younger siblings when her mother died in 1856; Zina claimed overwork had killed her mother. She married Charles Sanders Peirce in 1862, a marriage that could not have been easy.
Peirce, known today as the Father of Pragmatism, was a famous logician/scientist/philosopher prone to painful facial neuralgia. While Merriam Webster’s Biographical Dictionary considers him the “most original thinker and greatest logician of his time,” Charles likely wasn’t much fun at home.
Fed up with doing all of the housework and receiving none of the glory, Zina wrote a series of five articles for Atlantic Monthly in 1868-1869 arguing that women’s intellectual gifts were being trampled by their domestic chores. (In the daily monotony of COVID, can’t we all empathize?) Zina suggested co-ops would allow women to more efficiently perform housekeeping duties and get paid for their efforts.
That meant Thursday’s dinner for the community was stew with potatoes: buy it or go hungry. If your house needed sweeping, the garden required weeding, or your youngster had outgrown his clothes, there were women to be hired for those jobs. Women with a little extra cash in their pockets when that task was done. Oh, and those pockets were in sensible working trousers instead of long dresses over corsets. Pretty radical in post-Civil War Massachusetts.
Zina took things a step further. As outlined in her book, Cooperative Housekeeping: How not to do it and how to do it, co-ops would be equipped with a kitchen, laundry, fitting rooms, sales rooms, and such benefits as gymnasiums and reading rooms. Since individual homes would no longer need kitchens or laundry rooms, she suggested neighborhood designs and apartment complexes that incorporated community workspaces instead. Though the Cambridge co-op stumbled then floundered, Zina helped inspire future feminists, both in the United States and England, to fight for more equal footing.
It is not surprising that her marriage failed, given the two strong personalities involved and her husband’s chronic debilitating pain. They separated in 1876 but their divorce wasn’t finalized for another seven years. By then, Charles had taken up with another woman; this scandal caused his dismissal from the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and the stigma carried with him for the remainder of his life.
Zina remained single, fearing what she called “husband-power,” which she believed settled like “an invisible bell-glass” over women shortly after marriage. A widely respected activist and speaker, she also rallied for women’s suffrage, spearheaded efforts to save the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, and founded the Women’s Philharmonic Society of New York.
As another family dinner looms and the laundry piles up, Zina Peirce’s community model seems awfully appealing. Though it’s doubtful anyone would pay good money for the Sloppy Joes and tater tots on tonight’s docket.
Today’s post is written by guest contributor Andrea Friederici Ross, author of Edith: The Rogue Rockefeller McCormick and Let the Lions Roar!: The Evolution of Brookfield Zoo.