Jones, Jacqueline, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
Rodgers, Daniel T., The Work Ethic in Industrial America 1850-1920 (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 1974, 1978) ("'There are many ways to accommodate change,' John William Ward has written. 'A favorite one is man's happy ability to keep talking one way while acting another.' It is an unimpeachable historical observation and more than a reflection on human foolishness. The groves of thought and language are deep ones, particularly at the levels of morals, and even in the midst of change conscious values are not easily wrenched from the familiar ruts.... But it is also true that change intensifies fixities as men struggle to reaffirm the threatened. Not only inertia is at work in such instances, but the mutation of doubt into conventions of faith--the more versatile, the more reassuring, and in some ways the more potent in their ideal remove from the confusions of everyday life. American history has had its ample share of examples. From the rhetoric of republican simplicity and frugality by which the Jacksonians salved their practical experiment in restless speculation, to the doctrineless religious revival of the faith-shaken Eisenhower years, to the hollow versatility of the term 'peace' in a war-torn nation, stress has repeatedly hardened anxiety into ideals, generated words to cling to even as one strode off into the forbidden and the unknown." Id. at 241.).
