Reports on the discrepancies between the time spent by men and by women in household tasks – childcare, cooking, cleaning, yardwork – are a regular feature of the social and economic press. The latest installment is this week’s Atlantic article, “The Scourge of the Female Chore Burden.” Recognizing this almost universally unpaid labor, and the essentially feminine responsibility for it, often has a political purpose.

I’d like to suggest a spiritual purpose, drawing on Mormon history to illustrate.

The Kingston United Order (1876-1883), at Kingston, Utah (about midway east/west in Utah, and at the northern edge of what is considered Southern Utah, was an agriculturally-based community. They did run a sawmill and gristmill, and at the end of their organization as an Order they opened a woollen mill. Otherwise, they grew the food and raised the livestock for their tables, built their own homes and community buildings, and strove to be united in the economic as well as the spiritual aspects of their lives.

In the United Order, spiritual aspects of life were as important and as communal as the economic aspects. You couldn’t have one without the other. The “evenness” of economic lie was dictated by spiritual standards. Spiritual standing was measured in large part by contribution to communal economic life, and by support for the Order, its goals, and its leadership. Spiritual and economic were too tightly intertwined in the Order to separate.

Labor performed by individuals for the good of the order was credited on the books of the Order. Living expenses for goods and services drawn from the Order were likewise recorded on the books, and at the end of the fiscal year, the books were balanced. This was largely a symbolic exercise, because if your family had drawn more than your family had contributed, you didn’t have to pay the excess; likewise, you didn’t get a refund if you hadn’t used as much as you contributed. It was just a check on how well you met the goal of sharing the burdens and benefitting from the blessings of communal life.

The men’s work at Kingston was eminently suited to communal endeavor: It was far more efficient for a team of men, rather than a single man, to dig an irrigation ditch, brand the cattle, build a barn, put up a fence, and plow, plant, and harvest a crop. The journal of the Kingston United Order records the work assignments of each day, naming the leaders of the teams and recording the work accomplished.

Most of the men’s work was seasonal and required planning. When they prepared to fence a new field, somebody had to be assigned to secure the materials and deliver them to the site before other men showed up to work. When they prepared to shear the sheep, the various roles in that large enterprise were mapped out so that each man knew his assignment. It was like planning a military campaign, in miniature, and the Journal recorded those assignments in enough detail that a modern reader can understand how important each man’s role was.

One or two men were also assigned to do the chores of the Order – feed and milk the cows, generally, and perhaps deliver wood and water to the widows. There’s not much detail there. It didn’t take planning beyond assigning a man to do it, and it was so routine that it didn’t require much notice to be taken.

The women’s work at Kingston was no different from women’s work in any other setting in rural, 19th century Utah. Women took care of their children, in sickness and in health – there was a school, taught by a man, but otherwise they didn’t pool child care, and the community was too small and without the kind of epidemics, thank heavens, that would have called for hospital work. Women’s work didn’t translate well to communal effort – it takes only one woman to make a bed or sweep a floor or sew on a button.

The Kingston United Order did try the “big table” for a few months, so during those months teams of women were assigned to cook and serve meals in a communal kitchen and dining hall. It didn’t work very well, though – families preferred to eat en famille with the cooking they were used to, so before long women were cooking for individual families again.

Theoretically the women could have pooled their production of clothing, and at the end of the Order period, when the woollen mill had been built, they did work together in the mill. But until then, women had wheels and looms and knitting needles in their own homes, where they worked each for her own family. They had to work at home anyway, because they had children to care for at home.

The work the women did in their homes was most constant, season after season, and didn’t require planning and didn’t call for record in the official Journal – it was just chores, after all, the same as the men who milked the cows were simply doing chores.

The women were not idle. They were as constantly busy as women anywhere in that society. They were at least as busy as the men, who came home from their days in the fields to be dined by the women in their homes, the same women who cleaned up after the meal and washed the kids and put the kids to bed and cleaned the lamps and finished the mending in the evening. (I don’t mean to suggest that men put up their feet after dinner and watched football on TV; I mean only that after men’s primary workdays were over, women’s primary workdays continued.)

The Kingston United Order numbered approximately 100 adults during most of its continuance. The numbers of men and women were even in the beginning, although by the end of the Order experiment, women outnumbered men (the Order had become the dumping ground for extended family members who couldn’t live entirely independently – the old, the widowed, the unlikely-to-marry, the abandoned, with their children). In the first year, at least, the numbers of men and women were virtually even.

On the first anniversary of the Order, when the books were adjusted and closed, it was found that the men and boys of the Order were credited with 6,537 days of labor for the good of the Order. That isn’t all that remarkable – it amounts to 130 days of labor during a 365-day year for each of the approximately 50 men, but it’s still a significant contribution to the community by each man.

The women’s credit for that year? 264 days of labor, or an average of 5 days of contributed labor for each woman.

Were those women living lives of leisure the other 360 days that year? Of course not! They were working at least as many hours, every day, as the men were working.

But the women’s labor didn’t count, because it was the kind of unpaid – unaccounted, in this case – labor that is essential to human life, but which is done within the walls of a woman’s own home. And even if the women weren’t too busy at home to contribute to the success of the Order as a whole, there really was no opportunity for them to contribute. Helping another woman with her washing didn’t count. Helping another woman with her childcare didn’t count. There were no community enterprises where a woman could contribute. Except for that brief experiment with the common kitchen and dining table, there was nothing a woman could do to contribute to the economic success of the Order.

With the economic and the spiritual so closely tied in the Order society, I have to wonder what effect that lack of opportunity meant to the women of the Order. Did they take mental possession of their husbands’ contributions as their own? Did they not feel it important to contribute economically to the Order? Did it not occur to them even to wonder about their place in the economic order? Did their lack of direct economic credit affect how they saw themselves spiritually?

I don’t have the records to answer these kinds of questions. I only know that in evaluating the successes and failures of the Order, on paper, at least, it appears that the women did next to nothing. We know that isn’t true – we know that their labors were the invisible, unpaid, unmeasured, unacknowledged contributions that seem universally to be women’s responsibility.

Then, as well as now.