In this paper, we will discuss manual labor and women. We will start by showing that the groundwork for our attitude towards work was laying in classical times. We will examine evidence of how the Judeo-Christian belief system has influenced our modern attitude towards work, then we will also look at the Greek and attitude and see how it has influenced us today. From here we ill explore the history o women engaged in manual; labor in the United States. From this we will learn how this history has lead to our current views of manual labor and women’s role in it. Let us first turn our attention to the classical foundations of our attitude towards manual labor, and work in general.