Band of Sisters: Class and Gender in Industrial Lowell, 1820-1850
M B Reagan
[The] transition from mother and daughter power to water and steam-power is a great one, greater by far than many have as yet begun to conceive – one that is to carry with it a complete revolution of domestic life and social manners.
-Horace Bushnell, 1851[1]
On a late November afternoon in 1821, the land that a few years later was to become the industrial city of Lowell, Massachusetts, was pastoral and quiet. A light snow blanketed the landscape, interrupted only by the Merrimack and Concord Rivers, the cascading Pawtucket falls, and the dozen or so farmhouses dotting the countryside. On that day the soft rumbling from the falls where the two rivers meet mingled with the sound of conversation. Two wealthy industrialists from Boston, Nathan Appleton and Patrick Tracy Jackson, were selecting the site to place their next textile factory. With their breath hanging in the cold November air, they planned not only to locate a factory but to reshape the countryside and conjure a city. They speculated that their future city might one day house twenty-thousand residents. Indeed, within twenty years Lowell became the showcase industrial city of the North, known as “the city of spindles,” home to more than 20,000, and filled with the sound of textile factory machinery like “ten thousand windmills in a hurricane.” Women flooded into the city and others like it to take advantage of the high wages and advertised moral paternalism of the corporations. The city streets filled with the bustle of boutiques, book venders and charlatans while the bells from factories and churches clanged the new rhythm of the city, compelling women into their factory slot or church pew. The once isolated rivers now powered the incessant and expanding machinery, run twelve to fourteen hours a day, forcing some to question the claims to paternalism made by the “soulless corporation.” The unprecedented expansion, urbanization and development was not to be an aberration but a harbinger of the fate of the rest of the nation. Lowell had become the first footprint of the industrial revolution in the United States.[2]
As much as that revolution reshaped the landscape along the Merrimack, it similarly transformed the social fabric of New England. The rise of industrial capitalism in America induced individuals to join wage labor employment, disrupted traditional gender roles, and accelerated class stratification. Women in particular negotiated these changes because they were, surprisingly, the first industrial labor force. The reliance of the textile corporations on female labor was a continuation of a traditional gender division of labor involving textile work; but it also broke new ground, employing women for the first time in work outside the home. At the same time that women’s social horizons were broadened through public industrial labor, cultural restraints were placed on women’s mobility, proscribing women’s proper and natural role as limited to the “domestic sphere.” The working women of Lowell consequently lived a contradiction and often fought to create an independent and socially respectable role for themselves. The “factory girls,” as they preferred to be called, fought against both gender oppression and labor exploitation and recognized the synthesis of the two in their overall subjugation.
Beginning with the first yards of cloth pulled from the line, working women challenged corporate control of production and defended their position as women to fight. Men like Appleton, Jackson, and Francis Cabot Lowell (for whom the city was named) devised the “Waltham system” of textile manufacture, vertically integrating each stage of production under one roof and enforcing corporate paternalism to protect and control their female workforce. From the 1820’s onward corporations gradually “sped up” and “stretched out” their workers, maximizing profit by cutting labor costs and increasing the exploitation of each laborer. Meanwhile women’s secondary social status constrained their response to corporate authority and presented an obstacle to achieving economic and political rights as workers. Unable to vote, and facing social ostracism and ridicule if they even spoke in public, working-class women recognized and challenged the dual nature of their oppression. As workers they levied radical critiques of the factory system, condemning wage labor as “wage slavery” and attempting to influence the production process through strikes and worker organization. Their efforts to increase worker participation in the workplace fundamentally threatened corporate authority and legitimacy. Their demands as feminists for equal social participation and women’s rights were just as radical. They attacked the chauvinism found in both company boardrooms and workingmen’s organizations, and they belittled and challenged patriarchal attitudes, arguing for women’s complete social equality. Their dual critique was synthesized in the defense of their identity, the factory girl, and summarized by one radical factory feminist: “I am heartily glad when anything is done to elevate that class to which it is my lot to belong. We are a band of sisters – we must have sympathy with each other’s woes.”[3] Linking class solidarity to feminist notions of “sisterhood,” this author suggested that for working women fighting for labor reform and women’s rights were one in the same. The women of Lowell made significant contributions to the nascent feminist and labor movements through recognizing the combined nature of their oppression and taking action to change it.
Despite the example provided by the women of Lowell, historians tend to dichotomize the emergence of the feminist and labor movements in the decades from 1800-1860. One rarely finds a text that meaningfully engages both class and feminist methods of analysis. Writings about Lowell itself often fall into one of these two categories, with the feminists and the Marxists competing to show the exclusivity and primacy of their ideological framework. The majority of feminist research on the early nineteenth-century explores the origins of the suffrage movement with particular emphasis placed on a few influential leaders. Defining events like the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and courageous individuals like Elizabeth Cady Stanton seemingly act as blinders; they draw most of the feminist historians’ attention and confine the scope of their analysis to middle-class suffragettes. Feminist writers exploring this formative period tend to exclude working women from their perspective and ignore the concomitant rise of industrialism in relation to the early formulation of the “cult of true womanhood.” This creates a myopic middle-class and elite conception women’s identity. It stigmatizes the working women of Lowell by placing them by definition outside the “cult of domesticity.” And it ignores working women’s justification for their public actions and their creation of self-identity even though their explanations were overtly feminist. Although admittedly focused on middle-class and elite women, much feminist scholarship on the period attempts to apply narrow class-based conclusions about gender to all women. Where feminist analysis does engage women’s labor, it is mostly that which was done in the home.[4] Thus the significant contribution early industrial working women made to feminism is marginalized.
With few exceptions Marxists attempt to graft women workers onto the workingmen’s movement of the time, ignoring the special cultural hurdles women workers faced and the hostility of workingmen’s groups in general to women’s participation in the workforce. Labor historians highlight the cooperation of women and workingmen’s groups, while downplaying the opposition workingmen’s newspapers raised to the inclusion of women in the labor movement. While there was some support for the Female Labor Reform Association of Lowell and the women-led strikes of the 1830s, more often workingmen’s groups attacked working women on the basis of their gender. When Marxists historians evaluate the special problems of women laborers it is usually limited to women’s domestic work and is quickly related to conflicting theories presented in Engels and Marx’s body of thought.[5] Recent scholarship has, however, attempted a more holistic approach to the topic of women, work, and the transformation wrought by the rise of industrial capitalism. Thomas Dublin and Mary Blewett in particular, looking at transitions and continuity over time, have explored how a sexual division of labor existed in textile and shoe production before the capitalist industrial revolution changed these roles by taking production out of the home and into the sphere of the marketplace. The new trend of scholarship emphasizes the importance of a synthesis of interpretation between Marxist and feminist thought. This essay is an attempt to move in that direction.[6]
One need look no further than the activities and writings of the Lowell women themselves for an affirmation of this approach. Their attempts to simultaneously assert worker control of production and women’s social equality radically challenged capitalist patriarchy – and offer a historical counterpoint to the monolithic traditions of Marxism and feminism. Individuals live through trials of freedom and equality, exploitation and oppression not as fractured categories but as forces unified in events and experience. The trials of the “factory girls” demand a synthesis of class and gender analysis that meaningfully explores the conditions in which working women operated. In the mid nineteenth-century working women’s subjugation had its roots in the patriarchal traditions of colonial New England and the transformation of women’s work through the rise of industrial capitalism.
Labor and the Cult of Domesticity
In the colonial and revolutionary eras, a woman’s social status was tied to her labor. Independent family homesteads served as the basic unit of economic production and utilized the labor of male and female members. A gender division of labor developed that facilitated production and most easily accommodated the rigors of farm life. In the yeoman household, as Jeanne Boydston reminds us, “family survival required the wife’s work in the garden, the barnyard, and the larder as much as it required the husband’s work in the fields and meadows and barns.”[7] While men labored on the staples of family income – crops produced for home consumption and local markets – women managed and supplied the household, maintaining it as productive unit. In Sarah Smith’s home of Newbury, Massachusetts, for example, women cooked the meals, supervised children, and cleaned the house; they milked cows, made cheese and butter and sold it, tended the family garden of vegetables and fruit, and produced much of the family’s textiles and clothing.[8] Home textile production required a high level of skill and was an essential task of women’s household duties. Before manufactured fabric and yarn produced for market were readily available to farmers, women labored in the home on every level of clothing production. Linens, wools, and cottons were spun into yarn, woven together to make fabric, and finally sewn into clothes. Each step was difficult and time consuming.[9] Women’s work and the gender division of labor in general were vital for the survival of the home as an economic unit.
During this period women maintained a somewhat elevated social status derived from her importance at the center of household economic production. The gender division of labor created a mutual dependency between men and women as their complementary labor was necessary for survival. Although legally and financially dependent on men, in the words of Nancy Cott, “women’s economic dependency was one strand in a web of interdependence of men’s and women’s typical work.”[10] Although still in a subordinate position, women, compared to the restrictiveness of later periods, were respected in their communities. There were, however, definitive limitations to the respectability of women’s social status – in general women were to be kept out of the business of society – women’s work was to remain in the home.[11] Successful household labor relied on men’s and women’s cooperation and trust which in turn created a socially respectable position for women and women’s work.
Respectability did not change women’s second-class citizenship – a position that rested on her subsumed legal and financial status. Women fell under the rubric of “feme-covert,” restraining her independence in all public aspects of society. It meant that all women were legally covered by the rights of her husband, or whoever was the family patriarch: father, uncle or son. As a feme-covert, women could not make contracts, sue in court, own property, make a will, serve on juries, vote or run for office; “a woman had no recognized legal identity because the law assumed that her husband spoke and acted for her.”[12] These legal restrictions had economic implications. A married woman’s wages, income and estate were the property of her husband. Divorce was a rarity and financial independence was possible only for the exceptional widow or single woman. The combination of women’s legal and financial second class citizenship meant that women faced “subordination to men in marriage and society, profound disadvantage in education and in the economy, denial of access to official power in the churches that they populated, and virtual impotence in politics . . . women’s public life generally was so minimal that if one addressed a mixed audience she was greeted with shock and hostility.”[13] These conditions remained essentially unchanged from the eighteenth through the middle of the nineteenth centuries. In the 1830’s and 1840’s changes to the law were made mostly to benefit propertied men, who could transfer ownership to their wives and keep property away from those to whom they were indebted.[14] But changes to women’s social status were developing in other ways.
Women’s evolution into the public sphere through the changing condition of their labor was a slow process intricately tied to the rise of industrial capitalism. Beginning toward the end of the eighteenth century and continuing through the middle of the nineteenth, commercial market expansion and proto-industrial production altered men’s and women’s relationship to the home and work. Households found it more economical to purchase mass produced cloth (primarily imported from England) than to make it at home. This freed up women’s labor to produce marketable commodities that contributed to household income. In the “putting-out” system, local merchant-artisans organized the distribution of unfinished goods to be worked on in individual homes, and returned for sale to markets. Even though the products were produced for someone else, most of this work was still completed in the home where women could meet their other responsibilities and control their labor. Women would collect the raw materials, mostly straw for hats, yarn for textiles, or leather for shoes, and take them to work on in their homes when convenient and at their own pace.[15] Payment was in piece-rate wages and was low, but nonetheless it gave women income to contribute to family sustenance. This process, extending wage and market forces out into rural communities and homes, was increasingly widespread. Sarah Anne Emery, a young rural New Englander remembered, “almost every farmhouse in the country was furnished with a loom, and most of the adult females were skilled weavers. Mr. Batchelder [the mill agent] made contracts with many of them . . . to weave cloth for him, and often had in his employ more than a hundred weavers, some of whom came six or eight miles to receive the yarn and to return the woven cloth.”[16] In later decades as outsourced weaving labor became scarce an agent would contract with families eighteen and twenty miles away.[17]
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