Women at Work

by Dublin, Thomas

• ISBN13: 9780231041676
• ISBN10: 0231041675
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1981-05-01
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

Until the nineteenth century, women were largely confined to work in the home. But in the years between 1820 and 1860 the rise of the cotton textile industry in New England radically altered women's working and living patterns. Thousands of single, young women left the homes of their parents to work in the growing mill towns and to live together in the company boardinghouses. This was the first generation of American women to face the demands of industrial capitalism. Women at Workdetails the lives of this first generation in Lowell, Massachusetts -- America's leading factory town in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The mill experience bridged the gap between rural and urban life, as Yankee women from the countryside brought to the mill towns the rich kinship and friendship networks indigenous to preindustrial America. Thomas Dublin shows how these rural values, transplanted to Lowell's factories and boardinghouses, contributed to the emergence of a close-knit community of women workers. Recounting the birth of the American textile industry and the rise of Lowell, Dublin analyzes the social relations in the early mills, the boardinghouse community, the strikes of the 1830s, and the Ten Hour Movement organized for the reduction of hours in the 1840s. He then describes the influx of Irish and other immigrant workers who displaced the Yankee women workers and brought about the transformation of the community. The immigrant workers lived in private tenements rather than in the company boardinghouses, a family labor system replaced one consisting primarily of young, single women, and more stringent working conditions and wage cuts undermined the previous standards. The unprecedented first period of the American women's labor movement had passed.

Table of Contents

Tables	ix
Illustrations	xv
Preface	xvii
Acknowledgments	xxv
Women Workers and Early Industrialization	1	(13)
The Early Textile Industry and the Rise of Lowell	14	(9)
The Lowell Work Force, 1836, and the Social Origins of Women Workers	23	(35)
The Social Relations of Production in the Early Mills	58	(17)
The Boardinghouse	75	(11)
The Early Strikes: The 1830s	86	(22)
The Ten Hour Movement: The 1840s	108	(24)
The Transformation of Lowell, 1836-1850, and the New Mill Work Force	132	(13)
Immigrants in the Mills, 1850-1860	145	(20)
Housing and Families of Women Operatives	165	(18)
Careers of Operatives, 1836-1860	183	(15)
The Operatives' Response, 1850-1860	198	(53)
Appendixes
1. Preparation of the Hamilton Company Payroll, 1836	209	(10)
2. The Social Origins Study	219	(5)
3. The Hamilton Company Work Force, August 1850 and June 1860	224	(6)
4. The 1860 Millhand Sample	230	(9)
5. Sources of Bias and Considerations of Representativeness	239	(12)
Abbreviations	251	(2)
Notes	253	(40)
Selected Bibliography	293	(16)
Index	309