Alright. Part 2 of women in the antebellum era is what we're going to talk about today. We'll look specifically at women and work. There's a lot to talk about, so let's just dive right into that. Let's start by talking about this more traditional type of work that women did during this period, which is housework. We talked previously about this idea of the Cult of True Womanhood or the Cult of Domesticity and women's true or appropriate sphere being in the home. This is part of what we can also call a separate spheres ideology. Women are in the private sphere and men are in the public sphere. Women really should only use their influence within the family unit. They shouldn't be out in business or politics because that is sort of seen as immoral or dirty. Of course, we know that women have always had to be involved in the world, at least in terms of labor, even though this still was more associated with men, particularly in the urban setting where you had wage labor, which was a big shift during this period during industrialization. It's sort of two parallel things. It's this ideology of a separate sphere for men being the world of work and other public things, and also this increase in wage labor that then also becomes associated more with men. Although, as we'll see in a few minutes, that's not really the case, but this is the ideal. We can see from examples from scholars like Boydston that there was an acknowledgement that women are laboring in the home. It's domestic labor, but it's really just their natural place. It's not work, per se. Things like cooking are considered part of women's mysteries, we could even say. It's kind of mixed view. It's a science. There's this new, growing science of home economics. It's called a science and it's approached in that way, but it's also called a mystery because it's not men's work, it's not public. Again, this doesn't reflect actual life. Women and men are both doing multiple things. Women, in particular Black women and then poorer women, really performed hard labor. It was normal for women, especially on farms, from the beginnings of the Colonies to be working in hard labor, in physical labor. Then this growing wage labor. You go out and you're paid a wage for your work, often by the hour or by the piece if you're creating something or by some measurement like that. That is not … at this point, was not paying enough to support an entire family. Multiple family members would have to work. Women were involved in work that was money-saving--being frugal, mending things that are broken, scavenging, foraging, ect. Then, of course, their work in the home context that then turned into an income-generating kind of labor. They're selling things that they're producing, like food from their personal garden or sewing for pay, for example. We have to just reiterate, of course, working in the home is work, even if it's not being paid a wage, even if it's not work that has anything to do with money really but just caring for the people in the home or the home itself. Of course, as we've said multiple times, women are involved in actual public forms of labor. We have this beginning of that in the putting-out system. What this is is that, for example, you are wanting to sew a shirt, a men's shirt. You have one person in their home spin the thread. You have another person in their home weave that thread into cloth. Then you have a third person cutting that out into the pieces of the pattern. Then you have another person sewing it together, and so on. You are paying them all a wage out of what you can eventually sell that finished shirt for. It's dividing the labor up between many people. This was common in England. To some degree, it had been common for many hundreds of years. Then you had this industrialization, first in England and then in the United States. In England, it's earlier in the 1700s where you have factories. You have industrialization so that instead of doing pieces in the home of a process, you go to a centralized factory and do a piece of the process. The main example of this is, again, with producing cloth and the materials that go into cloth. You had power looms that are weaving cloth much faster and much higher volumes than the putting-out system could achieve, and the same with spinning the threads and other processes. You have this Francis Cabot Lowell, this man who in the early 1800s learns about this in England, brings that back to the United States, and starts the first kind of industrialized fabric production, or fabric component production, in the Boston area. Then you have this entire town, Lowell, Massachusetts, being developed by mill owners, textile mill owners. It had been another town, a very small kind of farming-based village, and they bought it and turned it into a company town. They owned the entire thing. They built housing for their workers. They built public buildings. They provided libraries. They, of course, built the mills themselves. They are attracting mostly women. They wanted women because, honestly, they had smaller hands that could better get into the innards of the looms and the other machines and operate them and fix them. You also had women needing work. If you are living in an agricultural area and your family has many children and you are not really needed to do the work on that farm, and there's not enough money coming in, you then are encourage by this situation to go off of the farm, away from your town or your village, and find work as a young woman in this period. It was advantageous on both sides of the labor equation. The owners of Lowell, they tried to make it a good place. They're not terrible people. They are … They are understanding that they are in some ways acting as a parent to these very young women, in some cases even children, so they do try to provide decent housing and things like libraries and educational and cultural opportunities. Still, it's pretty terrible work. It's tedious. It's repetitive. It's actually quite dangerous. There are many cases of women being injured by their clothing, their limbs, even their hair being caught in these machines. It was pretty normal to work over 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, with going to church on Sunday mandatory. It's a pretty onerous labor situation. It's also pretty strictly controlled, even in one's free time or in the boarding house. As a laborer in Lowell, you pay part of your wages to pay rent. Again, you had to go to church on Sunday. You were expected to follow behavioral expectations, social and cultural expectations. There's that whole acting in loco parentis, in the place of a parent. They're policing your morals and your behavior. Then, typically you would send home most, if not all, of the rest of your wages to your home, that agricultural village or wherever you're from, to supplement that family income. In some cases, you're paying for your brother's education. At this point, boys are still being educated in a more formal way and a more advanced way than women are. That was another reason to have that income for the family. Then once you're married … The goal socially and culturally is still that these young women would at the right age be married and shift into that domestic sphere again. They're not expected to work in the mills. This is not necessarily, again, what really happened for a lot of women. There was a variety of situations of women in these mills, as I said, including very young children. We'll look at a few examples of women in this situation. One of the most famous women is Lucy Larcom, and we see her picture, an actual photograph, of her here. She's a great example of this need for young women to work. She lived in a village on the north coast near Boston. Her family had 8 children including Lucy. When she was 8 years old, her father dies. The mother is a single mother with all of these children and needs to provide. The mother becomes the matron of a boarding house at a mill in Lowell. She is monitoring the girls, taking care of them in the boarding house. Lucy, her daughter, starts working in the mill herself, the boot mill in Lowell, at age 11. She's an 11-year-old child working as a doffer, which means she takes … on a thread-spinning machine, she doffs or takes off full bobbins of spun thread and puts on empty bobbins for the next round. Later, she worked in the weaving part of that operation. Very young age, working this very repetitive and dangerous work. Eventually when she's in her early 20s, she becomes a bookkeeper for the mill. Then, she also starts writing and publishing poems and essays. She eventually becomes a school teacher after she leaves the area and goes west, and then eventually comes back to Massachusetts and becomes an instructor at Wheaton Female Seminary, which is now Wheaton College, teaching English literature. This is a private college. It had opened in 1835 just for young women. She was also eventually the editor of a children's magazine for 10 years, and again, publishing her poetry, essays, and an autobiography. She achieves a level of education and accomplishment that is not typical among women generally and especially women working in these mills. One of the places that she was publishing was the Lowell Offering. This was a magazine created by the women working in Lowell in these factories. They called themselves the mill girls. This magazine was a monthly publication. It was written by them and for them. It's really an internal thing, although other people, of course, had access to it. It typically had poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction essays. It's this creative outlet for these mill girls, these young women. They had really clear ideas of their social and cultural roles--that goal to become a wife and a mother. That is seen in some of the writings that are published in this magazine. It wasn't intended to be political. It was more a creative outlet. They sometimes did discuss these abuses that they perceived by the factory owners or other injustices. They would report on the working conditions in the mills. We can interpret this as evidence of this growing sense of what we today might call empowerment. That they could focus on economic injustice. That they could be creative, intellectual people in this context of many hours of hard labor. It could also present kind of this romanticized view. We can see even in this cover image there's this young woman, and she's dressed kind of plainly, but she looks clean and healthy. The surroundings are beautiful with this kind of frame of vegetation and a beehive, kind of a symbol of hard work. The mills looking kind of clean and attractive in the background. Really, still romanticizing it even though it was created by women who may have known better or did know better. Then you also had sometimes southern attitudes toward these northern factory contexts in other publications. These mills are generally focused in the northern New England states with lots of infrastructure that goes along with that, railroads and canals and road systems that were somewhat significantly much more lacking in the southern states, and this issue of women and the Southern focus on idealizing their role, which, again, that happened in the North as well. We have this example, this text here called "Cupid in the Lowell Mills," from a publication in New England, in Massachusetts, from 1845. It talks about how this person saw someone from South Carolina visiting the factories. He's deadly opposed to this system. He sees a beautiful girl, a very beautiful girl, in a mill. He starts thinking about these economic tariffs and that, well, maybe whole situation, this economic labor structure, isn't so bad after all. They become engaged and get married a few days later. This person reports, "This is the third Lowell female operative or employee who is married to wealthy young men from South Carolina. Four are marrying people from Georgia. Fifteen or twenty in other Southern States similarly … Over two hundred young ladies who were working in these factories have earned the money to educated themselves, are now teaching other women," like Lucy Larcom. It's kind of giving this sense of this is not ideal. We want women to get out of this and become what is more appropriate--wives, maybe teachers. There's a little bit of a schism between roughly Northern and Southern views of this whole system. Of course, we have to say that the Southern economy of growing cotton is providing the raw material that these Northern factories are using. It's very much intertwined and interdependent. Southern men are not going to criticize this system too much. They're going to criticize it in terms of women, but not the money that they're making off of it. We can go on to look at an excerpt from the Lowell Offering itself, "A Week in the Mill." It's talking, again, about this view. that some people have represented these mill girls as "dwelling in a sort of brick and mortar paradise." They can just weave romantic fantasies while the spindle or the wheel flies. You can see a women in a photograph here, an actual photograph, running a loom weaving cloth. Then this "A Week in the Mill" says, "Others have deemed her a mere servile drudge, chained to her labor almost like an enslaved person in chains. Some have already given her the titled 'the white slave of the North.'" Of course, this is from our modern eyes really offensive in a way. It's not at all slavery. It is a voluntary state. It is temporary. It is not racial, ect. It's very much different than slavery. Then, the "Week in the Mill" essay goes on to say, "Her real situation is neither one nor the other of those extremes. It is laborious like any job, and it has good times and good points that help the hard labor." This, again, is true. The Lowell mill owners are providing things like musical performances, theatrical performances. They are providing things that are giving these young women cultural opportunities and educational opportunities. In their boarding houses, the boarding houses would be relatively pleasant. They might have a piano that they could play and sing, ect. This is not by any means servitude. The Lowell mill situation was subject to the economy of the nation in general, of course. You have in the 1800s this cycle of economical booms and depressions. There were many depressions, actually, not just this Great Depression of the 1930s that we talk about. Textile mill owners are being adversely impacted by these depressions, and so they want to preserve their profits, of course. It's logical. They lower wages to their employees and raise costs of living, like the rent in the boarding houses. Workers protest this. They go out on strike. This is some of the first labor movement strikes in the U.S. in United States history. The mill girls are inspired by this. These are often men striking, the men that work in different industries, as well as textile mills, doing labor that was perhaps seen as too difficult for women, for example, that required more strength. The mill girls themselves organize into a Lowell Factory Girls Association--we can see this image here of the constitution of that association--in 1836 specifically to protest a raise in the boarding house rent. This becomes really the first labor … [cough] Excuse me. The first labor union in the United States by around 1845. It only lasts about 3 years, but it is ultimately successful, at least in other ways. They really didn't affect the rent so much as they were able to reduce their working hours down to 10 to 11 hours a day rather than 12 or up. They did this both through petitioning the mill owners to change the rules within the mills in terms of their private rules and through state legislation in some cases. You have this testimony here along with this image from a woman who had worked in Lowell during the strike of 1836. She's recounting her memories in a publication in 1898. She's saying it wasn't just the wages that they were protesting. They were … It was the boarding. She's saying, "Before the corporations had paid twenty-five cents a week towards the board of each operative. Now they said the girls had to pay that." They're subsidizing their rent and now the subsidy is cut. That along with cutting the wages means that they are losing … the laborers are losing a dollar a week. She's describing 12,000 to 15,000 girls striking and marching through the streets. This was a very significant moment in labor history. We have another publication in the region called the Voice of Industry Newspaper. This was originally published by the New England Working Men Association in Lowell. It's a separate organization for men. It eventually is run by women. We see the photo, or the painting here of Sarah Bagley. She's anther very exceptional woman in this time period from the mills. She is working in the mill as a little bit of an older woman, typically. She was, I believe, in her 20s when she started working there. She becomes the first editor of the Voice of Industry after the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association took over its production in 1846. She had started that organization, that labor union, and was its president for 3 years. She's very much involved in politics and in the public world. This newspaper was sharply critical of the effects of industrialization on U.S. society. It is overtly political, unlike the Lowell Offering. This is part of this broader labor movement in the United States in the 1840s and thereafter. The Voice of Industry is criticizing the wage labor system as being … taking away laborer's independence. They're not self-employed craftsmen creating things and selling them themselves. They are being paid a wage by a mill owner, for example. They work had been turned into a commodity that is purchased by economic elite people, wealthy people, rather that something that the laborer could be proud of. They're not making a shirt themselves. They're only spinning the thread. There's less personal pride in that. That this technology, these machines that were coming through the Industrial Revolution in this period didn't benefit laborers. They just produced more. They were increasing production and producing profit for the mill owners, but it was not benefitting the laborers enough. They believed--they talked about this in the Voice of Industry--that this is contradicting these American ideals that were talked about so much in the early 1800s during the early republic in particular. That the story of America is about freedom and equality and high moral standards, and that this wage labor system reflected a decline in that. That there was too much wealth disparity and not value and pride in this kind of work. It's linking liberty and personal morality and everyday work. I think it's super fascinating, and it's really being instigated and promoted by young women in New England. It's super fascinating to me. Let's sum this up. We've had to talk about a lot here. The antebellum era is saying that … In the antebellum era, culturally, socially, the ideal was that women would be in the domestic sphere and not in public work or things like politics. It's this ideology of domesticity. It makes the work that women actually were doing both in and out of the home seem invisible, particularly that work in the home. Women started to enter into a very overt public labor with the development of the factory system. We talked about this coming from the putting-out system that had preceding it, and then in the centralized factory system. The Lowell mills, textile mills, are providing women with wages and housing and work in the company town setting, but the women had to abide by really strict requirements of behavior and activity. They then, in turn, the women were involved in labor disputes that were really ongoing in Lowell and other mills, other mill towns. One of the first labor strikes in U.S. history occurred in Lowell in 1836. Women were instigating that. We talked about thousands of women … over a thousand women marching in the streets against what they perceived were abuses. Labor didn't have a lot of success in their strikes and their efforts, but it really did … what they did accomplish did set the stage for later organizing. Super fascinating time period very specifically about women and their role in this change of labor.