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.