Poor Women and Wage Laborers

I. Transformation of work and social life in the 19th century

  • Shift from a family economy to wage-based economy
    • Emergence of women’s wage labor
  • Jobs open to women: Servants, seamstresses, mill operatives, teachers
  • Employment usually seen as temporary
  • Not so for black women
  • 1860: Only 10% of free women earned wages
  • 1870: 13.7%

II. Recap: The “family economy” in pre-industrial times

  • Cash-strapped economy; people bartered
  • Women’s work often associated with the generation of cash
  • All members of the family contributed
  • Work was gendered, but women’s work still valued
  • Gendered division of labor less rigid than it would become
    • Concept of the “deputy husband”
  • Economic contributions of all were visible

III. Impact of the rise of a wage economy on women

  • Introduced a new distinction between “men’s” and “women’s” work
    • Women labored for love in the private home
    • Led to a devaluing of married women’s household labor
      • Lack of wages rendered women’s household work increasingly invisible
      • Middle-class women’s household tasks not even seen as real work

IV. Industrialization

  • Emergence of an urban proletariart
    • 1840s: Large-scale immigration of impoverished German and Irish immigrants
      • Half of Irish immigrants are women; mostly single
  • Women’s relationship to work divided along class lines
    • Middle class
      • Leisure comes to be regarded as a positive good
      • “Ladies” increasingly supervised domestic help and oversaw household purchases
    • Working class
      • Shift from household production to wage labor
      • Young women began to work in industry; factories
    • Married women took in “outwork”

V. What was “outwork”?

  • Synonymous with “women’s work”
  • Employers distributed raw materials individual workers, who converted the materials into products by hand
  • Most common in garment industry
  • Numerous advantages for the manufacturer
  • A few advantages for women workers
    • Could do the work at home; at one’s own convenience
    • BUT, it kept workers isolated from one another
  • For working-class people, industrialization brought work into the home

VI. Domestic service

  • Most common occupation for working women in the 19th century
    • More than 50% of all female wage earners
  • Shift from “help” or “hired girls” to “domestics”
    • Increasing social distance between domestic workers and the families they served
    • Domestic servants often immigrants or African-American
  • Employers tried to imagine themselves as benevolent figures
    • But in fact, such relation were often strained

VII. Teaching

  • Early 19th century witnessed emergence of the modern public school system (“common schools”)
  • In the US, teaching comes to be defined as women’s work
    • Not true in Europe
    • Response to severe labor shortage
  • Role of teacher reconceived (maternal figure)
  • Women paid only 30-50% of the wages paid to men
  • Most schools would hire only single women

VIII. Lowell as a national symbol

  • Lowell was considered a model of industrialization
    • Benevolent paternalism of mill owners
    • Relatively high wages
    • Comparatively good working/living conditions
    • And a symbol of American womanhood
      • Lowell mills girls challenged the notion that women who worked for wages were coarse, crude
    • Drew many foreign visitors; Charles Dickens

IX. First textile mills

  • First mills built in Pawtucket, RI (1791)
    • Samuel Slater
    • Produced yarn, not cloth
    • “family system”
    • Hired families, including children over eight years
  • Lowell mills
    • Francis Cabot Lowell
    • First modern factory in the US
    • Waltham system (1814)
    • Vertical integration
    • Used the new power loom (introduced in 1810)

X. Workforce at Lowell

  • Primarily young, unmarried farm girls (80%)
  • Average age 16
  • Most had kin working at the same mill
  • Preferred mill work to other options
  • More independence than domestic service
  • Better wages than teaching
  • Most worked only about 5 years
  • Viewed employment as an interlude between childhood and marriage
  • Many worked to earn dowries
  • Some to educate their brothers

XI. Labor in the mills

  • 12-13 hour days (in the winter)
    • Highly regimented time schedule
  • New girls paired with more experienced workers
    • Extremely loud; overwhelming
  • Gender division of labor
    • 15% of labor force was male
    • Men performed different jobs, in different spaces
    • Handled the initial phases; picking and carding
    • Repaired machinery
    • Worked as supervisors
    • Typical workroom had 2 male supervisors; 80 female operators; 2 children
  • Fact that they worked different jobs allowed employers to avoid the issue of equal pay for equal work
  • All unmarried girls had to live in company boarding houses

XII. Boarding Houses

  • Generally run by matronly widows
  • Partially subsidized by the company
  • Strict rules: curfews; room cleaning; church attendance
    • Allowed girls to leave home and work for wages without risking their reputations
  • Important political consequences; fueled worker solidarity

“A girl, suspected of immoralities, or serious improprieties, at once loses caste. Her fellow boarders will at once leave the house, if the keeper does not dismiss the offender. In self-protection, therefore, the patron is obliged to put the offender away. Nor will her former companions walk with her, or work with her; till at length, finding herself everywhere talked about, and pointed at, and shunned she is obliged to relieve her fellow-operatives of a presence which they feel brings disgrace.”

XIII. Ethos of self-improvement

  • Lowell mill girls were renowed for their pursuit of education and self-cultivation
  • Formed lending libraries, benevolent associations, debating clubs, missionary societies; took evening classes
  • Some workers even pooled resources to hire teachers
  • Ran a company-sponsored newspaper, The Lowell Offering
  • Attended Lyceum lectures
  • Debated issue of slavery; dilemma of working on cotton products supplied from the South

XIV. 1834 Walk-out

  • 800 women (1/6th of the workforce) turned out to protest a proposed wage reduction
    • Strike was defeated within a weak
  •  Significance
    • Showed their willingness to defy ideals of feminine propriety
    • Revealed how they viewed themselves as workers
      • Did not draw on a discourse of class conflict
      • Instead used an older, Revolutionary-era language
        • “Daughters of free men”

XV. 1836 Lowell Strike

  • Occurred during an economic boom
    • When workers were in short supply
  • Had a much greater impact
    • Involved twice as many workers
      • 1/4th of the labor force
    • Lasted several months; significantly affected production
  • Workers were better organized and more sophisticated
    • Formed the Factory Girls’ Association
    • Still drew on “liberty rhetoric,” but were also began to see themselves as industrial workersNews of Lowell success spreads to other mill towns, and other women workers join the Factory Girl’s Association
  • Factory Girl’s Association calls for a 10-hour workday, a call adopted by the male labor movement as well

XVI. Ten-hour day movement

  • In 1845, workers formed the Female Labor Reform Association and began fighting for a 10-hour day
  • News of Lowell success spreads to other mill towns, and other women workers join the Factory Girl’s Association
  • Factory Girl’s Association calls for a 10-hour workday, a call adopted by the male labor movement as well
    • Founded their own publication, The Voice of Industry
    • Petitioned the MA state legislature rather than appealing to mill owners
    • Allied with the New England Workingmen’s Association
    • Led by Sarah Bagley; had worked in the mills for a decade

XVII. Ten-hour day movement

  • Occurred during an economic boom
    • When workers were in short supply
  • Had a much greater impact
    • Involved twice as many workers
      • 1/4th of the labor force
    • Lasted several months; significantly affected production
    • Workers were better organized and more sophisticated
      • Formed the Factory Girls’ Association
      • Still drew on “liberty rhetoric,” but were also began to see themselves as industrial workers
  • News of Lowell success spreads to other mill towns, and other women workers join the Factory Girl’s Association
    • Factory Girl’s Association calls for a 10-hour workday, a call adopted by the male labor movement as well

XVIII. Decline of Lowell system

  • 1840s and 1850s saw decline of high profits
    • Overproduction; increased competition
    • Employers reduced wages; instituted “speed ups”
    • End of the boarding house system
      • Newcomers had to live in privately run tenements or as boarders
      • Attempt to undermine worker solidarity
  • Rise of immigrant labor
    • Mainly Irish, both male and female
    • More desperate, and thus more tractable workforce

XIX. Changes in the Lowell workforce

  • 1830s
    • 74% female; 93%unmarried
    • 96% native-born Americans
    • 80% between ages of 15-30
    • 2.3% children under 15
  • 1850
    • 38.6% foreign-born
    • 6.5% children
  • 1860
    • 61.8% foreign-born
    • 15% children

XX. Significance

  • In some ways, the Lowell mill girls were among the nation’s first “modern women”
    • Because they had their own savings before marriage, they had more choice in regard to marriage
    • May have expected a greater degree of independence after marriage
    • And encouraged daughters’ independence
    • Married later and had fewer children than their peers
    • More likely to settle in towns and cities
    • More likely to experience upward social mobility