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In my paper, “She Works Hard(er) for the Money: Investigating Intersectionality within the Female American Workforce, 1814-1848,” I aim to explore methodological and theoretical shifts in the historical analysis of women’s work during the Industrial Revolution. Specifically, my paper will focus on their employment in mills during the first half of the nineteenth century, starting with the Lowell mills, leading up to the 1848 meeting at Seneca Falls and the mid-nineteenth century suffrage movement. My paper will discuss how historians approached working women who started to emerge into public and male dominated spaces by leaving their families and the home to work in the textile mills. Some historians I am currently researching are Thomas Dublin, author of Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (1993) and Julie Husband who wrote “The White Slave of the North”: Lowell Mill Women and the Reproduction of “Free” Labor” (1999).
First, I will need to pose several questions which will guide my research. In my analysis of the historical frameworks, I want to focus on historians that employ a bottom-up approach and make use of female voices. I will need to know what methodologies or theoretical frameworks historians used to interpret these female sources. In other words, how have historians’ perception of women’s work changed over time and why? In addition, I want to explore how historians have treated other dimensions that intersect with women and make their place in the public sphere even more contentious. Are historians looking beyond other categories that define women such as class, race, sexuality, marital status and age, all which add additional layers of domination? Have historians changed their approach to discussing women since intersectionality has been conceptualized? Which categories are emphasized and which are ignored by scholarship? Finally, does the historical analysis frame the Industrial Revolution as empowering women or does this movement into the public arena continue to make them inferior with issues such as unequal wages, poor working conditions, or trying to balance the dual role of mother and worker.
This last question will propel me into my own critical interpretation of female mill workers. In terms of my own analysis of texts, I will need analyze a mix of personal sources, including diaries and letters, as well as impersonal work logs or managerial accounts. Upon starting my research, I found an interesting set of newspapers written by female mill workers of Lowell and Lawrence. This set of documents would be ideal, as they contain the perspectives of these female workers. These collections, maintained by Harvard University, can provide insight on the the various ways that women were marginalized in the workplace. Yet, they also can reveal the means in which they established a voice and became empowered. In sum, I aspire to show the possibility of new conversations and interpretations by dissecting the many layers of female textile workers in the United States.