Warning: Undefined variable $num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 126
Warning: Undefined variable $posts_num in /home/shroutdo/public_html/courses/wp-content/plugins/single-categories/single_categories.php on line 127
In my paper, “She Works Hard(er) for the Money: Investigating Historical Intersectionality within the 19th Century Female American Workforce,” I will analyze multiple historical perspectives revealing the ways in which wage-earning women, of various backgrounds, were discussed, theorized and analyzed. I will also interpret how the scholarship evolved, contextualizing industrial work in new methodologies and structures to reveal more about marginalized working women. Spanning from the 1970’s to the later 2000’s, historians have employed some cohesive presentations of female factory and mill workers from the early to mid nineteenth century. Most employ a combination of economic perspective with a social framework, balancing the need for both factors. Some, such as, Julie A. Matthaei in An Economic History of Women in America favored the commercial aspect, while others such as Alice Kessler-Harris in Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States leaned towards a social orientation. Yet, all historians and scholars conferred in this paper show both elements to be integral to the study of women’s labor. Most historians also addressed the social construction of gender and how the industrial revolution, in the United States, but also around the world, shaped and shifted gendered notions of women’s and men’s work.
Moreover, historians and scholars examined in this historiography also maintained some consistency in the essential questions leading their work. These authors are concerned with questions such as: Which women worked? Why kind of work did they do? Why was the female labor force predominantly young and single? If they were married, what was the impact on family life? How did gender impact the Industrial Revolution in the shift from private to public sphere? What were the limitations of the independence of women gained from wage work? As these questions demonstrate, there is an apparent familial thread throughout all analysis of women’s work which ties into the shift from the home to the factory, private to public. As the historical analysis developed, historians began to add additional layers to the questioning, such as researching the ways in which women protested or accepted their position, and in which ways their independence was a promising or threatening.
Despite some evidence of a clear and consistent analysis of female wage-work, there also emerged a trajectory in which this analysis was developed and built upon. Starting with Joan Scott and Louise Tilly, with their foundational text based on European workers, and Thomas Dublin’s multiple texts concerning New England textile mills, other scholars developed deeper and more diverse analysis. In my research, up until the late 1990’s, a heavy Marxist perspective was used by historians to interpret the class and gender conflict coming out of factory work. This made for a very broad and vast interpretation of workers, often seeing them as a unit. Every text cited at least one of Dublin, Scott, or Tilly’s work, showing these texts to be the beginning and therefore it would seem necessary to provide much of the theoretical framework for others to build upon. However, they are not the end. Preceding historians and scholars used these texts to open the door to new interpretations, some using Foucault or a feminist perspective in which to launch their own analysis.
In addition to the various approaches historians or scholars employed, they also used the same sources but for different ends. Many authors used the same body of work, again creating cohesion in the material. Many utilize diaries, letters, and more specifically, The Lowell Offering, a newspaper written by female textile workers. They also rely on more impersonal sources such as census, tax lists and city directories. While their sourcing might be similar, the methodologies used by the author transformed the source for their intended purpose. Julie Husband used the newspaper to show the connection in discourse concerning the treatment of factory workers in comparison and to slaves. Yet, Dublin used this source to provide a more intimate narrative of the mill workers. Finally, some also weight the types of evidence differently. Especially early historians, some leaned towards a more quantitative driven interpretation while others show a more emotional and qualitative position. Based on the interpretation of the existing body of scholarship, there are arising questions this paper hopes to elucidate. How can we use these questions concerning economic and social history to discuss the working world in which women, beyond single white middle class wage workers, operated in? What space do historians give the even further marginalized or how does a particular work open up a dialogue for such a discussion to occur? Despite the massive amount of literature on the subject, even the historians in the texts agree, there is still much more work to be done.