Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work: the Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Pp. 312. Illustrations, tables. $7.5 Dublin, Thomas. Farm to Factory: Women's Letters, 1830-1860.

Abstract

It is not everyone who could recount the oft-told tale of the famous Lowell mill workers with a fresh approach and with stimulating insights. It is to Tom Dublin's credit, then, that in his prize-winning monograph (Bancroft and Merle Curti Prizes, 1980), Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860, he manages to do this. Dublin is a Marxist historian and has a strong commitment to women's history scholarship. Paraphrasing E.P. Thompson, he explains in his introduction that the largest purpose of his study is to show "human agency" in history, more specifically to reveal how people shape and control their fates, as well as how they are shaped and controlled by circumstances not of their own choosing. In this vein his study investigates "both the broad economic and social changes that led to a transformation of women's work in the first half of the nineteenth century and the attitudes and responses of women workers themselves that shaped and modified the larger processes"