Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1850–1881. By Wendy M. Gordon. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. x, 234 pp. Cloth, $68.50, isbn 0-7914-5525-4. Paper, $22.95, isbn 0-7914-5526-2.)

Abstract

Wendy M. Gordon compares the rural/urban migration of young, single, “independent” (self-supporting) workingwomen in three textile manufacturing communities to understand the commonalities and differences among those experiences. Her analysis centers on domestic servants in Preston, Lancashire, on textile operatives in Lowell, Massachusetts, and on domestic service and bleachery workers in Paisley, Scotland. Utilizing quantitative sources (largely census samples) and qualitative when possible, she argues that those migrants represented an important if declining contingent in the work forces of late-nineteenth-century industrial cities. Gordon demonstrates considerable imagination in teasing out patterns in the census data. She also contends that “if the patterns the statistics show are similar then qualitative sources from one city may help to explain behavior evident in all three” (p. 91). Thus by inference the Emma Page letters by a Lowell operative from Maine can, if used with care, suggest why Lancashire domestic servants and Scottish workingwomen decided to migrate. Understanding the personal reasons for migration probes the crucial transition from childhood to adult womanhood.