Public aesthetics versus personal experience: Worker health and well-being in 19th-century Lowell, Massachusetts

Abstract

Documentary and archaeological evidence provides seemingly contradictory views of conditions of sanitation, hygiene, and nutrition under the boardinghouse system in Lowell, Massachusetts. Archaeological evidence, for example, reveals that public expression of corporate concern for worker welfare often failed to result in actions that would improve living conditions in the boardinghouses. On the other hand, boarders and keepers alike made efforts to humanize and personalize the anonymous surroundings of corporation housing. This situation is revealed through personal accounts as well as by objects of everyday life recovered from archaeological deposits in the backlots of two Boott Corporation boardinghouses. Both documents and archaeology reveal that despite the penetration of elements of 19th-century domestic ideology (e.g., notions of economy and scientific housekeeping) into the design, operation, and maintenance of the Lowell boardinghouses, workers and keepers retained traditional notions of health and nutrition. Historical research and zooarchaeological analysis reveal that workers living in corporation housing had a diet dominated by fatty meats and foods high in starch and carbohydrates, but documents do not imply there was dissatisfaction with food in the boardinghouses; on the contrary, workers believed that their diet was nutritious and healthful. It is suggested that the tendency to interpret the archaeological evidence for sanitary conditions and food remains according to the strictly “objective” criteria of current ideas about health and nutrition can be misleading or at best can bring into focus only part of the picture. Documentary analysis aimed at eliciting the emic perspective of contemporary observers must temper efforts at “science.”