"She Came to Work": The Female Labor Force in Chester County, 1750–1820

Abstract

"She Came to Work" The Female Labor Force in Chester County, 1750–1820 Lucy Simler This essay was presented to a seminar of the Transformation of the Delaware Valley Project on May 11, 1987, and is published in memory of the late Lucy Simler, who died December 20, 2005, at age seventy-nine. She was an important and exceptionally generous contributor to the scholarly communities in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Chester County and to the earliest incarnations of what is now the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. This research by Lucy Simler on female wage labor was never published and remains a unique, although still preliminary, look at the economic lives of rural middling and poorer women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1 It has all the hallmarks of Lucy Simler's detailed investigations: [End Page 427] an encyclopedic knowledge of underutilized primary sources, particularly for Chester County, a deep concern for commoners and the daily routines of everyday economic and social life, and a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity that might sometimes be elliptic or obscure to those who did not know Chester County as she did, but that always probed deeply into the archival record. She was engaged with current scholarship and had the ability to raise significant research questions. This study of women and work is especially appropriate because Lucy Simler was a pioneer in her own right who had to struggle for recognition as a woman and as a scholar. She was a valued friend and colleague to her peers and a role model and mentor to several generations of younger historians. This essay is not a finished product, but it is hoped that this belated publication of her research on women and wages will encourage others to explore the questions concerning gender, labor, consumption, and access to money that are raised here in a preliminary fashion and that await further study. The paper has been silently and lightly edited for style, and footnotes have been added [in square brackets]. Occasionally, unstated assumptions and conclusions have been inserted [also placed in square brackets]. It is otherwise as she wrote it in 1987, and it serves, in her own words, "to right the balance." —Susan E. Klepp, ed. * * * The purpose of this essay is to present some preliminary findings on the female labor force in Chester County in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The study is part of a larger project that argues that the wage laborer in rural Pennsylvania was as important in the development of the economy of the Middle Atlantic region as were the slave and indentured servant in the South or the family laborer in New England.2 An exploration [End Page 428] of the contributions and conditions of this labor force is essential to the understanding of the broader topic: the "Transformation of the Delaware Valley." In earlier work I have dealt with male laborers. Here, to right the balance, I shall deal with their important but heretofore little-studied counterparts, female laborers.3 Most women in Chester County were "working women" [in the sense that they labored and were not leisured]. By "the female labor force," I mean those women who, lacking land and capital, were dependent on their own labor for survival, for upward mobility, or for small luxuries (perhaps a silk handkerchief or calfskin shoes), and who, for varying lengths of time over their life cycle, were wage laborers. The focus will be on servants, the wives of cottagers, and widows without means. Although many of these women entered the labor force as indentured servants or slaves and, in a sense, competed with them in the labor market, this essay will treat slavery and servitude only indirectly. These limits are for practical reasons. Laboring, wage-earning women made up a large segment of the population in these years, yet we know little about them: What was the size of the female labor...