Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution by Thomas Dublin

Abstract

354 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE lar: farmers as well as merchants and fishermen combined to form “tight though unequal relations of interdependence” (p. 86). The second half of the book details the history of Essex County’s “socioeconomic maturation” (p. 7). In the 18th century, when land resources began to diminish and there was less work to do on the family farm, farmers moved away from the “frontier principle of strict-interdependence” (p. 229). Sons began to work off the farm, for neighbors, launching “a thin local market in the labor of young men” (p. 237). In the fishery, the system of clientage gave way to a more adversarial, less paternal system characterized by much harsher relations between capital and labor. Like the farmers, fish­ ermen found themselves driven more and more into regular paid employment, what Vickers calls the “marketplace oflabor” (p. 167). In this way, Vickers carefully traces the gradual transformation of independent workers into a class of people whose defining condi­ tion was “proletarian dependency” (p. 323). Farmers and Fishermen is an original and significant addition to the literature on economic development in Puritan New England. Vick­ ers is almost mathematical in the precision and logic of his argu­ ment, yet the book is never boring. He writes very well—his descrip­ tion of cod fishermen at work is haunting—and covers a lot of ground. While some of it is familiar territory, Vickers takes care not to be redundant. His emphasis is on workers, and community, and how that community was transformed over the course of two centu­ ries by the accumulation of wealth and manpower from a frontier settlement into a nascent industrial economy. There is little discus­ sion ofwhat role specific technologies played in this transformation, but that is understandable given the task Vickers set for himself. At the core of this study is a deep and illuminating understanding of Puritan accomplishment and struggle, and how those struggles shaped New England, sometimes ironically, into a re-creation of so much of the world the Puritans left behind during the Great Migra­ tion. George M. O’Har Dr. O’Har teaches at Boston College. Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolu­ tion. By Thomas Dublin. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994. Pp. xix+324; illustrations, tables, notes, appendixes, bibliog­ raphy, index. $35.00. In this carefully wrought quantitative social history, Thomas Dub­ lin reports his findings about women who worked for pay in New England during the 19th century. He has expanded the databases of his previously published studies of rural New Hampshire weavers TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 355 and palm-leaf hat makers, Lowell mill girls, and Lynn shoe binders and added samples of domestic servants and garment workers in Boston and schoolteachers in rural New Hampshire. The resulting five studies, in as many chapters, proceed chronologically through the century from the outworking hat makers and handloom weavers of the 1820s to the teachers of 1860-80. A concluding chapter ties these Endings to census data about New England working women in 1900. Forty-four statistical tables and twenty-seven pictures and maps convey supplementary information and detail. Vignettes of particular life histories lend flavor to the statistics; so do quotes from diaries and letters of working women not necessarily in the samples. Dublin gratefully acknowledges “incredibly labor-intensive work” by “a legion of research assistants” (p. xvii). With their help he has linked several kinds of records for each study to round out informa­ tion about individual women workers from sources well beyond the list in which he initially found their names. New Hampshire store accounts, Lowell mill employment records, an unusually detailed state census of inner wards in Lynn, a federal census of Boston, and school records for certain New Hampshire towns provide names of about 400 women for each sample. From local histories and genealo­ gies, tax records, and federal and state manuscript census returns, Dublin sought to identify the women’s families of origin and how well-off their fathers were; whom they married and whether they had children; where the women lived, and with whom, before, during, and after employment; and where...