Workers' Aspirations, Historians' Anxieties

Abstract

Almost twenty years ago, the historian Thomas Dubin published a compact, tightly argued article on the first female mill operatives of Lowell, Massachusetts, entitled Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills: 'The Oppressing Hand of Avarice Would Enslave Us.'' In that article, as in subsequent publications (Women at Work, 1979, and Farm to Factory, 1981), Dublin argued that the history of the Lowell women through the mid-1800s presents the twentieth-century reader with suggestive glimpses of the complicated, contradictory impact of the transition to industrial production in America. In surprising ways, according to Dublin, the of Lowell at once liberated and oppressed the women who made them work. Lowell's millhands, he showed, negotiated the difficult transition from rural New England with profoundly ambivalent feelings and in full consciousness of the tensions that marked their lives on either side of the industrial divide. David Zonderman's encyclopedic monograph, Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815-1850, as its title suggests, addresses these very themes as they unfolded not only for the women of Lowell but for thousands of their colleagues, female and male, all across New England. Zonderman concludes that the first generation of American factory workers had a divided-and at times fragmented-consciousness of their own identity as workers and of the opportunities and dangers in the factory system (pp. 5-6). Some workers, he argues, enthusiastically supported the factory system, others harbored ambivalent feelings about it, and still others condemned it; moreover, many workers changed sides over the course of their years in the factories (p. 6). For Zonderman, the central analytical problem is to explain how and why workers developed so many different perspectives on the factory system (p. 6). To answer this question, he volunteers what he calls an intellectual portrait (p. 7) of America's first factory operatives by letting working people