Mill Girls Research Articles

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

An Accidental Historian

An Accidental Historian

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis

An Idle Heroine in Industrious Times: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ <i>The Story of Avis</i>

Searching for a Soul Mate

Searching for a Soul Mate Elizabeth H. Pleck (bio) Carol Faulkner, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 224 pp. Bibliography and index $49.95 Carol Faulkner, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 224 pp. Bibliography and index $49.95 The prize for the most famous metaphor in literature goes to Shakespeare, either for "All the world's a stage" or "But soft! What light through window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun." The world is decidedly not a stage and Juliet was a teenage female character in a play (that was on a stage), not a centrally placed star consisting of blazing hot gasses. But the mind delights in finding correspondences between wildly different things. Metaphors comparing marriage to something else are centuries old because the wedded state is known by all and significant almost everywhere. Marriage could be the caboose or the engine of comparison. The marriage could be the unqualifiedly favorable term, as in postrevolutionary America where the bonds of citizens to the new republic were likened to the lifelong and affectionate ties of husband to wife. Or marriage could be the clearly unassailable term, as for defenders of slavery, who argued that the peculiar institution resembled marriage since both were based on "natural hierarchy." Since the seventeenth century, intellectuals and reformers have employed the metaphor of marriage as a form of slavery to critique the unequal, even unsavory aspects of marriage. Madeleine de Scudery, the French saloniste and novelist, originated the metaphor. She had in mind ancient bondage, not transatlantic slavery, and was especially animated by the unfreedom of arranged marriage. The English advocate of woman's rights Mary Astell picked up the metaphor about a half century later because she believed that in marriage the wife was subjected to the arbitrary will of her husband, a condition she thought morally wrong. Later on, U.S. abolitionists and "feministabolitionists" (the term of Blanche Glassman Hersh) amplified and made more concrete the marriage metaphor, naming runaway wives as "fugitive slaves." Utopian socialists in the early nineteenth century originated the comparison of marriage with prostitution, not quite as popular as the slavery metaphor, and communitarians and advocates of woman's rights followed their lead.1 A third metaphor—that marriage was a form of adultery—seems counterintuitive [End Page 569] and was considerably less popular, although it was often employed by the same reformers who used the slavery and prostitution metaphors. It, too, originated with European intellectuals; it surfaced in the American press when sex radicals in the U.S. in the 1850s began to refer to the unwholesome nature of sex within a loveless marriage. Historians have noted but not paid much attention to the use of the adultery metaphor because it was less commonly employed than the other two and because historians, like most nineteenthcentury Americans, dismissed those making use of it as cranks. Carol Faulkner, more respectful and appreciative of such rhetoric and the mavericks who employed it, traces the use of the adultery metaphor among critics of marriage between the 1830s and 1880. Her geographic focus is New York state—the newspaper capital of the nation, the home of many spiritualists and of several of the most important intentional communities whose members practiced their own version of freedom within and from marriage. Her cast of characters includes familiar figures—for example, John Humphrey Noyes and Victoria Woodhull—and some colorful unknowns she learned about from the records of communes, newspapers, published memoirs, and personal papers. The lesser-knowns and unknowns are a fairly heterogeneous group of white Anglo-Saxon men and women, some of whom were legally married couples. With the exception of Paschal Bradley Randolph, a biracial spiritualist who sometimes identified himself as Indian, sometimes as Black, the group is entirely white. Randolph, who was decidedly more on the moderate side of the movement, confronted the racism of one of his fellow reformers several times. The one member of the working class was Marie Howland, a former Lowell mill girl whose novel, Papa's Own Girl (1874), expressed her twinned...

Representation of “mill girls” at a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Gunma, Japan

Distribution and recognition injustices are often inextricably linked throughout history. Economic exploitation of a minority group by a dominant group may even transition into cultural domination of the former group by the latter. However, dual and historical analysis of these two forms of injustices is scarce regarding representation of women in the context of tourism. This study explores how “mill girls,” young women who worked in the Tomioka Silk Mill, Japan, dating back to 1870–1940, are represented to tourists. A qualitative case study approach revealed that mill girls are represented in fantasized and sanitized forms. Also, only the short, most prosperous time of the mill is showcased at the expense of excluding the historic struggles of female workers. We argue based on our study that the touristic representations reflect persistent and changing forms of gender injustice that the mill girls have faced. While the mill girls were economically exploited as the mill was in operation, when the mill was turned into a cultural heritage, the form of economic injustice morphed into recognition injustice where the women’s experiences find little expression. The study points to the importance of understanding the role of tourism in perpetuating historically engrained gender injustices.

女工(ミル・ガール)たちのモダニティ : 『ヒンドル・ウェイクス』におけるアダプテーションと労働、余暇、快楽の政治学(優秀論文賞論文)

女工(ミル・ガール)たちのモダニティ : 『ヒンドル・ウェイクス』におけるアダプテーションと労働、余暇、快楽の政治学(優秀論文賞論文)

Life and Labor of Lowell’s Mill Girls

Song, Kiho. “Life and Labor of Lowell’s Mill Girls.” Studies in English Language & Literature. 43.1 (2017): 83-103. Lowell in Massachusetts was the first place where factory labor was introduced in America. Due to its success in the cotton industry, Lowell was once called an “Industrial Eden.” Lowell’s success was indebted not only to the adoption of new machinery and modes of production, but to the benevolent and paternal policies of the cotton industry. Numerous young girls from New England came to work in Lowell, attracted not just by the high wages and good working conditions, but by the educational opportunities the provided its employees. Lowell was a place that simulated the intellectual desire of mill operatives and helped them expand their lives. The writings of Harriet Robinson and Lucy Larcom, who worked in Lowell as mill operatives when young, clearly illustrate the meaning of life and work during its heyday of factory labor. (Hannam University)

Women in the Industrial Area : Where Have All the Mill Girls Gone?

1962년 ‘국가공업특구’ 지정은 지리적 환경과 결합하여 농산어촌 지역이었던 울산을 새롭게 구성하는 변화의 기폭제가 되었다. 이 연구는 ‘국가공업특구’ 지정 이후 산업수도, 생산기지이자 남성의 도시로 자리매김하고 인지되어 온 울산지역의 산업화 과정을 함께 겪고 살아온 절반의 지역민인 여성의 삶을 고찰한다. 울산지역의 여성을 살펴보는 것은 한국사회의 산업화를 압축적으로 경험한 울산지역, 그리고 울산여성의 삶을 살펴본다는 데에 의의를 가진다고 할 수 있다. 특히 산업화가 이루어지는 과정 속에서 중화학산업이 극적으로 성장하기 이전, 국가와 지역 산업의 단초를 마련하였던 경공업 산업분야에 직접적으로 참여한 여성들의 자취를 살펴보는 것은 산업화 속의 여성 그리고 산업의 변화와 여성을 살펴봄으로 지역사회와 국가 그리고 산업화 과정 속의 젠더를 이해할 수 있게 할 것이다.

Making the Mill Girl Modern?: Beauty, Industry, and the Popular Newspaper in 1930s' England

Making the Mill Girl Modern?: Beauty, Industry, and the Popular Newspaper in 1930s' England

Factory Labor and Literary Aesthetics: The “Lowell Mill Girl,” Popular Fiction, and the Proletarian Grotesque

Factory Labor and Literary Aesthetics: The “Lowell Mill Girl,” Popular Fiction, and the Proletarian Grotesque

‘In the Mills, We Are Not So Far from God and Nature’

Beginning in the 1820s, industrialization wrought profound and violent disruptions in the culture of the northeastern United States. Lowell, Massachusetts, grew from a rural village of 1500 people in 1820 to a manufacturing city of 33,000 in 1850. Newcomers found crowds, buildings, and noise spiritually assaultive: one yearned ‘to find myself alone for a brief space, that I might hold communion with my own heart undisturbed’. In response to these yearnings, Lowell’s developers and laborers eschewed artful fabrications of pastoral countryside or wilderness. Instead, they incorporated greenery into canals, factories, and streets, weaving sacred space into industrial urbanism. Writings by Lowell’s ‘mill girls’ detail the spiritual rewards—some actively sought, some serendipitous—of their lives in the city. Although the hopes of the city’s founders and workers that balance could be achieved between mass production of material goods and harmony with nature were not fully realized, the gardens, green spaces, and human ecology of Lowell provide models for sustainable and spiritually fruitful industrialization and urbanism in the twenty-first century.

“Oh Dear! How the Factory Girls Do Rig Up!”: Lowell's Self-Fashioning Workingwomen

The “mill girls” of Lowell relished their opportunities for reading, writing, and dressing in stylish clothes. In their magazine the Lowell Offering (1840–45), the workingwomen used their growing reputations for literariness and fashionability to scrutinize the differences between themselves and the ladylike models they were expected to emulate.

The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (review)

Reviewed by: The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City Steven High The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City. By Cathy Stanton. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2006. Cathy Stanton won the 2007 National Council for Public History's book prize for The Lowell Experiment, an empirically grounded study of public historians at work in a former Massachusetts textile mill town. The author situates the founding of Lowell National Historical Park (1978) in the context of the rise of public history and the emergence of the industrial heritage site out of the ruins of deindustrialization. She notes, rightly I think, that industrial museums "come to praise and to bury—to extol the workers whose labor created these places and frame that labor as something essentially finished." (xii) The sense of disconnection with the present, its pastness, is an integral part to the interpretation of industrial sites. Stanton asserts that this unwillingness to tackle present-day issues serves to depoliticize the message, even when the Lowell site is infused with social history. Conflict is almost always located safely in the distant past. Stanton uses the performance of the guided tour as an entry point into the Park Services' interpretation of the site. The "The Run of the Mill" tour, the most frequently offered, consisted of a trolley and boat journey into the early development of the industrial [End Page 143] city. Technology, waterpower and the "mill girl" labour force all loomed large in the official narrative. However, Stanton is attentive to the small opportunities for subversion of the official line. Yet there was virtually no contact with residents during the park's tour of the "Acre", a poor working-class district, and a narrative arc of upward mobility. Throughout these chapters, Stanton makes the crucial point that the "culture-led regeneration" of Lowell has produced few new jobs. It was more a matter of re-imaging the town, branding it post-industrial. The interpretative core of the book originates in Victor Turner's notion of rituals of reconnection. Based on her interviews, Stanton concludes that working-class memories serve as markers of how far middle-class public historians and visitors have come. The park reconnects them with the working-class pasts of their parents or grandparents. In effect, "The park's rituals of reconnection are designed to bridge personal distances—between visitors' and public historians' own family pasts and personal presents—while denying the social distances between these postindustrial workers and people less fortunately situated in the present day." (182) So far so good. Yet what perplexed me about Stanton's book was its refusal to engage meaningfully with Martha Norkunas' superb monograph, Monuments and Memory. Like Stanton, Norkunas examined the politics of remembering in post-industrial Lowell. But there the similarities end. For Stanton, the social actors are non-local public historians. In fact, local residents in Stanton's account are peripheral to the story being told and their interventions are belittled as the work of a handful of "local cultural activists," or as an "activist tribe." (192) Stanton clearly questions their moral authority to speak on behalf of local community. By contrast, Norkunas is more interested in the public and private remembering of city residents including her own family. The two books thus mirror the two "poles of discourse" that prevail in Lowell: "localness" and "outsiderhood." The park's "Working People" exhibition is put forward by Stanton as a warning to public historians who work with communities. The first half of the exhibit represents social history at its critical best. However, the second half of the exhibit on immigrants provides a celebratory narrative not unlike a scrapbook or photo album. The bifurcation of the exhibition was the result of a local representative playing the "blow-in card" to over-rule the objections of professional public historians. Stanton sides with her peers, throughout. Why is it that we only get to see the local "blow-in card" being played? What power cards did the institutional insiders in the National Park (the public historians) play? The unresolved tension between community collaboration and critical social history, so central to the work of Lowell's progressive public historians, is thus...

Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders (review)

Reviewed by: Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders Andrew Lawson Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience Among Antebellum New Englanders. By Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracinco Zboray. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. 2006. "Neighbors knowing the value an elderly man placed upon his library risk their lives to save it from a devastating fire. A young woman mourning the loss of a literary confidante inscribes ghostly verses from her via a spiritual medium. . . . Characters from a novel by James Fenimore Cooper enter the dreams of homesick Salem woman in China" (xvii). These examples, from the extraordinary range of "socioliterary" experience examined in this volume, testify to the central place of literature in the daily lives of antebellum New Englanders. The Zborays draw on a sample of 931 men and women, from a range of occupations, faiths, and age groups, from the 1820s to the outbreak of the Civil War—a period in which economic "destabilization" scattered people across a region linked not just by roads and railroads, but by paper, ink, and print. Their emphasis is on the various [End Page 281] ways in which ordinary, intensely literary folk used literature "to maintain a world of social relations" (69). The Zborays' inductive approach involves "accumulating material, structuring and engaging it, and developing generalizations from it" (xix). They examine popular literary production in diaries and letters, scrapbooks and commonplace books, unpublished effusions, valentines, valedictions, and quilts (where the literary was literally woven into the material of everyday life). Reading matter was disseminated in letters, mailed newspapers, and bundles filled with quotes, excerpts, and clippings: a more popular form of consumption than direct purchase (72). The Zborays estimate that half of all reading was done orally, as New Englanders read aloud at home, in sewing circles, in boarding houses, and on picnics and strolls. Silent reading went on everywhere—in work places, passenger cars, and ship's cabins—leading the authors to challenge a scholarly emphasis on the bourgeois parlor which sees reading "primarily as a genteel activity" (338 n.2). Finally, literature was received collectively, by lecture audiences whose chatter and commentary framed the performances of popular speakers, and through a "homespun literary criticism," generated in "barnyard salons, sitting-room debates, and kitchen lyceums" (244). For all its archival richness, the Zborays' inductive-taxonomic method tends to blur important social differences and class divisions. Amongst the chatter of "like-minded literati" listing books read, it jars somewhat to hear a mother writing of the death of her daughter, "an overworked mill girl," without further elaboration (18). The lack of any analysis of social class means that links between specific literary practices and social formations are obscured or elided: if commonplace books acted as "a form of social capital" for the "socially mobile," then we need some sense of how this practice worked, and what kinds of mobility it facilitated (32, 311 n.8). But these are possible directions for future research, opened up by this finely detailed "experiential history." To read this book is to sense the determining pressures and the creative possibilities of a specific cultural moment—to begin to grasp the luminous details of a culture as, in Raymond Williams's words, "a whole way of life." As the intrepid Salem voyager, Harriet Low, told her journal, in China, on August 1, 1832: "Oh tempora. O Mores. What an amalgamation" (13). Andrew Lawson Leeds Metropolitan University Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

The virtues of vice

Virtue and vice remain at the margins of feminist conceptual analysis although both establish a dualism that denies women full citizenship. To make this argument, this analysis explores the historical case of the Lowell mill girls – the first nearly all-female labour force in the United States between 1826 and 1850. Their public debate illustrates how virtue aligns some women with the economic and political status quo while society affiliates those who challenge its dominant beliefs with vice. This moral location reveals the ‘virtues of vice’ or the political benefits that women may derive from vice which places them outside traditional moral and political discourse, enabling them to question existing moral paradigms, consider alternatives, and politically organize against the status quo. As such, the Lowell mill girl debate can inform contemporary feminist theory by raising serious questions about virtue and suggesting how vice opens up a critical space for ideological innovation, referred to here as a moral middle ground, that may result in a more democratic, feminist ethics.

"Mill Girls" and Labor Movements: Integrating Women's History into Early Industrialization Studies

To investigate the history of the Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills—once world-renowned for their scale and success—is to encounter the story of the “mill girls” who left farms all over New England to work in those factories in the mid-nineteenth century. This period and these people in American history have received abundant attention both in historical novels for youth and adults and in many compelling works of non-fiction that look at the history of Lowell's mills and at the lives of the men and women—especially the women—who worked there. We have in this case a perfect integration of women's history and “standard” history, in that it is impossible to teach about Lowell's (and America's) industrialization without examining the impact on and of the women who comprised at times over three-fourths of the total textile industry workforce in Lowell. Additionally, the “mill girl” story grips the imagination of most everyone who...

BOOK REVIEW: Wendy M. Gordon.MILL GIRLS AND STRANGERS: SINGLE WOMEN'S INDEPENDENT MIGRATION IN ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND THE UNITED STATES, 1850-1881. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.

Reviewed by: Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1850–1881 Lisa Chilton (bio) Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1850–1881, by Wendy M. Gordon; pp. x + 234. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002, $68.50, $22.95 paper. Wendy Gordon's Mill Girls and Strangers is ambitious. Through an examination of three urban centres in which textile manufacturers featured prominently as employers of female labour, this book endeavours to make sense of the migration of single women in three different national contexts. Preston, Paisley, and Lowell, Massachusetts, serve as case studies for developing trends in England, Scotland, and the United States, respectively. This study was designed to work both at the "macro" level, plotting migration patterns and their relationships to quantifiable socioeconomic factors, and at the "micro" level, examining in detail the personal experiences of individual migrant women. The study seeks to answer questions such as: "Under what circumstances did employers' needs exercise more influence on single women's migration, and when were the women's own needs and desires a stronger factor? What experiences were common to all textile cities, and which were specific to the city or region in which they [were discovered]?" (14). The book's introduction claims that it will contribute to our understanding of "the dynamic of the textile cities themselves," including "how nineteenth-century urban populations coped with women who were on their own" (2). Likewise, Gordon argues that the combination of quantitative and qualitative study that underpins Mill Girls and Strangers allows this book to "illuminate individual women's experiences from different perspectives, including insight into their goals and feelings regarding migration" (5). According to Gordon, this book presents "a picture of single female migrants with multiple dimensions, revealing their hopes and failures as well as their economic roles" (5). Mill Girls and Strangers is organised into three sections, each of which explores one of the three highlighted cities. Gordon begins her study with an examination of single women's migration to Preston, moves on to an exploration of Lowell, and concludes with Paisley. The logic behind the order in which the reader is introduced to these case studies is clear. At the heart of the study is the information that was gained from the cities' sampled census reports for the years 1850-51 through 1880-81. Gordon notes that in the case of Preston there are few "qualitative" documents through which to gain further access to female migrants' lives. (In fact, the only archival sources listed in [End Page 512] the bibliography for this city are a Penny Bank Minute Book and a set of Preston Savings Bank Records, which Gordon uses to question the extent of migrant women's continuing financial relations with their families back home.) Preston thus serves as the base upon which the more "qualitatively" rich case studies of Lowell and Paisley will build. The Lowell chapter contributes information derived from the particularly rich collection of migrant women's correspondence available for that location, while the Paisley chapter adds evidence gained from government institutions' records relating to migrant women whose efforts to gain or maintain independence went awry. Gordon's book is a solid contribution to the literature on women, waged work, and migration during the Victorian period. It provides information that may be instructively applied to questions relating to the motivations behind single women's migration, and to questions concerning the effects of migration on the migrants themselves. Gordon's findings confirm that single women were considered vulnerable to sexual predation and corruption during the late nineteenth century, and that this had a significant impact upon their decisions regarding where they would seek paid employment. Mill Girls and Strangers emphasises that migrant women's movements were determined by a variety of factors (including the needs and desires of prospective employers, the availability of desirable waged labour close to home, established patterns and cultures of migration, and the more personal whims and ambitions of the migrants themselves), and that the weighting of these various factors differed from case to case. In these respects, Gordon's...

‘I Think Less of the Factory than of My Native Dell’: Labor, Nature, and the Lowell ‘Mill Girls’

‘I Think Less of the Factory than of My Native Dell’: Labor, Nature, and the Lowell ‘Mill Girls’