Mill Girls Research Articles

Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1850-1881 (review)

Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1850-1881 (review)

Reviews of Books:Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1850-1881 Wendy M. Gordon

Reviews of Books:Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1850-1881 Wendy M. Gordon

<sc>Wendy M. Gordon</sc>. <italic>Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1850–1881</italic>. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2002. Pp. x, 234. Cloth $68.50, paper $22.95

<sc>Wendy M. Gordon</sc>. <italic>Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1850–1881</italic>. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2002. Pp. x, 234. Cloth $68.50, paper $22.95

Literature of the Thirties: Region and Genre

The second special issue on the literature of the thirties follows on from an earlier edition of Critical Survey which brought together new critical writings on the period (volume 10, number 3, 1988). The first four essays selected are responses to regionalism and identity and the last two to the issues raised by the relationships of gender and generic fiction. Simon Featherstone analyses how two popular artistes, Gracie Fields (the ‘mill girl’) and Max Miller (‘the cheeky chappie’) achieved success in an entertainment industry that was changing rapidly in response to technological and cultural pressures. Their stardom depended on the dialogues between regional and national identities as part of a national cultural dynamic during a decade in which mass popular forms reconstituted the older regional and local traditions of dialogue and performance. Steven Matthews sees Auden’s injunction to ‘Consider this and in our time’ as a ‘clarion call to a particular, post-The Waste Land, form of modernity’. Focusing on Scottish and Irish writers (Louis MacNeice, Sorley Maclean, Grassic Gibbon et al.) Matthews argues that the temporality of some thirties’ writing aligns it closely with the emergent nationalisms familiar in recent postcolonial theory.

The Mill Girl and the Cheeky Chappie: British Popular Comedy and Mass Culture in the Thirties

The Mill Girl and the Cheeky Chappie: British Popular Comedy and Mass Culture in the Thirties

WENDY M. GORDON, Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland and the United States, 1850–1881

WENDY M. GORDON, Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland and the United States, 1850–1881

Rum and Axes: The Rise of a Connecticut Merchant Family, 1795-1850 (review)

Reviewed by: Rum and Axes: The Rise of a Connecticut Merchant Family, 1795–1850 Julie H. Ernstein Rum and Axes: The Rise of a Connecticut Merchant Family, 1795–1850. By Janet Siskind. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. In Rum and Axes, anthropologist Janet Siskind explores the roots of industrial capitalism in post-Revolutionary War Connecticut. This historical ethnography of class and culture draws on primary materials associated with three generations of the Watkinson family, congregants in an East Anglia society of dissenters, who immigrated to New England in 1795 and subsequently amassed considerable economic and social capital. The title refers to the family’s transition from merchant capitalists who imported rum and other commodities from the West Indies to their role as industrial capitalists engaged in the factory production of axes and edged tools for an expanding national market. This succinct volume has numerous strengths, including its user-friendly format, readability, and organization. The structure is logical, tracking parallel developments within the Watkinson and Collins families and their broader social, economic, and historical milieu. At the same time, Siskind carefully examines interlinked patterns of continuity and change at the level of the individual, the family level of parent-child and inter-sibling relations, and within the business and corporate realms where these individuals played pivotal and self-defining (even re-defining) roles. For example, the Watkinson’s class standing is presented as one that “continually rationalized itself as one of benevolence and morality” within both the extended family and broader society (p. 144). Throughout, Siskind makes her points by carefully detailed demonstration and not simply by assertion. She provides a sophisticated critique of the rich documentary materials she uses and is quick to identify their potential biases and silences. She notes, for example, instances where a given historic author wrote in a not-entirely-candid fashion for an idealized future readership. Such is the case of her treatment of Samuel Watkinson Collins’ presentation of self in his handwritten 352–page memoir, which traced the company’s history from 1826–1867. Of particular interest is Siskind’s incisive reading of Collins’ reactions to worker problems faced in 1833 and again in 1846. Although only thirteen years separated the two labor disputes, they marked a sea change in the unfolding relations between the “owning” and “laboring” classes. During this brief time span, the circumstances, workers, and Collins himself had changed considerably; by 1846 he no longer spoke in “his old republican discourse” but had adopted “the language of the marketplace” (p. 120). It may seem unfair to praise the book for its conciseness while simultaneously promoting its expansion in select instances, but there are a number of areas where more detailed treatment would be welcome. The first is Siskind’s tantalizing but schematic consideration of personal correspondence as a means for self-fashioning and the building and maintenance of relationships. Second, the notion of corporate paternalism could have been expanded. As an archaeologist, I was pleased to note Siskind’s familiarity with some of the historical archaeology and oral historical work conducted in Lowell, Massachusetts. However, Siskind’s discussion of paternalism and class would benefit from juxtaposition of events experienced by Watkinson and Collins family members against a fuller range of assemblages and experiences documented at Lowell. Specifically, Siskind should move beyond the gloss of the Boott Mills Boarding Houses and the thousands of patent medicine bottles recovered there to the below-ground reflection of corporate paternalism (Beaudry 1989) and a fuller range of archaeological interpretations that contrast the material culture of “mill girls” and later boarding house occupants with that of middle management recovered from the Kirk Street Agent’s House (Beaudry and Mrozowski 1987), also at Lowell. Third, the discussion of nineteenth-century prisons and asylums warrants fuller consideration of the contributions of Bentham and Foucault on the subject, limited to passing mention in a footnote. And finally, given the book’s focus on capitalist transformation, a treatment of the considerably older roots of capitalism should have occurred earlier than page 123 of a 153–page volume. Rum and Axes is nonetheless a valuable case study that makes a worthy contribution to the literature on postcolonial New England during the...

“The Mill Ran Today”: Patterns of Work in a Mid-Nineteenth Century Northwest Missouri Woolen Mill

Mid-nineteenth century woolen mills in northwest Missouri represented proprietary rather than corporate mill ownership found in the northeastern United States. Although the work performed by mill operatives was similar in both types of mills, forms of mill management and the daily rhythm of work differed. The first purpose of this study was to determine the patterns of work at the Watkins Woolen Mill (WWM), near Lawson, Missouri. The second purpose was to compare WWM weavers to the New England mill girl profile (Dublin, 1979). Data revealed that weavers at the WWM worked irregular weeks compared to the 12-hour, six-day work weeks common in corporate New England mills; that the weavers’ work culture included job-sharing and on-the-job training; and that there were sibling employment patterns similar to Dublin’s (1979) study. Weavers at the WWM experienced a “dual loyalty” to their home and to the mill (Zonderman, 1986).

In the Master's Eye: Representations of Women, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern Literature , and: Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era (review)

150CIVIL WAR HISTORY In the Master's Eye: Representations of Women, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern Literature. By Susan J. Tracy. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Pp. ix, 307. $42.50.) Literature andHumanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era. By Gregory Eiselein. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xi, 215. $29.95.) The two works under review here arejoined by their authors' common desire to extract from literature (novels, poems, essays, personal accounts) a picture, in the first instance, of the slave holders' worldview on the eve of the Civil War, and in the second case, a description of the crippling, suffocating attitudes that marred the efforts of well-meaning humanitarians in all but a few cases. Both authors also follow guidelines ofcultural studies to describe not only what ideas reigned during the period of study, but how and why the ideas were produced. Susan J. Tracy studies five male novelists often associated with the defense of slavery and Southern culture: John Pendleton Kennedy, William Alexander Caruthers, Nathaniel BeverleyTucker, William Gilmore Simms, andJames Ewell Heath, whom Tracy identifies as "the only true liberal ofthe group" (1). Tracey considers her work to be a "Marxist feminist project ... to consider the parts of a literary text in relation to the whole" (2). Sure enough, she rounds up the usual savants—Karl Marx,Antonio Gramsci, RaymondWilliams, Eugene Genovese— and with their methodological help argues that the proslavery argument "was as much about gender and class as it was about race relations" (4). Various chapters explore the novelists' characterizations ofthe place for poor whites, blacks, daughters, mothers, spinsters, fallen women, belles, "spirited" women, and slaves. Not surprisingly, she finds that the novelists reflected the ideas of the South's ruling "class," which exercised patriarchal powerwith "terror and violence" (224). Anyone familiar with the novelists studied or with the writings of George Fitzhugh knows that a wide range of national and especially Northern developments came under the condemning gaze of these writers. Especially during the Jackson period, the land was ablaze with proposals from crackpot schemers who wished to redesign the social order with blueprints of their own manufacture . If Tracy is correct, that the novelists' characters reflect concerns about class and gender more than race, and that they in turn represent the social vision ofthe South's leaders, then it is no surprise that gender and class figured prominently in the worries ofthe elite. In the "Age ofthe Common Man" and uncommon women like Sarah and Angelina Grimké, or striking Lowell mill girls, threats to social order were ubiquitous and varied. The dates of Tracy's main texts may offer an explanation for her discovery. The appendix which lists the novels examined reveals the median date of publication to be 1838. One wonders if a description of a "worldview" extracted from a literary analysis of many novels written during or before the Jackson period can suffice to describe the notions of a generation living a quarter century later. Gregory Eiselein, assistant professor of English at Kansas State University, has authored Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era, which BOOK REVIEWSI5I joins seven other titles in the series Philanthropic Studies, edited by Robert Payton and Dwight Burlingame. The subject of the study is the writing and philanthropic practices of John Brown, Louisa May Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, Henry Thoreau, former slave Harriet Jacobs, and especiallyWaltWhitman, who emerges as the most successful practitioner of "eccentric philanthropy." Normal philanthropy, Eiselein asserts, is marred by authoritarianism, control, efforts to stabiUze society, efficiency, social distance between the giver and receiver of the act, and—after the Civil War—the presence and misguided efforts of the national government. In his work the author hopes to defend benevolence from defamation by writers who either praise it uncritically for its pure selflessness, or from "social control" historians who see in benevolence only aggressive efforts to exact obligations "and control the thinking, values, and activities of certain groups" ( 1 1 ). Neither ofthese interpretations "can explain the complexity , diversity, or idiosyncracy of benevolent work" ( 1 2). Benevolence could be made acceptable only if "eccentric" care-giving, by which Eiselein means care that is noncoercive and patient centered, were the...

Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American women in the United States

Preface Introduction The First Wave, 1875-1925 Miriam Katreen Syrian Immigration Women Immigrants Peddlers Mill Girls, Factory Hands, and Entrepreneurs Students and Teachers Clubwomen Making a Match From Second Generation to Third Fighting Political Racism: Paula Reconnecting: Linda Women for Women: Cheryl Color and Religion: Khadija The Second Wave, 1945-Present Prologue Palestinians: Emily, Ihsan, Najeebi, Suhair, Suad, Nuha, and Nawal, Mona Collage Epilogue Appendix Bibliography Index

Commonwealth of Toil: Chapters in the History of Massachusetts Workers and Their Unions.

Over the past two centuries, Massachusetts workers have fought for many important advances that would later be enjoyed by other Americans. The right to organize, restrictions on work hours and child labor, and workers' compensation were all pioneered in the Commonwealth. From the 1825 strike of Boston carpenters for a ten-hour day to recent victories in hospitals and universities, Massachusetts workers and their unions have been in the forefront of the battle for dignity and justice. This book tells their story. In eighteen chapters, beginning with the first industrial workers in the nation - the Lowell mill girls - the authors describe the struggles of working men and women to improve their lives. In the process, the book provides a valuable perspective on the development of the American labor movement.

‘Mill girls’ and ‘mine boys’: The cultural meanings of migrant labour

(1996). ‘Mill girls’ and ‘mine boys’: The cultural meanings of migrant labour. Social History: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 160-179.

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

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...

Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850 ed. by Judith A. McGaw

356 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE girls had done so in 1836. Similarly, among women who were domes­ tic servants or garment workers in Boston, the proportion who were not living with their own families declined between 1860 and 1880. Surprisingly, technological change in these women’s work re­ ceives slight attention. Although a few pictures show women posing at their workplaces, descriptions ofactual work processes are absent. Gender comparisons crop up occasionally but are not a strong theme; nor, in contrast to Women at Work, Dublin’s earlier book about Lowell mill girls, is labor unrest of concern here. Rather, Dub­ lin presents the fruits ofhis research as a test ofthe concept of “fam­ ily economy.” He believes his data show a short-lived period of “eco­ nomic and social independence of early female wage earners” (p. 27). For each woman, it was brief—upon marriage she joined another family economy. For American society, it was brief—in­ creased immigration after the Civil War submerged the “transient Yankee work force” (p. 27) in a permanent workforce of immi­ grants’ daughters whose “work and wages . . . were reintegrated within a patriarchal family wage economy” by 1900 (p. 257). One might differ with Dublin’s interpretation of his data, or wish he had included non-Lowell-type textile mill workers, but one must still applaud this substantial contribution to our basic stock of infor­ mation about working women in 19th-century New England. Carolyn Cooper Dr. Cooper, research affiliate at Yale University, is the author of ShapingInvention: Thomas Blanchard’s Machinery and Patent Management in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1991). She writes about 19th-century woodworking mechanization and the patent system. Early American Technology: Making and Doing Things from the Colonial Era to 1850. Edited by Judith A. McGaw. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Pp. x+482; illustrations, notes, ap­ pendix, index. $49.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). Until Brooke Hindle began his systematic and imaginative exami­ nation of 18th- and 19th-century American invention and practical technology more than four decades ago, few historians explicitly rec­ ognized that mechanism and culture were two sides of the same tech­ nological coin. This collection of essays dedicated to Hindle makes clear the intricate and intimate connection between technology and material culture, mainly in the Middle Atlantic region during the century and a halfbefore 1850. It also addresses a number ofimpor­ tant but relativelyunexplored questions in the history ofearlyAmeri­ can technology, including fundamental ones concerning the com­ plex and varied nature ofthat technology and how historians should approach it. Ofparticular concern to the volume’s editor,Judith McGaw, is the TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 331 bridging of the technological divide between the craft technology of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and the machine technology identified with the mid-19th-century industrial revolution. This, and the clarification of the roles of gender and the environment in de­ termining the form and consequences of the ways in which early Americans “made and did things,” are the main points of her intro­ duction to the volume and the controlling themes ofmostofits essays. Together these concerns describe what might be called an anthro­ pological approach to the history of technology, and a number of the authors here take it. This approach yields very different (and sometimes refreshing) results from those derived from analysis of patent statistics or the prosopography of inventors. Instead, the an­ thropology oftechnology tells us how people devised techniques and devices and applied them to the prosaic tasks of daily existence. A case in point is one of the more extensive essays, Susan Klepp’s discussion of methods and means of contraception and abortion in and around 18th-century Philadelphia. Also in this vein is Sarah McMahon’s essay on food preservation on New England farms be­ tween 1750 and 1850. McMahon’s focus is the “gender division of labor” (p. 186) and the often ambiguous differentiation between men and women in the work of preparing and putting up food. McGaw’s own piece on agricultural tool ownership in 18th-century Pennsylvania and New Jersey is a report on her current research, based on farmers’ probate inventories. The...

Liberating Voices: Autobiographical Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921-1938

Bryn Mawr has given me a new definition of internationalism and a new feeling for the word 'tolerant,' writes... a cigar worker from a southern mill. At first I thought my mother would have a fit if she knew I was going around with the cotton mill girls. Now I see that they are just as nice girls as anyone else, and I am trying to get them to come to our club [YWCA Industrial Club]. I got acquainted too with a lot of the Russian girls, and learned a lot from them. .. (Smith Women Workers 17).

Beyond the Difference versus Equality Policy Debate: Postsuffrage Feminism, Citizenship, and the Quest for a Feminist Welfare State

Previous articleNext article No AccessBeyond the Difference versus Equality Policy Debate: Postsuffrage Feminism, Citizenship, and the Quest for a Feminist Welfare StateWendy SarvasyWendy Sarvasy Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 17, Number 2Winter, 1992 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/494733 Views: 48Total views on this site Citations: 27Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1992 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Notes, (Jan 2020): 251–302.https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316941331.010Marissa E. Yingling “The Mother State and Her Weaker Children”, Affilia 31, no.44 (Jul 2016): 504–519.https://doi.org/10.1177/0886109915604896 References, (Jul 2012): 491–564.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444355093.refsEmmett L. Gill The Rutgers Women’s Basketball and Don Imus Controversy (RUIMUS): White Privilege, New Racism, and the Implications for College Sport Management, Journal of Sport Management 25, no.22 (Mar 2011): 118–130.https://doi.org/10.1123/jsm.25.2.118Kristin A. Goss Never Surrender? How Women's Groups Abandoned Their Policy Niche in U.S. Foreign Policy Debates, 1916–2000, Politics & Gender 5, no.0404 (Nov 2009): 453.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1743923X09990316 Bibliography, (Mar 2008): 418–461.https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470696071.biblioJoan Tronto Assistência democrática e democracias assistenciais, Sociedade e Estado 22, no.22 (Aug 2007): 285–308.https://doi.org/10.1590/S0102-69922007000200004J. M. Boryczka The virtues of vice: The Lowell mill girl debate and contemporary feminist ethics, Feminist Theory 7, no.11 (Apr 2006): 49–67.https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700106061455Virginia Sapiro, Pamela Johnston Conover Gender Equality in the Public Mind, Women & Politics 22, no.11 (Oct 2008): 1–36.https://doi.org/10.1300/J014v22n01_01Elisabeth J. Friedman State-Based Advocacy for Gender Equality in the Developing World, Women & Politics 21, no.22 (May 2000): 47–80.https://doi.org/10.1300/J014v21n02_03Kerreen Reiger Birthing in the Postmodern Moment: Struggles over Defining Maternity Care Needs, Australian Feminist Studies 14, no.3030 (Oct 1999): 387–404.https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649993209KRISTIN BARKER Women Physicians and the Gendered System of Professions, Work and Occupations 25, no.22 (Aug 2016): 229–255.https://doi.org/10.1177/0730888498025002005Landon R. Y. Storrs Gender and the Development of the Regulatory State: The Controversy over Restricting Women's Night Work in the Depression-Era South, Journal of Policy History 10, no.0202 (Oct 2011): 179–206.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898030600005601Lena Sommestad Welfare State Attitudes to the Male Breadwinning System: The United States and Sweden in Comparative Perspective, International Review of Social History 42, no.S5S5 (Feb 2009): 153–174.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000114828Ruth Lister Citizenship: Towards a Feminist Synthesis, Feminist Review 57, no.11 (Mar 2019): 28–48.https://doi.org/10.1080/014177897339641RENÉE A. MONSON STATE-ING SEX AND GENDER, Gender & Society 11, no.33 (Jun 2016): 279–295.https://doi.org/10.1177/089124397011003002Amy Fried Gendered Heroism, Limited Politics, Women & Politics 17, no.22 (Mar 1997): 43–75.https://doi.org/10.1300/J014v17n02_03Ruth Lister Dialectics of Citizenship, Hypatia 12, no.44 (Mar 2020): 6–26.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1997.tb00296.xRobin Silbergleid Women, Utopia, and Narrative: Toward a Postmodern Feminist Citizenship, Hypatia 12, no.44 (Mar 2020): 156–177.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1997.tb00302.x References, Current Sociology 44, no.22 (Jun 1996): 109–124.https://doi.org/10.1177/001139296044002008Ruth Lister Dilemmas in engendering Citizenship, Economy and Society 24, no.11 (Feb 1995): 35–40.https://doi.org/10.1080/03085149500000001Jytte Klausen Social Rights Advocacy and State Building: T. H. Marshall in the Hands of Social Reformers, World Politics 47, no.22 (Jun 2011): 244–267.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0043887100016099Elizabeth J. Clapp Welfare and the Role of Women: The Juvenile Court Movement, Journal of American Studies 28, no.33 (Jan 2009): 359–383.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800027638Jane Lewis Gender, the family and women's agency in the building of ‘welfare states’: The British case, Social History 19, no.11 (Jan 1994): 37–55.https://doi.org/10.1080/03071029408567891JOANNE L. GOODWIN An American Experiment in Paid Motherhood: The Implementation of Mothers’Pensions in early Twentieth-Century Chicago, Gender & History 4, no.33 (Apr 2007): 323–342.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.1992.tb00153.xElizabeth Cagan Women and democratization: Lessons from Latin America, (): 91–121.https://doi.org/10.1016/S1529-2126(00)80022-3Mark Hendrickson Gender Research as Labor Activism, (): 180–215.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139236690.006

Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South.

Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South.

Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South.

Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South.

Book Review: Labor History: Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South

Book Review: Labor History: Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South

Female unemployment in England and Wales 1851–1911: An examination of the census figures for 15–19 year olds

When one thinks of working-class women in England and Wales in the second half of the nineteenth century, the picture that rises to mind is one of unremitting toil, of factory hooters at dawn calling out the mill girls in their clogs and shawls, of dressmakers' apprentices at two o'clock in the morning fainting as they put the finishing touches to a gauzy ball gown, of sooty-faced girls in denim trousers shovelling coal at a pit head in Wigan, or of girls with raw, chilblained fingers pulling turnips in the sleety November rain. One does not usually think of teenage girls and young women, unemployed for months at a time, dragging out empty days on the doorsteps of farm labourers' cottages or in the back streets of mining villages and seaports. Yet a really close look at the published census returns suggests that though the first picture may be true of the majority, for a very sizable minority, in some areas over 40 per cent, of the girls who grew up between i85o and the First World War, the second is equally true. Though it is generally accepted that the Industrial Revolution in England and Wales caused unprecedented change and created many problems, long-term structural unemployment is not seen as one of them.' Historians refer to certain cases of technological unemployment (lasting one generation), like that of the handloom weavers, to the periodic unemployment caused in particular industries by trade cycles and trade depressions, even to under-employment like that which depressed the wages of agricultural labourers in the southern counties, but see the overall unemployment rate as not rising much above 5 per cent from mid-century to the First World War.2 It seems to be generally assumed that the changes in employment structure caused by industrialism did not bring in their wake any major long-term problems of unemployment.