"The White Slave of the North": Lowell Mill Women and the Reproduction of "Free"
Labor
Author(s): Julie Husband
Source: Legacy , 1999, Vol. 16, No. 1, Discourses of Women and Class (1999), pp. 11-21
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25679285
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Julie Husband
oppression was far worse than that of the wage
laborer, the two groups shared much in common.
His experiment of selling land in Elba, New York
on easy terms to former slaves was aimed at help
ing them to establish independence as Brownson
denned it. Douglass compared white shipyard
workers in Baltimore to slaves who mistakenly
viewed their black counterparts as threats. Ac
cording to Douglass, the white workers failed
to see that the slaveowners and capitalists played
one group off against the other to keep wages low.
6. In her study of the "woman's fiction" that
dominated American literature between 1820 and
1870, Nina Baym finds "scarcely any . . . novels
of seduction" (26). Domestic ideology rejected
the figure of the woman dominated by her emo
tions, the "inevitable sexual prey." Sentimental
heroines transcended their sexuality rather than
falling victim to it. Michael Denning argues that
the seduction story returns after 1870 with the
important difference that it became a means of
discussing class oppression. The seducer/rapist
was of a higher class than the working-girl and the
-.
working-girl usually just escaped his persecution.
Neither notes the persistence of the seduction
narrative in anti-slavery fiction, which acts as a
bridge to the class inflections Denning discovers
in the later seduction tales.
Works Cited
Ash worth, John. "The Relationship between Cap
italism and Humanitarianism." American His
torical Review 92 (1987): 813-28.
Baym, Nina. Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels
Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imag
ining Self in Nineteenth-Century America.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.
Brownson, Orestes. "The Laboring Classes." Bos
ton Quarterly Review 3 (1840): 358-95.
Davis, David Brion. "Reflections on Abolitionism
and Ideological Hegemony." American Histor
ical Review 92 (1987): 797-812.
Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Nov
els and Working-Class Culture in America.
New York: Verso, 1987.
Dublin, Thomas, ed. Farm to Factory: Women's
Letters 1830-1860. New York: Columbia UP,
1981.
Ella. [Harriet Farley]. "Conclusion of the Volume."
Lowell Offering 1 (1841): 375-78.
A Factory Girl. [Harriet Farley]. "Factory Girls."
Lowell Offering. (Dec. 1840): 17-18.
Farley, Harriet. "Editorial." Lowell Offering 3
(1843): 190-92.
"Editorial." Lowell Offering 4 (1844): 260.
Grace. [Harriet Curtis]. "Woman's Influence."
Lowell Offering 3 (1843): 218-25.
Hannah. "History of a Hemlock Broom: Written
By Itself." Lowell Offering (Oct. 1840): 1-2.
Lucinda. [Harriet Farley]. "Abby's Year in Lowell."
Lowell Offering 1 (1841): 1-8.
Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race
and the Making of the American Working
Class. New York: Verso, 1991.
"A Week in the Mills." Lowell Offering 5 (1845):
217-18.
by and about Women in America, 1820
1870. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978.
21
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"The White Slave of the North":
Lowell Mill Women and the
Reproduction of "Free" Labor
Julie Husband
State University of New York, Buffalo
In her first attempt to represent female fac
tory workers to a critical public, Harriet
out this form of independence, Brownson
went on to argue, American workers faced
a degradation worse than African American
Farley, future editor of the Lowell Offering,
attacked Orestes Brownson, transcendental
slavery.
ist reformer and 1840 presidential candidate,
Harriet Farley might have been expected
for his "slander" of working-class women.
to agree with Brownson. By 1840, she had
In a lengthy piece entitled "The Laboring worked in the Lowell mills for eight years,
Classes," part of a series of controversial
articles articulating his electoral platform,
during which time the mills had reduced
wages, imposed work speed-ups, increased
individual's ownership of the means of pro
duction, a cornerstone of American republi
canism in the early nineteenth century. He
tives lived, and defeated two strikes by the
women. Farley's rebuttal to Brownson?and
coming self-employed farmers, craftsmen or
conditions for women at the mills. At the
Brownson equated independence with an
contested the characterization of wage la
borers as "free" workers en route to be
rents at the company-owned boarding
houses where most of the female opera
many of her future editorials?expressed
concern over deteriorating pay and work
professionals. Challenging those who would same time, Farley and most of the other
view with equanimity the shift from arti
writers for the Lowell Offering resisted
san to industrial capitalism in the United representations of the mills that conflated
States, he asked, "[I]s there a reasonable
the mill's harsh environment with the
degradation of women workers.1 To defend
present generation of laborers, shall ever women's decisions to work in the mills, Far
become owners of a sufficient portion of ley developed an alternative to Brownson's
the funds of production, to be able to sus masculinist definition of independence, one
tain themselves by laboring on their own
informed by both her experience as a mill
capital, that is, as independent laborers?. . .
operative and as the daughter of a farmer.
[E]verybody knows there is not" (371). With
She repeatedly claimed that wage-labor in
chance that any considerable portion of the
LEGACY, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1999- Copyright ? 1999 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
11
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Legacy
the mills offered greater independence
ditions
than of operatives. Instead, in an essay
which
did women's lives on family-owned farms. would set the tone for her later edi
Taking a page from the anti-slavery torship
femi of the Lowell Offering, Farley offered
nists, the first sustained women's movema definition
ent
of independence at odds with
Brownson's:
in the country, mill women used the tropes
of the anti-slavery campaign to refigure their
And
whom has Mr. Brownson slan
rural lives as lives of dependence and do
dered? . . . [G]irls who generally come
mestic servitude not unlike slavery. If wage
from quiet country homes where their
labor in the mills was restrictive and ex
minds and manners have been formed
ploitive, so, too, was farm labor for women,
under the eyes of the worthy sons of
even on family farms. Independence based
Pilgrims and their virtuous partners and
on capital ownership was elusive, at best, for
who return again to become the wives
women. By building on the campaign of the
of the free intelligent yeomenry of New
anti-slavery feminists, writers for the Lowell
England and the mothers of quite a
Offering formed an alternative to Orestes
proportion of our future republicans.
Brownson's masculinist discourse of class.
("Factory Girl" 17)
Brownson's article suggested that factory
Farley defended female operatives by remov
women participated in not one but two
ing them from their factory context and by
marketplaces and that when they bartered
downplaying their independence from fam
their labor they also bartered their marriage
ily ties. Positioning them back in their rural
ability; thus, she who sought to profit in
homes, "under the eyes" of their fathers,
the labor market might lose all in the mar
husbands, and sons, Farley secured their rep
riage market. "Few of them ever marry"; he
utations by denying their autonomy in the
wrote, "fewer still ever return to their native
Lowell mills. Farley insisted, however, that
places with reputations unimpaired. 'She
female factory operatives achieved indepen
has worked in a Factory,' is almost enough
dence vicariously, through their family con
to damn to infamy the most worthy and
nections. She further argued that they chose
virtuous girl" (370). Leaving her family to
to exercise their independence by "voluntar
live in the factory-owned boarding houses
ily assuming" certain "restraints":
in Lowell, a woman also left the protection
[I]t has been asserted that to put our
of her family, and, according to Brownson,
selves under the influence and restraints
she was widely believed to fall victim to
predatory city men. Derived from characof corporate bodies is contrary to the
terizations of British factories, the premierespirit of our institutions and to the love
of independence we ought to cherish.
nineteenth-century example of a degraded
There
is a spirit of independence which
and exploited working-class, it was this pic
is averse to social life itself and I would
ture of promiscuous female workers that
advise all those [who] wish to cherish it
the Lowell Offering was devoted to stamp
to go far beyond the Rocky Mountains
ing out.2
and hold communion with none but the
When Farley responded to Brownson in
untamed Indian and the wild beast of
the pages of the Lowell Offering, she left
the forest. (17)
unanswered Brownson's claim that factory
wages were insufficient for operatives, male
If Brownson used a racialized metaphor to
or female, to establish themselves on inde
characterize white, working-class women as
pendent farms or in businesses. Nor did she
degraded, Farley responded in kind. Both
the black slave and the "untamed Indian"
comment on the health and working con
12
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Julie Husband
Theorists of the anti-slavery movement
have long debated the relationship between
industrial capitalism and the rise of an or
ganized anti-slavery movement in the nine
teenth century. David Brion Davis has argued
that there was little public opposition to
America. The Jeffersonian view of America
as a land of independent, yeomen farmers
still dominated many Americans' conception
of themselves. As more and more workers
ceased to own the means of production
during the first decade of the nineteenth
or control the mode of production, Amer
icans of all classes sought institutions that
would limit the areas in which self-interest
century. Initially it was the elite African Insti
governed human relations. "They looked
tution and wealthy philanthropists, without
a base among the majority of British citi
zens, who successfully pushed laws against
the slave trade through Parliament. Only af
ter their legislative success did a mass anti
for, and found, new supports for individual
morality and the social order. Among these
slavery in either Britain or the United States
slavery movement develop in Britain and
the United States. The capitalists who com
prised the African Institution, whether con
scious of it or not, advanced a definition
of "free labor" that, in condemning the op
pression of slaves, legitimated the exploita
tion of British wage laborers. In the wake
of the French Revolution and labor unrest
among British miners and factory workers,
capitalists led the British public to accept
a new "common sense" definition of wage
labor, making the term synonymous with
"free" labor.
Ante-bellum apologists for slavery, and
even some who opposed slavery, also ac
cused capitalists of using the issue of slav
ery to deflect attention away from the
degradation of workers closer to home.
Orestes Brownson renounced his own anti
slavery activism because he believed that
the anti-slavery movement was being used
to displace more important concerns about
the growth of a wage-dependent laboring
class in America. Considering the develop
ment of a powerful anti-slavery base among
the working-class and among the growing
professional-managerial class in America,
historian John Ashworth argues that anti
were the family, the home, and the individual
conscience'' (Ashworth 822). In a culture
that increasingly viewed family affections
as a bulwark against anti-social behavior,
slavery and its subordination of family re
lations to market relations would appear to
all classes to be profoundly de-stabilizing.
To Brownson, the writers for the Low
ell Offering rebuffed a friend when they
denounced his article. He assumed that la
boring on a family farm was a form of in
dependence for women, an independence
they were duped into rejecting when they
left for the factories. His patriarchal view
of rural domestic economies colored his
view of female operatives' decisions. These
first-generation working-class women, po
sitioned as they were between the family
farm and the factory, hastened the accep
tance of the new definition of "free" la
bor. Using comparisons to the fugitive slave,
writers for the Lowell Offering character
ized factory labor as a means of escaping
oppressive domestic situations. Factory la
bor also became a means of repairing and
re-establishing the family on a more stable
financial footing. Through the "family poli
tics" campaign of feminist-abolitionists, writ
ers for the Lowell Offering learned to prize
their freedom as the freedom to leave and
to return home rather than independently
slavery discourses had surprising implica
to own their homes. Freedom meant not
looked to the degradation of workers in Eng
only the ability to participate in the market
place, but also the self-possession necessary
to refuse the marketplace's lure if it con
tions for Americans of all classes. Americans
land and France and feared the development
of a landless working class in republican
flicted with their family's interests.
19
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