Factory Labor and the Domestic Sphere in the Lowell Offering Essay

In 1822, a group of Boston merchants and traders began their thrust to transform a riverbank below the thirty-foot falls of the Merrimack River into the salientest cloth manufacturing establishment in the country. These capitalists dug and improved the Merrimack canal, constructed machine shops, and built accommodate for mill executives, foremen and operatives. The cotton mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, and other rising England sites began to employ the introductory female industrial labor force in the United States. approximately twenty years later, milling machinery reverseers wrote and edited the Lowell whirl, a literary mag showcasing the virtues and talents of the female operatives in verse, essays and short fiction (Eisler, 13-22).This ESSAY discusses the female Lowell pulverisation worker as portrayed in the Offering. Although the magazine never express an overtly feminist view of the factory girls condition, nor invoked a working-class instinct similar to later labor expressions in Lowell, there is evidence of a narrative strategy and ideology speaking both to the factory women and the conservative readership outside of the mill town. The papers short stories, epistolary narratives and commentaries seek to legitimize an operatives grapheme within the feminine ideal of domesticity. In conforming to the norms of feminine literature, the Offering reconstructs the operatives character. It subordinates the evidence for independence or autonomy to relate stories of familial or sentimental ties binding the factory girl to the world outside of factory life. The magazine sought to provide an answer to this question given her peeled liberties, what kept the factory girl from losing contact with her moral sentiments?To a great degree, the economi... ..., 1820-1865. Columbia Studies in American Culture Series (New York Columbia University Press, 1942) 13-14.Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of adult female Womans Sphere in New England, 1780-1835. New Have n, CT Yale University Press, 1977.Dublin, Thomas. Women at achievement the Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860. New York Columbia University Press, 1979. Dublin, Thomas. Women, work and protest in the early Lowell mill arounds the oppressing hand of avarice would subjugate us. Labor History 16(1975) 99-116.Eisler, Benita. The Lowell Offering Writings by New England Mill Women (1840-1845). New York Harper Torchbooks, 1977.Welter, Barbara. The Cult of True Womanhood. The Many-Faceted Jacksonian Era New Interpretations. Contributions in American History, number 67, Edward Pessen, ed. Westport, CT Greenwood Press, 1977.