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"Blewett challenges historians to incorporate gender analysis and a tradition of working women's protest into the history of the American labor movement." -- Georgia Historical Quarterly " Blewett's] detailed reconstruction of feminist perspectives in shoeworker protest and the divisions created by the competing loyalties to sisterhood and to working-class families is among the best available. . . . With works like this, it should be impossible to write about the American working class without including women." -- Historical Journal of Massachusetts "A highly stimulating and rewarding book." -- Journal of Interdisciplinary History
This study is a textual and contextual appraisal of the writings of Yorkshire-born Hedley Smith (1909-94) whose depiction of the fictional mill village of Briardale, Rhode Island, captures an early twentieth-century labor diaspora peopled with textile workers. Enraged and embittered at the transformatory experience of his own emigration, Smith used fiction to explore Yorkshire immigrants' culture and stubborn refusal to assimilate, their vital sexuality, and their vivid social customs. As Smith's writings reveal, emigration involves grief and anger, often universally concealed and problematic. Adopting a transnational perspective, Mary H. Blewett links Smith's fictional community to empirical data on the substance of working-class lives both in Yorkshire and in New England's worsted textile industries.
A part narrative, part analytical reconstruction of the history of the New England textile industry during the 19th century. The author examines industrialization from the point of view of both management and labour exploring their struggle in terms of class, culture and power.
In tobacco fields, auto and radio factories, cigarmakers' tenements, textile mills, print shops, insurance companies, restaurants, and bars, notions of masculinity and femininity have helped shape the development of work and the working class. The fourteen original essays brought together here shed new light on the importance of gender for economic and class analysis and for the study of men as well as women workers. After an introduction by Ava Baron addressing current problems in conceptualizing gender and work, chapters by leading historians consider how gender has colored relations of power and hierarchy—between employers and workers, men and boys, whites and blacks, native-born Americ...
Contains primary source material.
With a series of rich case studies focused on mobile laborers, this book demonstrates how the regional migrations of the early modern era came to be connected, contributing to the creation of an increasingly integrated nineteenth-century world.
This collection assembles documentary materials--letters, account books, diaries, reminiscences, testimony, eyewitness reports--that illuminate women's involvement in the industrialization of the northeastern US. It focuses on the shoemaking industry of eastern Massachusetts to illustrate the development of preindustrial household production; the rise of the factory system; and the parallel operation of outwork and factory stitching in the late 19th century. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Every year 100 million visitor's tour historic houses and re-created villages, examine museum artifacts, and walk through battlefields. But what do they learn? What version of the past are history museums offering to the public? And how well do these institutions reflect the latest historical scholarship? Fifteen scholars and museum staff members here provide the first critical assessment of American history museums, a vital arena for shaping popular historical consciousness. They consider the form and content of exhibits, ranging from Gettysburg to Disney World. They also examine the social and political contexts on which museums operate.
"I am not living upon my friends or doing housework for my board but am a factory girl," asserted Anna Mason in the early 1850s. Although many young women who worked in the textile mills found that the industrial revolution brought greater independence to their lives, most working women in nineteenth-century New England did not, according to Thomas Dublin. Sketching engaging portraits of women's experience in cottage industries, factories, domestic service, and village schools, Dublin demonstrates that the autonomy of working women actually diminished as growing numbers lived with their families and contributed their earnings to the household. From diaries, letters, account books, and census...
Set in New England, The Unforeseen follows the consequences of the brutal Civil War to the lives of ordinary women through three generations of intermarried families. No one among the antislavery advocates in New England foresaw the sweeping changes that the long, brutal Civil War would bring to their towns and families. In Beverly, Massachusetts, the magnitude of the war tears family life apart, forcing many to endure the absence and deaths of fathers, fiancEs, brothers, uncles, cousins, and nephews. Unmarried women are forced to find work in factories or as servants and farm help--or else face miserable poverty. Jenny Proctor Hutchins, nineteen when the war breaks out in 1861, withstands c...