Transforming Women's Work - by Thomas L Dublin (Paperback)

About the Book

Dublin provides a broad account of women's work during the industrial transformation of America, testing the typicality of the factory experience against other forms of female employment.

Book Synopsis

"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 censuses, Dublin reconstructs employment patterns across the century as he shows how wage work increasingly came to serve the needs of families, rather than of individual women. He first examines the case of rural women engaged in the cottage industries of weaving and palm-leaf hatmaking between 1820 and 1850. Next, he compares the employment experiences of women in the textile mills of Lowell and the shoe factories of Lynn. Following a discussion of Boston working women in the middle decades of the century-particularly domestic servants and garment workers-Dublin turns his attention to the lives of women teachers in three New Hampshire towns.

From the Back Cover

Review Quotes

In his impressively researched book, Thomas Dublin examines the transformation of women's work in New England, the first American region to be reshaped by the Industrial Revolution.... A valuable addition to the scholar's shelf. The data provide the single most detailed description of women and work a century ago.

No historian has done more to illuminate the achievements of female labor in the early textile mills than Thomas Dublin.... In this latest book, he provides a broad account of women's work during the industrial transformation of America, giving us the chance to test the typicality of the factory experience against other forms of female employment. He mines a breathtaking array of sources, including business records, census data, deeds, wills, diaries, and personal correspondence, to reconstruct the circumstances surrounding women's work in New England from the 1820s to 1900.... Dublin's ingenious detective work in matching families in archival sources enables him to make important points.

About the Author

Thomas Dublin is Professor of History at the State University of New York at Binghamton. His many books include Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side, also from Cornell.