From Working Girl to Working Mother

The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820-1980

Lynn Weiner

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780807841594, 9780807816127
• eBook ISBN: 9781469610283
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In this fresh perspective on one of the major demographic trends in our history, Weiner skillfully interweaves evidence on women's employment, government social policy, and the contemporary debate about women's sphere to explore the interconnections between patterns of women's work and the ideologies that arose in response to that work. In uniting the sources and methods of social and intellectual history, the author illuminates the changes in women's lives during the past 250 years.

Originally published in 1985.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

Part One: The Era of the Working Girl, 1820–1920

Chapter 1: “Women Adrift”: The Growth of an Urban Class

The era of the working girl unfolded in the nineteenth century. By the years after the Civil War, the typical woman worker was young and single. In addition, hundreds of thousands of working women had migrated to cities from American small towns and farms or had immigrated from Europe. By the 1870s, women who worked and lived apart from traditional networks of home and family formed a growing urban class; reformers singled them out with labels such as “homeless women,” “women adrift,” and “working girls.”

By the turn of the century, these self-supporting women were a third of the urban female labor force, and they were also at the heart of a widespread public controversy over the morality of women’s work. Yet in modern times young single working women have as a group become socially and historically invisible. The widening of “woman’s sphere” in the twentieth century has been accompanied by the acceptance of employment and housing practices that were at one time considered to be a threat to social order.

This chapter examines the history of that generation of single women which first challenged conventional social roles by their entrance into the urban labor force. Immigrant and black women have always worked. But when native-born white women increased their propensity to work, producing in effect a new labor supply, the question of woman’s proper place gathered strength in the public debate.

The chapter will first look at the antecedents of the era of the working girl. In particular, this era was shaped by the collapse of paternalistic employment structures in the nineteenth century, particularly the decline in domestic service and factory housing customs which imposed a supervised domestic environment upon working women before the Civil War. This care was thought necessary to insure the respectability of women who worked temporarily before marriage. Ironically, as these customs faded, the supply of young single women who were living on their own increased. The discussion will conclude with a description of the female labor force that had developed by 1900.

Antebellum Women Workers: Maids and Mill Girls

Since colonial times, the urban female labor force included self-supporting women—those who had to work to survive, prostitutes, vagabonds, and widows. By the antebellum era, urban growth and population pressures pushed and pulled thousands of single women to the cities, as young women abandoned the New England countryside to seek work in the burgeoning mill towns and in Boston.¹ But the geographical movement of rural single women did not become a national phenomenon until after the Civil War, when the development of steam railroads and the acceleration of urban and industrial growth launched the journeys of tens of thousands of migrants. At that time, too, the rapid increase in immigration added thousands of foreign-born women to the numbers of female workers living on their own in large cities.

Prior to this time, self-supporting women had not been visible as a social group. Women workers in large cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, or New York were generally considered to be beyond the pale of middle-class respectability; they were usually destitute, black, or immigrant.² In smaller communities, however, paternalistic structures allowed thousands of white rural women to migrate, work temporarily, and retain the status conferred by the domestic ideology. In small towns and villages, young women lived as servants with their employers, or they resided in the pseudo-families of supervised boardinghouses. In both cases, they were surrounded by domestic influences and family constraints.

These living arrangements stemmed in part from the colonial axiom that all individuals be attached to those microcosms of social order—well-governed families. In the mid-seventeenth century, for example, the single young person could not legally “be for himself” in Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay, but instead had to reside within an established family unit.³ This stricture loosened for young men in the nineteenth century. Single men boarded not only with families, but increasingly in commercial boardinghouses and hotels.⁴ The expectation for women, however, remained stringent. Woman’s respectability rested on her ties to family life. If she could not live within the province of her parents’ governance, she was expected to reside within a substitute family environment that insured a modicum of supervision and protection during the years before she married and established her own home.

To some degree, domestic service provided this supervision. Domestic service was the leading occupation for women in the United States through the 1940s, and until the 1920s servants commonly accepted partial payment for their labor in the form of room and board with their employers. A brief overview of the history of domestic service illustrates how the status of the servant evolved.

MAIDS

During the colonial period, female servants were indentured or “redemptioned” whites, or enslaved blacks. White female servants were usually European immigrants who paid sponsors for their passage across the Atlantic with a term of labor that generally ranged from four to five years. Wages were low; at the time of release a servant could expect some food, clothing, and a pittance of money. These early servants were considered to be inferior to their employers; they were stigmatized as a lower social class.⁵

In the early national and antebellum periods, however, the status of domestic service improved to some degree in the northern United States. Particularly in New England, patriarchy fused with democracy to remove the social stigma of domestic work. Antebellum servants were often women born into the same community as their employers. They commonly “attended the same church, sat at the same fireside, ate at the same table, had the same associates; they were often married from the homes and buried in the family lots of their employers.”⁶ These young women were treated as surrogate daughters “helping” within their employers’ households; they were not merely servants laboring for contracted wages.

Significantly, wage-work for single women was at this time socially approved because of the popular belief that workers avoided the sin of idleness and learned “habits of industry.”⁷ This sanction of women’s work evolved because women were needed to meet labor demand. At the same time, social approval rested on the maintenance of moral order and the continuance of quasi-parental supervision.

With the influx of Irish and German immigrants to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s, however, domestic service lost status. Native-born women feared they would lose social position if they competed with immigrant labor. Foreign-born women entered households not as surrogate daughters but as servants of inferior social rank. For these young immigrants, domestic boarding became the female equivalent of the male practice of “boarding out” with strangers before marriage. These women were continuing a long-standing European tradition in which a servant’s household membership and the implied protection of her employer sanctioned her departure from home.⁸ In Buffalo, New York, for example, newly arrived Irish and German women had by the mid-nineteenth century established a pattern of working for a few years before marriage as live-in servants with the resident native-born families of the city.⁹ As domestic service became a major job channel for immigrants, it no longer served as acceptable employment for native-born women between the stages of childhood and marriage.

MILL GIRLS

Factory work developed similarly to domestic service. A system that at one time provided paternalistic safeguards for female respectability declined as immigrants replaced native-born workers in the 1850s and 1860s. The American factory age began at the end of the eighteenth century, when New England “manufactories” hired rural women and children to doff, weave, and spin on factory premises rather than at home. Because labor was scarce, unmarried women had been used to provide an extensive and cheap labor supply for the nascent textile industry.¹⁰

Many New England factories promoted the Waltham, or boardinghouse, system. Women applying for factory work were required to sign a “regulation paper” promising regular church attendance, strict moral behavior, and residence in a corporation boardinghouse. Men also signed a regulation paper, but for them corporation boarding was not a requirement. Corporation lodgings provided a substitute family environment for young women that effectively transferred parental authority from the farm to the factory.¹¹

This moral authority was meant not only to protect the virtue of young women but also to insure factory productivity by maintaining a class of “industrious, sober, orderly, and moral” operatives. Without such a class of workers, the Lowell clergyman Henry Miles suggested in 1846, “profits would be absorbed by cases of irregularity, carelessness, and neglect; while the existence of any great moral exposure in Lowell would cut off the supply of help from the virtuous homesteads of the country.” Miles concluded that “public morals and private interests … are here seen to be linked together in an indissoluble connection. Accordingly, the sagacity of self-interest, as well as more disinterested considerations, has led to the adoption of a strict system of moral police.”¹²

Factory lodgings established to protect the workers were supervised by matrons who were frequently the widowed mothers of operatives and who were often called “mother” by the young residents. Inmates were expected to obey a plethora of rules and regulations, including a strict curfew. Labor historian Norman Ware described the “moral policing” of the Waltham system. “The operatives were told when, where, how, and for how much they must work,” he wrote, “when and where they were to eat and sleep. They were ordered to attend church, for which they had to pay pew rent. They were discharged for immoral conduct, for bad language, for disrespect, for attending dancing classes, or for any other cause that the agents or overseers thought sufficient.”¹³ Discharge was a powerful threat; in Lowell, a blacklisting code guaranteed that a worker dismissed from one mill would not be hired by another.¹⁴

At the same time, factory boardinghouses attempted to provide the amenities of the country homes left behind by the young migrants. Harriet Hanson Robinson, one of the early “factory girls,” nostalgically recalled in her autobiography the pianos, libraries, and carpeted parlors of her factory lodgings, and maintained that the operatives’ surroundings were as pure and refined as their own homes.¹⁵ The cultural activities and domestic duties carried on in the boardinghouses—reading, sewing, letter writing—secured a domestic atmosphere of gentility meant to protect both the reputations of the workers and the morality and social order of the factory villages.

This moral strategy succeeded in maintaining the respectability of the Lowell operatives. In 1844, William Scoresby, a British clergyman, visited Lowell and later reported that, among the operatives, “there was not the slightest appearance of boldness or vulgarity; on the contrary, a very becoming propriety and respectability of manner.”¹⁶ In the 1860s, the respectability of the Lowell mill girls was still legend. Asa Mercer, an imaginative Washington bachelor, traveled to Lowell to recruit women to migrate to Seattle, a city where marriageable women were scarce. He recruited more than a hundred mill workers, who became popularly known in Seattle as “Mercer girls.”¹⁷

With increasing European immigration and with growing wage and hour demands on the part of the workers, factory employment gradually lost status, paralleling the process that occurred in domestic service. Immigrants were willing to work longer hours for lower wages, the factories filled with foreign-born instead of native-born women, and women mill workers as a group lost the ideological sanctions they had gained in antebellum years.¹⁸

The era of the “factory girl” was gone by the end of the 1860s. By the 1880s, operative resentment of boardinghouse regulations and the decrease in native-bo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: The Era of the Working Girl, 1820–1920
• Part Two: The Era of the Working Mother, 1920-1980
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index