By Allen C. Guelzo, Princeton University
One of the great innovations of the factory system in the Industrial Revolution was the transformation of the worker from being a worker into being simply an operative. The nature of labor in the factory posed another kind of stress, or shall we say temptation, on the new relations of men and women. In fact, all of these stresses were developments that republican women had not quite bargained for when they became part of a republican system.
The Position of Women
From time out of mind in European society, men had been assigned the primary role of providers and leaders, while the combined risks and necessities of biological reproduction limited the mobility of women, and limited them with but few exceptions to the subordinate roles of giving supporting care to children, and performing gender-based women’s work in agriculture—like spinning, carding, butter making, sewing, making and mending clothes, storing and preparing food, making soap and candles, household cleaning, etc. Above all, women were expected to yield to the direction and the authority of men.
In America, however, recreating these ancient patterns of subordination, just like the recreation of all the other patterns of European social organization, was neither easy nor straightforward. The unending shortage of labor in the American colonies meant that women were able to move into the operation of business and service enterprises that before had been the preserve of male heads of households. Marriage was understood to be a union of companions, a union of equals—each complementing each other in the private world of the family.
How Women Became the Principal Workforce
Post the Industrial Revolution, labor in the factories meant that the muscular strength, which biology had conferred on the human male, was no longer an unconditional necessity for production. What was needed to tend the spinning and carding machines of the factories was quickness of hand and eye. Furthermore, the operative of a machine was valued not so much for strength as for quickness, suppleness, and liveliness, and women could supply those qualities in the factory as easily as men. What was more, they could do it more cheaply, too.
Great textile mills sprang up along the rivers and creeks of southeastern Pennsylvania and western and central Massachusetts. And these mills turned to young, unmarried women as their principal workforce, to turn out in vast quantities the textile of goods their mothers had spun, carded, and sewn by hand at home. In 1810, 24 out of every 25 yards of wool produced in the United States was produced in the home. By 1839, that proportion of had fallen to only half, and home-produced woollens, spun and knitted by women, were now dismissed as homespun.
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Women: The Principal Consumers
Among these stresses, as the demands of the factory system required ever higher levels of education, state legislators created, and then mandated, public school systems that turned over the responsibility for child training from parents to trained professionals, that is teachers. This was a development at which women’s rights activists, such as Susan B. Anthony, erupted in frustration at age 17 “What an absurd notion, that women have not intellectual and moral faculties sufficient for anything else but domestic concerns.”
The productive tasks that had once constituted women’s work were being abolished by the market. In the absence of any kind of meaningful production, marriage easily came to seem like a domestic cage in which women were expected to define themselves not as their mothers had—by the production for the household—but by dress, by dance, by useless self-admiration. In other words, women were coming to be defined, and were defining themselves, as consumers.
The Seneca Falls Convention
Women like Susan Anthony gave vent to their rage over this development in organization, because they saw that by this time the only antidote to economic marginalization was political action.
In July 1848, a group of 200 women—led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott—organized a women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York. The Declaration of Sentiments, which the Seneca Falls convention adopted, announced that:
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.
A Demand for the Right to Vote
They concluded by demanding what women in America had not had since 1807, and that was the right to vote. Two years later, they organized a National Women’s Rights Convention, which denied the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion what is and what is not their proper sphere, that the proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest to which they are able to attain.
However, the obsession with reform at various levels drew praise from some, but severe criticism from many others—both Americans and foreign observers—who equated the reform frenzies with the influence of democracy.
Common Questions about the Factory System and the Economic Marginalization of Women
The mills turned to young, unmarried women as their principal workforce, to turn out in vast quantities the textile of goods their mothers had spun, carded, and sewn by hand at home.
As the demands of the factory system required ever higher levels of education, state legislators created and then mandated public school systems that turned over the responsibility for child training from parents to trained professionals, teachers.
In America, recreating the ancient patterns of subordination, just like the recreation of all the other patterns of European social organization, was not easy. The unending shortage of labor in the American colonies meant that women were able to move into the operation of business and service enterprises that before had been the preserve of male heads of households.
