Ten Hours' Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England.

Ten Hours' Labor is a nuanced account of the ways that religion and reform shaped the labor movement in early nineteenth-century New England. Using labor and temperance journals, and to a lesser extent, letters and diaries, Teresa Anne Murphy argues that religion gave working people an avenue for protesting against their middle-class employers. In many ways, employers and workers shared a common culture; they were linked together by their concern with religion, morality, and temperance. At the same time, however, Murphy emphasizes that "Religion and reform were shared languages rather than shared ideologies" (6). Indeed, the story that she tells is one of conflict, not consensus. Employers and workers clashed with one another, and even within the labor movement, men and women struggled for control. In one of the most important insights of this book, Murphy argues that gender as well as class shaped attitudes toward religion and reform.

Murphy begins her book by describing the paternalism of New England's factory owners and merchants. In New England, unlike other regions of the country, manufacturers represented an industrial elite who possessed enormous power over the people who lived in their communities. Many of these men wanted to recapture traditional "community values" in their mill villages, viewing themselves as the guardians of a morally dependent workforce.

The movement for a ten hour day was an attack against this paternalism. Using fascinating evidence, Murphy traces how workers demanded greater control over their education, morality, and religion. Educationally, they complained that lyceums and lectures were middle-class institutions that preserved hierarchy and deference. And morally, they attacked middle-class pretensions to piety and respectability. Indeed, they claimed that workers--not employers--were the true guardians of morality in American culture. The main requirement for membership in the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics, and other Workingmen was a good moral character.

Ironically, workingmen were guilty of their own brand of paternalism; they viewed women and children as "dependent workers" who needed male protection. Women as well as men were organizing in the 1830s, but they were more concerned with obtaining higher wages than shorter working hours. Male workers, however, seemed to have little sympathy for their complaints. They believed that women belonged in the home, not the workplace, and they refused to accept them as equal partners in the emerging labor movement.

Employers and workers fought over the meaning of religion as well as morality and education. Echoing the arguments of historian Paul Johnson, Murphy claims that "Protestantism was a crucial component in legitimizing the social relations of wage labor" (82). Somewhat tentatively, however, she also suggests that workers were able to transform evangelical religion into a tool for challenging middle-class authority. During revivals, for example, factories virtually ground to a halt while workers attended camp meetings. Religion could be used to support factory life, but it could also compete with factory discipline. Protestantism was clearly a vital part of working-class life, a "contested terrain" where workers and employers struggled for control. Importantly, however, male factory workers were always ambivalent about religion because they perceived it as a threat to their family authority. Evangelicalism allowed workers to challenge their employers, but it also enabled women to proclaim their spiritual independence from fathers and husbands.

The Washingtonian temperance movement of the 1840s allowed men to create a more masculine "religion" where they could reassert their moral authority within the family. All the Washingtonian leaders were reformed drunkards, and the movement was focused on rehabilitating male household heads. In contrast to the labor activists of the 1830s, the Washingtonians defined morality as a private, personal concept rather than a more public, secular one. Because of their concern with the "feminine" sphere of home and spirituality, they paved the way for women's involvement in the labor movement during the 1840s.

The labor movement of the 1840s was more inclusive than it had been during the 1830s, linking men and women together in a petitioning campaign for a ten-hour day. Male workers still assumed a paternalistic stance toward their female co-workers, but women began taking a more assertive role in the movement. In Lowell, for example, women spoke publicly at the meetings of the New England Workingmen's Association. They emphasized their domesticity, but they used the middle-class language of female morality to assert their equal rights as workers. Indeed, the women of Lowell even challenged traditional gender roles by refusing to accept the traditional boundaries of separate spheres.

This book is a valuable contribution to both women's history and labor history. Murphy has a keen sense of the differences which divided working men from working women and laborers from employers. Her treatment of evangelical religion, however, stands out as the weak spot in an otherwise solid book. First, Murphy seems surprisingly unaware of recent scholarship in American religious history; she painstakingly cites the works of labor historians, but virtually ignores recent debates about nineteenth-century religion. Second--and even more troubling--Murphy's attempts to appear balanced often make her sound tentative and even uncertain about what she is arguing. For example, even though she claims that religion empowered women to speak publicly and sometimes even undermined factory discipline, she repeatedly denies that evangelicalism posed a real threat to the status quo. In one passage she writes, "It is worth remembering that the challenge of popular religion was primarily a spiritual one whose struggle was to some extent predicated on an acceptance of already-existing social and economic relationships, rather than an explicit attempt to change them" (88). Given the main thrust of Murphy's argument, such disclaimers are puzzling and distracting. Certainly, Protestantism has often been used to serve conservative purposes, but as Murphy herself illustrates, it also has a more egalitarian potential.

Despite these criticisms, this is an important and valuable book which should have a major influence on future work in labor and women's history. By examining the role of gender as well as class, Murphy adds significantly to our understanding of the early labor movement in New England.

Catherine A. Brekus University of Chicago Divinity School