Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution.

By Thomas Dublin (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. xix plus 324pp.).

In a cautious introduction, Thomas Dublin, one of the pioneers of women's history, explores his continued fascination with some of the older questions about wage-earning women. He contrasts the Scott-Tilly thesis in 1978 (along with its American counterparts) on the continuities of European women's work as family-serving with some of the recent America scholarship that explores the worlds of working women as far more complex in structure, consciousness, and activism. His argument on the major trends in women's work supports the Scott-Tilly thesis in spite of the America experience of quick growth in industrial sectors that recruited females and the implications for New England women of agricultural depression and the sex ratio upheavals of westward migration and the Civil War

His methodology in this study draws on his well-known 1836 sample of Lowell millhands: genealogies, vital records, tax lists, city, state, and federal census returns, and probate records. His selection of samples of individual women involved in various occupations in nineteenth-century New England, Dublin believes, will provide a synthesis able to illuminate the general experience of working women in the United States in the nineteenth century and even today. This is a tall order indeed. century

Dublin has chosen 1,500 families and 1,200 individual women for his record linkage techniques. The occupational categories are outworkers (his best recent work), textile workers, shoe workers, garment workers, domestic servants, and teachers. The community focus--not a regional approach--dominates: Lowell, Lynn, Boston, and certain rural villages and towns in New Hampshire. A startling, almost blank map on page 16 indicates how much of industrial New England is left out. White native-loom women are the focus of these samples in spite of Dublin's deft treatment of the immigrant Irish in Lowell in Women at Work (1979). African-American women are included in the sample of Boston domestic servants.

These choices of occupational samples raise serious questions about his ability to generalize for New England. Where are Ardis Cameron's woolen workers of Lawrence, the clerical and saleswomen of New England cities and towns (briefly discussed for Boston but not in the sample), the typographers of Cambridge, Judith McGaw's paper workers, female workers in the company textile towns and country shoe factories of rural and small town New England, female farmers, and many others? Dublin argues that his categories as identified from the 1870 federal census (why 1870?) represent 87% of Massachusetts working women, p. 23, but the samples of outworkers and teachers are residents of New Hampshire. His conception of working women seems to assign gender to females only. He has little interest in recent gender analysis on the social constructions of womanhood, femininity, manhood and masculinity, although he discusses the categories of male, female, wage-earning women, and the family wage economy. He is comfortable "placing women at the center of analysis," p. 13.

My own familiarity with the federal census data, 1860-1910, on Lynn shoe workers makes it difficult to accept Dublin's analysis of the composition of the female workforce drawn from the state census of 1865. His expert use of record linkage amazes the most hard-working historian, but the critical questions is the choice, like occupations, of which records should be linked. The the Massachusetts census in 1865 provided unusual data that allowed Dublin to the trace shoe workers to their town of origins (much like the 1836 sample) and to their families. In 1865, however, the shoe industry of Lynn specializing in to women's shoes was undeveloped, just on the eve of serious mechanization, and to dull from lack of military orders. Only the federal censuses beginning in 1870 capture the explosive growth of post-Civil War Lynn factories that came to dominate the national market. Dublin uses aggregate data on shoe manufacturing in 1860 and in 1870, p. 124, that conceal this postwar growth. Five years matter.

The 1865 data thus creates a sample of shoe workers in resident and migrating families in a year without much economic significance. By 1870 two additional groups would dominate the post-Civil War female work force in Lynn: boarders and female heads of families--not so different from the Lowell millhands as Dublin insists. He notes the numbers of working wives reported in the state census of 1875, a period of hard times, but these numbers declined in 1880 and 1885. The analysis is further distorted in the conclusion when Dublin contrasts the shoe work force in 1900 with that of 1865. He overlooks thereby those decades during which women shoe workers organized the most militant labor tradition in New England, activism led chiefly by boarders and female heads of families. Carole Turbin found similar patterns for Troy's collarworkers.

The analysis in chapter 5 of Boston's complex economic and social structure and the role of women workers is the most convincing work in this study. Here the sample of native-loom garment workers and domestic servants is drawn from the 1860 Boston census of population. These data are augmented by linkages to 1845 and 1850 data and to the population census of 1880. Dublin also uses studies in 1869,1870,1884 as well as the manufacturing censuses of 1860-1880. A few diaries add a welcome human touch and explore in a limited sense the social relations of work. Needle-work is broken down into various categories including skilled dressmaking, and although the foreign-born are excluded from the 1860 sample, African-American women are included. This picture of an ethnic and racial hierarchy in female work better reflects the twentieth-century job market. The essentially non-industrial and low-waged character of women's work in Boston bolsters Dublin's argument that the family wage economy was progressively strengthened in the nineteenth century. Boston not Lynn is the ground on which the Scott-Tilly thesis seems most firmly anchored.

Still, Dublin's earlier work was much richer in the analyis of industrial development, the social relations of production, and the ideology of resistance in the speeches, letters, and writings of working women. The experience of industrial wage work in cotton textiles, away from family, living in a community of working women, profoundly changed their lives in ways that still speak to twentieth-century women.