From Housewife to Wage Laborer:

A Look at Women’s Work in Antebellum America

Cortnie Zachery

History 4000

Dr. Michael Gagnon

November 18, 2002

Women have played a pivotal role in the industrialization of American cities. Athens, Georgia, like other towns, utilized the cheap labor that women provided in the fields of needlework, and especially in the textile mills. Women even took up prostitution to make money. Through different professions women gained independence and earned the title of wage worker. The need for labor took women out of the privacy of her home and placed her at the heart of public life in industry and manufacturing. African American women also played a role in this transformation by earning wages through providing domestic services as white women entered into the mills and other professions of their choice. The kind of work done varied for women of different classes, races, ethnic groups, and geographical location as urbanization and industrialization called women out of the home and into the public sphere. Women also worked for different reasons, but the main reason was that the household needed the money. Though many felt this transition was in violation of societal norms and values, it cannot be denied that women’s work was crucial in the changing society and necessary for the advancement of the nation.

In traditional roles women have been relegated to being domestic caregivers. A woman’s work consisted of filling the needs of the family; hence her work was defined by these needs. Since the needs of the family varied according to its relationship to the market, her duties were contingent upon the particular work and success of her husband. Women were charged with the responsibility of raising morally upright children while also taking care of the household chores as well as overseeing the family’s finances and obligations. In the pre-industrial period, both men and women worked together in the household as well as in the fields. This was especially true in the South, for agriculture was the basis of the economy. The household was the center of production. Women as well as men derived identity, self-esteem, and a sense of order from their household places.1 Her work included the home production of food, clothing, candles, soap, household furnishings, and drink.2 If there was a shortage of labor at planting or harvest time, the women were expected to help out in any way necessary. They raised animals, tended to the garden, hoed, and performed any task that would aid her husband. The production of cloth, dairy products, and other homemade commodities provided the family with items that could be available for trade. The surplus was sold in the market for extra profit. The goods women produced were the staple of the barter markets that provided for the day-to-day needs of the entire community.3 This was the start of women’s labor earning financial means for her family.

Women did not willingly enter into the labor force. They entered it out of necessity. As the market changed from an agricultural economy to an industrious one, male farmers began to the leave the fields for work in towns and urban centers. The work changed from craft or household labor for use and distribution to waged labor within the home, which is referred to as outwork. Work also moved from wage work within the home to factory labor as mechanized production crowded out home and craft labor.4 As capital markets expanded, demanding labor in a country with political, economic, and social changes led to a climate that fostered the migration of women into waged labor within the household and in factories. There are two economic factors that underlay the change in social construction of labor and controlled the entrance of women into the waged labor force: an increased need for cash in a country suffering from specie shortages and an increased rural debt associated with land shortages in the Northeast.5

Women worked for many reasons. For the most part, the women who worked were from home situations that did not provide them with adequate means for earning their livings. They were single women usually from a household where an extra pair of hands was not needed as much as extra income. Also the invention of electricity gave women more opportunities to explore other avenues. The availability of mechanical servants such as the washing machine, vacuum cleaner, electric light, and iron made it possible for the housewife to venture into the labor market by reducing the amount of work she had to do in the house. The advent of the working woman was intimately connected with the mechanization of household work.6 Women could also choose to pay for one or more of a variety of processes and discontinue them at home. As the household carried less of the burden of production, the need for female labor in it diminished.7 Their outside work encouraged in women a sense of competence, and to some degree, of social autonomy.8 This new found freedom gave women assertiveness and independence. The transition allowed women to step out of the patriarchal hold and control her economic status. This held especially true for single women who were exiting the home. Widowhood also forced the homemaker to fend for herself and children and take on waged labor. Which household members chose to work seems to have been more a function of how the household as a whole could best produce the necessary income than of anything else. Also, as the demand for non-domestic labor increased and the need to keep the “home” intact became a major determinant of where and how women should work.9 Women usually followed their housework into the labor field as they took jobs as milliners, seamstresses, servants, dressmakers, and laboring in textile mills and factories. Some, as a last resort, turned to prostitution.

A group that employed large groups of women workers was that of seamstress. In 1833 there were about 12,000 women seamstresses in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Sewing emerged as a way to make a living in the cities of the 1820’s.10 The ready-made clothing business was dominated by women. Spinning and knitting were done by women in their homes both for income as a putting out system and for the direct use of the family.11 Being a seamstress was often the lowest paid of jobs. Most earned one and a half to two dollars per week. Though this was true, needle trades afforded women more opportunities for upward occupational mobility.12

Milliners were the most likely of the major groups of needleworkers to have been employed in shops or factories outside of the home. They were also the youngest. Most were single and ninety percent were either boarders or children living at home.13

Milliners were collectively the most autonomous and most successful businesswomen in America. There was a longevity in business, regular newspaper notices, and contacts in the London fashion world gave them public visibility and influence in an increasingly fashion conscious era.14 The Southern Banner made the latest fashions in headwear and dresses available for women to keep up with the latest trends. The growing number of southern milliners and the expanding lists of goods they carried reflected the centrality of women as both producers and consumers. They often touted their merchandise as “genteel”, “fashionable”, or “lately arrived from London.”15 Milliners were the elite women workers in America at the time.

Women also turned to prostitution as a necessary way of stretching income or making up for wages lost by unemployment. There was a high connection between low wages and prostitution. Many believed that poverty bred prostitution. It was estimated that between five and ten percent of the total female population of New York was involved in prostitution as a full time occupation during the antebellum years.16 Prostitution was a creation of the particular sexual needs of men. The insistence on women’s abstinence along with the perception of men’s sexuality being “uncontrollable” and “limitless’ sustained a lively prostitution trade in the nineteenth century. It was made attractive by the relatively high wages and glamour it offered young women.17

Black women were virtually excluded from all forms of work except for domestic services and field work. They were not permitted to work in the mills, in stores, or clerical work. For black women domestic service often seemed a lesser evil than field work, which was frequently the only other option.18 They made up the majority of servant and domestic workers. The Athenian posted many ads needing “Negro women” for work.

Any woman having a NEGRO WOMAN to

hire for the present year and who is a

good field hand and can cook and wash

will obtain a liberal price by making

application at this office.19

White women found being a servant degrading and not an option. For black women, this was the only way to support the family. They also received wages lower than those of her white counterparts. They were also treated cruelly and reduced to doing the hardest jobs and working the longest hours.

Out of all the jobs performed by women the textile mills employed the greatest number of female employees. Industrialization transformed much of women’s work into waged labor.20 Cotton and wool textiles were among the first manufacturing industries to experience rapid rates in output during the early nineteenth century. Nearly seventy percent of the adult females in the manufacturing sector labored in the textile industries.21 In Athens, factories did not imitate the larger institutions of the North. They wanted to create smaller industries. It was a concern that larger factories had a negative impact on the character of a person and weakened morals. All fourteen factories in the 1840 Georgia Federal Census shows that they followed this prescription. As with every other town, women performed most of the labor. It was reported that women comprised fifty-four percent of the textile mill work force in Athens in 1850.22 They averaged an age of just over twenty-years. Women usually participated in work in their early teen years and then fell away from factory work at the time when girls in Athens were likely to marry and raise children.23 While at least one factory owned a boarding house for its workers, it by no means compared to those made famous at Lowell. The female operatives generally boarded with some extensions of their families.24 Athens followed many of the same trends for working women that other towns during industrialization followed, but Athens chose to keep the mills at a much smaller scale.

Francis Cabot Lowell was a successful merchant who sought to recreate the large cotton mills he witnessed in Manchester and Birmingham England in New England. He set up shop along the Charles River in Waltham with his newly invented power looms. His factory was completed in 1823. The plant both spun cotton and thread and wove it into cloth by machine.25 He wanted to attract farm girls of good character so he advertised in newspapers to encourage women to come to the mills for work. This tactic was extremely successful as thousands of young women flocked to the city for work. He built dorms and rooming houses and staffed them with house mistresses of the utmost respectability. The “operatives” as they were called, worked twelve hours a day six days a week at two to four dollars per week, which was relatively high at the time. Work transformed [RZ1] from being guided by nature to being guided by a time clock and a whistle. On one hand there was independence, the ability to accumulate money, and the experience of meeting new people in a different environment, but on the flip side there was a demanding work schedule, relentless factory routine, and constant supervision that left them with no privacy. The deterioration of working conditions led mill girls to strike for higher wages and a better work environment.26 This was the type of environment that the small mills of Athens wanted to avoid.

Women in the work place was not an ideal that sat well with people. Women were to lead lives subordinate to men. When women stepped out of their private sphere, the home, it created social unrest as people tried to reinforce the place women should have in society. The ideal of a pious, moral, and nurturing woman legitimized and limited the public lives of white Southern women.27 Femaleness was identified with childishness and womanhood was linked with the metaphor of a snail. William Secker in a sermon stated: “Phideas when he drew a woman painted her fitting under a snail shell that she might imitate that little creature, that goes no further than it can carry its House upon its Head.”28 When the female entered the public sphere it was looked at as a sign of social disorder. Prostitution was the name given to female agency in the public realm. Their presence in the public was correlated with seduction and prostitution.30 In The Southern Watchman, ladies were warned of a new law preventing them from wearing certain types of clothing for fear that they would seduce a man. “Any female found guilty attempting to seduce a young man by wearing low dresses and other captivating garments of attire” would be charged with a crime. They were notified that they should be “obliged to correct their habits” pending this new law if passed.31 Appeals to women’s natural tendency to seduce, her natural inferiority, and her delicate ways were used to justify the social roles women were forced to adopt during the nineteenth century.

The belief that women belonged at home allowed employers to exploit working women by treating them as though their earnings were supplemental. So by keeping women’s pay insufficient, it kept her dependent on the male breadwinner, keeping him in control. Employers who were convinced women belonged in the home refused to train them to perform skilled jobs, promoting their poverty and offering them no choice but to remain unskilled labor.32 Men also fought for the exclusion of women from certain jobs and their confinement to others, usually low-paid, low-status jobs. This enabled men to restrict women’s opportunities and reconstruct the division of labor. Working men also felt that if they were excluded, then men’s wages would be higher.33 For one’s wife to be working meant that the husband had failed. To many men the independence of a wife who earned money was threatening. The women were to be in the private household as a protected entity. “A leadership rested in the stronger party to the contract under which the weaker party should receive affection, protection, and care.”34 Women were to behave a certain way and not stray from those roles and morals. “Light manners are in his eyes an infallible evidence of an improper character.”35 With their entrance into the workforce, women were accused of causing the breakdown of the family household and the nature of womanhood.

Women in antebellum America took on a plethora of roles beyond the ones discussed here. They constituted a major part of the workforce in the nineteenth century. Though willingly or not, women changed the societal gender roles by entering the labor market with men, which in turn shaped our economy. Without the emergence of women into the field of waged labor, industrialization would not have advanced at the same rate that it did. Women provided an alternative form of labor that proved to be a crucial component in the transforming economy of the periods before and during industrialization.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cooke, Rose Terry. “Are Women to Blame?” The Galaxy 148, no.390 (1889), in

Making of America [database on-line], accessed November 17, 2002.

Dublin, Thomas. Transforming Women’s Work. New England Lives in the Industrial

Revolution. New York: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Gagnon, Michael. Transition to An Industrial South: Athens, Georgia, 1830-1870.

Michigan: UMI Dissertation Services, 2000.

Gilje, Paul. Wages of Independence. Capitalism in the Early American Republic.

Madison: Madison House Publishers, 1997.

Goldin, Claudia and Kenneth Sokoloff. “Women, Children, and Industrialization in the

Early Republic: Evidence from the Manufacturing Censuses.” The Journal

Of Economic History 42, no. 4 (1982), in Jstor [database on-line], GALILEO;

Accessed November 17, 2002.

Harris-Kessler, Alice. Women Have Always Worked. New York: The Feminist Press,

1981.

Heilbroner, Robert. The Economic Transformation of America: 1600 to the Present.

Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1999.

Hooper, Lucy. “Are Women to Blame?” North American Review 148, no. 390 (1889),

in Making of America [database on-line]; accessed November 17, 2002.

Kierner, Cynthia. Beyond the Household. Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700-

1835. New York: Cornell University, 1998.

Licht, Walter. Industrializing America. The Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: The John’s

Hopkins University Press, 1995.

Matthaei, Julie. An Economic History of Women in America. Women’s Work, the

Sexual Division of Labor, and the Development of Capitalism. New York:

Harvester Press, 1982.

Mutari, Ellen, Heather Boushay, and William Fraher IV. Gender and Political Economy. Incorporating Diversity into Theory and Policy. New York: ME Sharpe, 1997.

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1. Alice Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked (New York: The Feminist Press, 1981), 4.

2. Julie Matthaei, An Economic History of Women in America. Women’s Work, the Sexual Division of

Labor, and the Development of Capitalism. (New York: Harvester Press, 1982), 31.

3. Ellen Mutari, Heather Boushey, and William Fraher IV, Gender and Political Economy. Incorporating Diversity into Theory and Policy (New York: ME Sharpe, 1997), 44.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 47.

6. Robert Heilbroner, The Economic Transformation of America: 1600 to the Present (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1999), 245.

7. Harris, Women Have Always Worked, 34.

8. Paul Gilje, Wages of Independence. Capitalism in the Early American Republic (Madison: Madison House Publishers, 1997), 31.

9. Harris, Women Have Always Worked, 57.

10. Ibid., 84.

11. Matthaei, An Economic History of Women in America. Women’s Work, the Sexual Division of Labor, and the Development of Capitalism, 45.

12. Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work. New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (New York: Cornell University Press, 1994), 191.

13. Ibid., 165.

14. Cynthia Kierner, Beyond the Household. Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700-1835. (New York: Cornell University, 1998), 20.

15. Ibid., 46.

16. Mutari, Boushay, Fraher, Gender and the Political Economy. Incorporating Diversity into Theory and Policy, 54.

17. Matthaei, An Economic History of Women in America. Women’s Work, the Sexual Division of Labor and the Development of Capitalism, 202.

18. Harris, Women Have Always Worked, 76.

19. The Athenian, 1850.

20. Gilje, Wages of Independence. Capitalism in the Early American Republic, 25.

21. Claudia Goldin and Kenneth Sokoloff, “Women, Children, and Industrialization in the Early Republic: Evidence from the Manufacturing Censuses.” The Journal of Economic History 42, no.4 (1982): 741-774.

22. Michael Gagnon, Transition to An Industrial South: Athens, Georgia, 1830-1870 (Michigan: UMI Dissertation Services, 2000), 100.

23. Ibid., 102.

24. Ibid., 106.

25. Heilbroner, The Economic Transformation of America: 1600 to the Present, 107.

26. Ibid., 108-110.

27. Kierner, Beyond the Household. Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700-1835, 215.

28. Matthaei, An Economic History of Women in America. Women’s Work, the Sexual Division of Labor, and the Development of Capitalism, 49.

29. Gilje, Wages of Independence. Capitalism in the Early American Republic, 37.

30. Southern Watchman, 21 February 1856.

31. Harris, Women Have Always Worked, 64.

32. Ibid., 64.

33. Lucy Hooper, “American Women Abroad.” The Galaxy 21, no.6 (1876): 818-822.

34. Rose Terry Cooke, “Are Women to Blame?” The North American Review 148, no. 390 (1889): 626-630.

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