No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism

13. Staking Claims to Independence

During the Gilded Age and Progressive era, white, working-class women in the nation’s industrializing cities launched a series of campaigns to gain economic as well as political equality. Individually and collectively, they challenged long-held assumptions about women’s dependence on men as inaccurate and damaging to the growing numbers of women who worked for wages in order to support themselves and their families. Some of these women organized to gain the same benefits being won by organized working men: shorter hours, higher wages, and greater respect at work. In addition, white, working-class women rejected their relegation to jobs as domestic servants and demanded access to a broader range of occupations. Defining themselves as breadwinners, they challenged their second-class status in the labor market and the polity, making radical new claims for female independence. The intertwined stories of Jennie Collins, Aurora Phelps, and the Boston Working Women’s League illuminate the development of northern, white, working-class women’s distinctive political ideology, revealing coalitions and conflicts with laboring men and with educated, affluent women eager to expand their social influence. Collins, Phelps, and the wage-earning women who joined them in the Boston Working Women’s League seized on the discrepancies between a national political ideology promising freedom and equality to all people and the circumstances of their own lives. Their petitions and public statements explained that women who had no choice but to work as domestic servants or underpaid needleworkers could hardly be considered “free.” Asserting their own entitlement to freedom, these women Staking Claims to Independence Jennie Collins, Aurora Phelps, and the Boston Working Women’s League, 1865–1877 LARA VAPNEK 305 13 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb sought to increase their independence by joining labor organizations, demanding land, and calling for full rights of citizenship. Like many working-class women, Jennie Collins learned about the high costs of women’s second-class status firsthand. Collins began working in a textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1842, at age fourteen. Orphaned as a young child, she had been raised by her Quaker grandmother, who provided her with an unusual degree of liberty but only a limited education and no property. Like most girls, Collins must have learned basic domestic skills such as sewing and cooking with the expectation that she would marry and have a family of her own. When family support failed, however, Collins’s domestic training had little market value. Like many girls and young women in New England, she made her way to the mills to take a position as a machine operative.1 When she reached Lawrence, Collins quickly realized that the popular sentimental view of young, white women stopped at the factory gate. She later described the typical experiences of a young woman entering the mill. In seeking out the employment agent, she was “treated neither with politeness nor consideration.” She faced him on her own and made “her own bargain with him.” Earning “her own money,” she was left to “hire her own board, buy her own clothes.” She received no deference as a woman, and she knew that she “must work as hard and do her task as well as a man, or . . . be discharged, without ceremony or apology.” Indeed, her sex entailed a burden, rather than a privilege; Collins earned only half of a man’s wages and had none of his “perquisites.” She could never become eligible for a skilled position because these were reserved for men.2 Collins found herself outside the bounds of family and domesticity, yet compromised in her ability to negotiate the labor market. As a young woman “cast on her own resources,” Collins found herself in a situation that anticipated that of hundreds and thousands of northern women forced to become self-supporting after the Civil War. Not only did many women lose sons, husbands, fathers, brothers, and prospects for marriage , but the intensification of industrialization after the war strained the viability of family farms and artisan workshops, increasing pressure on working -class daughters and wives to earn money. By the early 1870s, daughters of farmers and craftsmen flooded into the labor force, joining orphaned girls and widowed mothers seeking employment in order to contribute to the family economy or to support themselves if their families had dissolved. LARA VAPNEK 306 Finding few opportunities in the countryside, or in the prospect of westward migration, these women...