Working Women, Literary Ladies: The Industrial Revolution and Female Aspiration (review)

In Working Women, Literary Ladies, Sylvia Jenkins Cook creates an impressive historical narrative of an intellectual phenomenon among nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century working-class women, who transgressed class and gender boundaries to pursue the Romantic ideal of a "life of the mind" (3). The book traces Lowell, Massachusetts, women workers' earliest efforts to represent themselves imaginatively in operative magazines of the 1840s, and it continues through the first wave of immigrant women writers in New York at the turn of the twentieth century. Cook links these women by their shared sense of individual worth and their commitment to self-culture through reading and producing literature. Cook's volume contributes to the critical attention recently devoted to class in American literature, in dialogue with such scholars as Amy Schrager Lang and Laura Hapke. Much critical attention to working-class literature and labor organization focuses on men; however, Cook foregrounds working-class women's writing, as they voice their own concerns and imagine others' perspectives, as well as working women's literary portrayals by male and female middle-class authors.

Cook draws parallels between working-class women and the bourgeois women writers who attempted to speak on their behalf, identifying their shared gender concerns and literary aspirations. Her study begins with close readings of two understudied novels about factory women by middle-class female authors: Sarah Savage's The Factory Girl and Catharine Williams's Fall River: An Authentic Narrative. Both novels address public fears about women's ability to remain virtuous outside of the conventional family, and their literate heroines anticipate the intellectual ambitions factory women would soon voice more acutely for themselves. While the protagonist of The Factory Girl extends self-sacrifice into the industrial realm by teaching a Sunday school to factory children, the heroine of Fall River is a fallen woman who succumbs to the temptations of the new mercantile economy by shoplifting and, ultimately, is seduced. The primary villain of Fall River is the controversial new Methodist revivalism, which replaced the strict predestination of Calvinism with the possibility of universal salvation through a benevolent deity and thus compromised social stability. The middle-class female industrial chroniclers Cook addresses in a later chapter—Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Louisa May Alcott—would restore religion's role as social ballast, relying on a "Christian eschatology as the lingua franca for bridging the class barrier"; these later writers subordinate class inequality to gender commonalities and millenarian promises (212). Cook also identifies a transition toward formal realism in the depictions of women workers by Davis, Phelps, and Alcott, comparing their texts to the allegorical and exaggerated treatment of working-class women in novels by romantic male authors: Sylvester Judd, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.

"Ideal Mill Girls," a discussion of the Lowell Offering, documents operative writers' defenses of their femininity and morality while it also details their engagement in debates about rapid industrialization and evolving literary form. Writers' assertions of piety and self-sacrifice, aligned with traditional notions of appropriate womanly behavior, evoked the backlash of being closely allied with factory owners' messages and goals. Yet writers also dealt with contradictions, such as the owner-mandated church attendance for which the operatives had to pay (a week's wages for a year's pew subscription); likewise, the religious admonition against materialism and greed that the women heard was situated in the midst of an emergent mercantile economy that courted female operatives for their new buying power. Scholars' interpretations of these magazines have taken widely oppositional stances about them. They have presented the writings in operative magazines either as militant and nonliterary (Voice of Industry) or as nonmilitant and bourgeois, attempting to be literary yet ultimately imitative and conventional (Lowell Offering). However, Cook argues that the Lowell Offering actually "begin[s] the more radical process of developing imaginative literary modes that anticipate later realism" (46). Mill worker and Offering editor Harriet Farley, in particular...