Toil and Tabulation: Studying Working Women in Nineteenth-Century New England

For fifteen years, Thomas Dublin’s first book — Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 — has stood as a model of scholarship in American social and labor history. Dublin has now expanded his geographical and chronological scope, combined his meticulous and compendious research with rigorous statistical analysis, and produced a comprehensive study of working women throughout nineteenth-century New England. This work should reaffirm Dublin’s standing as one of the premier practitioners of quantitative social history in the United States.

Dublin’s ambitious and far-reaching investigation into the lives of literally thousands of workingwomen seeks to answer “a series of questions that remain unanswered despite the increasing interest in women’s wage labor in recent years: Who worked for wages? From what backgrounds did working-women come? How did women’s paid employment fit within the larger pattern of the female life cycle? How did patterns of female employment change during the nineteenth century? And how did changes in women’s wage work affect women’s positions and power relations within their families?” (pp. 14–15). Dublin begins his quest for understanding women’s integration into industrial capitalism by exploring the infusion of market forces into rural households through the outwork system. He then traces the growing number of full-time female wage laborers in the textile mills of antebellum Lowell, the shoe factories of mid-century Lynn, the garrets and homes of Boston in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the one-room schoolhouses of New Hampshire.

Dublin’s foray into the surprisingly complex world of outwork and market exchange in small New Hampshire towns reveals the ironic ways in which wage work done at home both reinforced the traditional patriarchal farm family economy, and prepared the way for full-time wage workers — operating independently or pooling resources within family wage economies — to displace those earlier agricultural arrangements. Outwork was especially appealing to rural families of the middling sort at the stage in their collective lifecycle when their daughters were old enough to work but too young to marry. Farm families could shift a modest amount of their daughters’ human capital toward weaving or hat braiding, without getting so dependent on outside sources of income that they would fall under the complete control of merchants and middlemen. Income from outwork could supplement rural families’ agricultural earnings, and allow them to remain on their smaller landholdings in the face of competition from more productive midwestern farmers; but outwork was rarely the major source of income for farm families saving them from destitution.

Young farm women often welcomed the opportunity to engage in outwork because the cloth and hats they produced were a crucial source of cash and credit for them, particularly if they could maintain their own store accounts and thus edge closer to some degree of social and economic independence. But these women also found themselves increasingly enmeshed, as individual economic actors, in a system where storekeepers and merchants made a profit from the final product of the outworkers’ labors and from the purchases made with the store credits. Thus, the quest for self-sufficiency came with a price tag attached, and subtle nonpecuniary costs which could actually erode the ideal of independence, as farm families became linked increasingly with the growing commercial markets of antebellum New England.

Dublin argues that, once in this world of wage work and store credits, it was not a long way (physically or psychologically) from hat braiding on a New Hampshire farmstead to the more steady cash payments and the brightly lit shop windows of Lowell. His chapter, “Lowell Millhands,” is both a precis and an extension of his previous book on the subject. Dublin traces a sample of operatives, larger than his previous data set, back to their home-towns in New Hampshire. He notes that crowded farmhouses and the desire to save for...