Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920 by Lara Vapnek (review)

Building on women’s labor history and critically engaging with it, Lara Vapnek has produced a fascinating study that will enlarge her readers’ understandings of both the labor reform and woman suffrage movements in post–Civil War American history. Using the biographies of middle-class reformers and working-class labor-reform leaders, the author argues that white, working-class women rejected domestic service as an occupation that failed to give women independence and respect. Indeed, Vapnek asserts that a new type of female independence emerged in this era that rejected the notion of women as dependents and insisted on the recognition of working women as “breadwinners.” In various ways, the domestic realm was severed from other types of women’s work and denied the status given to factory, retail, and office work. Domestic work also became associated with immigrant and, eventually, African American workers and thus even more devalued compared to the occupations filled by single, white, working-class women.

An introduction and five chapters represent five case studies that provide a chronologically constructed narrative stretching from the mid-nineteenth century to 1920. Beginning with Jennie Collins, who was involved with labor reform and specifically the Boston Working Women’s League and Aurora Phelps, who advocated free land to women, chapter 1 delves into the tensions among middle-class reformers who wanted to turn industrial women into domestics to improve the lot of women wage earners. On the contrary, Collins and the short-lived League envisioned women establishing their own employment agencies. Collins’s book, Nature’s Aristocracy (1871), took a working-class perspective on women’s rights. Phelps, who also helped found the League, argued that the solution to women’s independence was to give them land (garden homesteads) instead of encouraging them to migrate westward in search of opportunities. Although the language of wage slavery was used to critique labor conditions for working women in the 1860s and 1870s, Vapnek observes that the language essentially identified the constituency as white.

Collins was an early supporter of state labor statistics, and chapter 2 comments extensively on four separate investigations of women’s work between 1870 and 1890. These were decades in which the number of working women doubled, but fewer and fewer of them were employed in domestic service. Working-class organizations also began clamoring for labor statistics as a means of documenting the problems of wages and conditions, especially for women and children. Carroll D. Wright’s famous 1884 study, The Working Girls of Boston, defined categories of working women that ignored domestic service entirely as well as prostitutes and African American women. According to Vapnek, the elimination of domestics underlined the moral value Wright assigned to women’s unpaid domestic labor in the home. This chapter also covers Leonora Barry’s investigations for the Knights of Labor and her advocacy of state investigations of labor conditions. Vapnek credits Barry with early initiation of a discussion of sexual harassment and notes her commitment to full political rights as a precondition for women’s economic equality. Helen Campbell’s 1886 Prisoners of Poverty proposed a consumers’ movement to support much-needed reforms in women’s working conditions while at the same time helping to defuse class tensions. The final investigation, by undercover female reporter Nell Cusack in Chicago, involved a monthlong study of various kinds of women’s work, from sewing and pressing ties to selling gloves and sorting feathers. The resulting sensationalist series exposed the lot of women workers as “City Slave Girls,” an epithet that invoked Southern slavery while ignoring the conditions of black women who were at the time a tiny minority in Chicago. The series also ignored domestic service, contributing to the construction of working women as white industrial or retail employees. Taken together, these four investigations reveal the tensions surrounding working women and the competing views of middle-class protectionism versus working-class struggles for independence.

Chapter 3 uses the life...