Description
Book SynopsisMary H. Blewett''s award-winning look at the men and women working in the shoe factories of Lynn, Massachusetts, explores the sexual division of labor and gender relationships in the workplace.
Trade ReviewWinner of the 1989 Herbert G. Gutman Award, 1989. Winner of the New England Historical Association Book Award, 1989. Co-winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association, 1989.
"Blewett challenges historians to incorporate gender analysis and a tradition of working women's protest into the history of the American labor movement."--
Georgia Historical Quarterly"[Blewett's] detailed reconstruction of feminist perspectives in shoeworker protest and the divisions created by the competing loyalties to sisterhood and to working-class families is among the best available . . . With works like this, it should be impossible to write about the American working class without including women."--
Historical Journal of Massachusetts"A highly stimulating and rewarding book."--
Journal of Interdisciplinary HistoryTable of ContentsAcknowledgments xi
Introduction xiii
CHAPTER ONE Origins of the Sexual Division of Labor, 1750-1810 3
CHAPTER TWO The Rise of Early Labor Protest, 1810-37 20
CHAPTER THREE The Social Relations of Production in the Rural Outwork System, 1837-45 44
CHAPTER FOUR Women and the Artisan Tradition 68
CHAPTER FIVE The Early Factory System and the New England Shoe Strike of 1860 97
CHAPTER SIX Crispin Protest in the Post-Civil War Shoe Factory 142
CHAPTER SEVEN Hard Times and Equal Rights, 1873-80 191
CHAPTER EIGHT New England Shoeworkers and the Knights of Labor 221
CHAPTER NINE Militancy and Disintegration, 1892-1910 267
Conclusion 320
APPENDIX A The Accounts of Charles Fisher, 1837, and William Peabody, 1835 326
APPENDIX B The U.S. Census of Population: Lynn, Haverhill, and Marblehead, 1860; Lynn, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910 329
Abbreviations 353
Notes 355
Bibliography of Primary and Unpublished Sources 425
Index 431
