A more recent take on Gilman's Herland: An Opening Analysis

     Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopia, Herland, is simultaneously an exploration of space through the complex, planned interactions between the land, a variety of social institutions, and the community of women who created and live within those institutional structures, and an exploration of temporality, producing a narrative dependent on the imagined shift from the primitive to the modern. The narrative explores this interaction through the pedagogical process of the society as it tries to bring the three outsiders, the three male explorers who play the role of the protagonists, into the new rationalized structures of social reproduction. One of the didactic passages near the end of the first part of the narrative offers a useful entrance into Gilman’s political project. As they are about to be released into the general society of Herland, the men are offered an explanation for their imprisonment, as well as the central organizing logic of the society. When the most patriarchal of the three protagonists, Terry, asks if their imprisonment was imposed because they feared the men, the response is immediate.

    “Oh no,” she said quickly, in real surprise. “The danger is quite the other way. They might hurt you. If, by any accident, you did harm any one of us, you would have to face a million mothers.”

     He looked so amazed and outraged that Jeff and I laughed out right, but she went on gently.

     “I do not think you quite understand yet. You are but men, three men, in a country where the whole population are mothers—or are going to be. Motherhood means to us something which I cannot yet discover in any of the countries of which you tell us. You have spoken”—she turned to Jeff, “of Human Brotherhood as a great idea among you, but even that I judge is far from a practical expression?”

     Jeff nodded rather sadly. “Very far—“ he said.

     “Here we have Human Motherhood—in full working use,” she went on. “Nothing else except the literal sisterhood of our origin, and the far higher and deeper union of our social growth.

     “The children of this country are the one center and focus of all our thoughts. Every step of our advance is always considered in its effect on them—on the race. You see, we are Mothers,” she repeated, as if in that she had said it all.” (Gilman 67)

     At the center of the narrative, shaping its conception of space, time and institutions, is the concept of motherhood. Operating in a multiplicity of modalities, motherhood simultaneously operates as a social institution, an ideological formation creating bonds of social solidarity, legitimating and enacting forms of collective violence, and as the means of enacting a progressive and teleological political project. Motherhood both constitutes and is constituted by the biopolitical category of population, placing the tending and caring for biological life at the center of its project. At the most immediate level, the imaginary of Gilman’s Herland has an uncanny resonance with what Betty Friedan would call ‘the feminine mystique’ some 47 years later. Motherhood is not only the destiny of the women of Herland, but it also plays a central role constructing the social bonds of the community. The raising of children defines the alpha and omega of the society, defining its institutions and political projects. Motherhood simultaneously individuates potential mothers based on their fitness, while at the same time, produces a grid of intelligibility for the community of women as a whole. Rather than offering an uncanny precursor to the feminist projects of the 1960’s and 1970’s, Gilman’s narrative gestures towards the very institutional formations of femininity and sexuality that those movements were protesting.

     But beyond that, the speech also insists on the social reproductive function of the institution. Motherhood links to the distant origins of the nation to the present, or as Moadine puts it, Motherhood creates a link “to the literal sisterhood of our origin, and the far higher and deeper union of our social growth.” The link from an original sorority of the past provides a sense of connection to the contemporary political projects of the community. Those projects can only be understood in that context. Turning to the spacial metaphors of the quote, the ‘height’ of the social accomplishments of the community of women or the depth of commitment to that community is only measurable from the standpoint of the origin of the community. Or to translate this into the language of Benedict Anderson, motherhood creates the sense of continuity that allows for the formation of the imagined community of the nation. More notably, we can already see two of the significant conditions of the nationalist project, the sense of generational continuity and an open-ended sense of progressive time, which Anderson codified as empty, homogenous time of the nation, following the critical work of Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” The domestic sphere becomes the prime locus for shaping and reforming the nationalist project, the creation of new form of the national-popular. This nationalist dimension needs to be understood within the context of her involvement with the Nationalist political project created by utopian novelist and political theorist, Edward Bellamy. Responding to the radical shifts in the economic structures of post-bellum United States, particularly the increased class stratification and struggle created by the increased industrialization of the country after the war, Bellamy imagines a potential future that neutralizes those conflicts through the rationalization of production and consumption. Gilman begins her political activism within this movement, and her earliest publications are contained in the movement’s publications. While Gilman never abandons the basic framework of Bellamy’s analysis, despite her engagement with a multiplicity of movements, she focuses her intellectual work on the sex roles of the society, adding a libidinal and racial economy to the politics of consumption and production explored by Bellamy. In effect, Gilman incorporates a reform Darwinist analysis of sex roles into Bellamy’s reform program, and perhaps more significantly, shits it into the temporality of a biological, social-historical temporality.

     In effect, motherhood plays the role of a central regulatory mechanism of the society, organizing every aspect of its collective existence towards the rational needs of its evolutionary development and reproduction. We’re offered the secret code that links the cultivation of biological life to a project of political economy. The institution of motherhood instantly rationalizes the latter in service of the teleological drive of the former. Moreover, the sociological significance of these mechanisms is explored through the use of a utopian narrative, and indeed a narrative driven in part by very conventional romantic narrative structures, as critic Kathleen Margaret Lant points out in her reading of the text, ‘The Rape of the Text: Charlotte Perkins Violation of Herland.’ In her biographical project on Gilman, Judith A. Allen argues for a privileging of her sociological works, effectively reading her fictional works as an extension of that work. Indeed, rather than challenging the bulk literary criticism of this process of reading comes close to defining the field of Gilman criticism, both her critics and her apologists. The most notable revisionist accounts of Gilman, Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization and Louise Michele Newman’s White Women’s Rights focus on her sociological work to the exclusion of her domestic and utopian fiction. Alys Weinbaum’s Wayward Reproductions is a notable exception, reading the racism of Gilman’s sociological work into her utopian fiction, although this engagement was driven less by a genre analysis than an attempt to respond to apologists attempt to place a firewall between her fiction and the problematic racial politics found in her sociology.

      I want to reverse that formula. Rather than reading Gilman’s fictional works, notably her utopian fiction of the Forerunner period as extensions of political sociological project, Gilman’s sociological work can be read as offering the intellectual infrastructure for a an evolutionary and progressive political project that finds its telos in the generic form of the utopia. We might take Gilman’s effort as a remarkable modeling exercise, akin to the architectural efforts on the part of Jeremy Bentham in his conceptualization of the panopticon, the idealized disciplinary model of the prison designed to reform the prisoner through the interiorization of the gaze of the guard. However, Gilman’s modeling, or perhaps more accurately, mapping doesn’t operate on the terrain of architecture. Instead, it finds its fullest form in the topography and temporality of the utopian and science fictional form. Rather than simply offering a vehicle for a set of sociological commentaries, the formal qualities of the utopia shape Gilman’s political project. Gilman implicitly sought to purify the empty homogenous time of the nation from its various impurities, placing the temporal marker of the primitive on them. Gilman re-imagines the nation through the regimes of consumption imagined by Bellamy, but with an emphasis on the domestic economy of the household. The sexual division of the household becomes the central obstacle to evolutionary progress of the race. Gilman’s Lamarckian framework simultaneously intensely biologists the sexual economy of the household and argues that this biological framework is malleable through social engineering. The utopian form binds these various elements into a coherent narrative, posing futurity as a critique and a foundational narrative of a future where the crisis is neutralized, and a new social symbolic is reestablished. This emphasis on futurity also places Gilman’s text on the borderline of a transition from the conventions of the classical utopian tradition to science fictional generic forms.

     Engaging in a generic analysis of Gilman’s work is an interesting exercise. Most analysis of her work is focused either on its position in the history of the feminist movement, or its political content in the form of its impact on social formations or its proposed political projects, leaving the question of how its formal qualities shape that work unanswered. Posing that very question strikes me as a significant one in understanding Gilman’s work because of the profound impact that popular generic forms had on the ways that Gilman framed and shaped her political project. Her engagement with utopian and domestic fiction was continually influenced by reform Darwinism producing an almost science fictional focus on the future. However, rather than seeing generic form as a simple vehicle for her scientific sociological analysis, that scientific discourse was constantly modified in order to fit generic convention. Gilman was not only a star on the popular lecture circuit, but a writer for popular magazines, including her own publication, The Forerunner, and a producer of domestic and utopian fiction, as well as mystery novels. She wrote short articles for Woman’s Journal, Saturday Evening Post, as well as traditional women’s magazines such as McCall’s and Good Housekeeping. This translates into her engagement with those forms throughout her work, which is defined by both the domestic narrative as well as the narrative utopian form. The present is always doubly haunted, by the primitive that continues to dwell in the repressive structure of its social institutions, and a progressive futurity that continually marks those limitations. This temporal framework not only dominates the logic of her fictional narratives, but provides an implicit temporal and therefore narratological to the non-fictional work.    
 
   At first glance, Gilman’s Herland reads like a conventional utopian narrative. The story is set in the present of its production, and operates within the traditional comparative narrative structure of earlier utopias, drawing from and satirizing the conventions of travel and exploration narratives. Susan Gubar, for instance, reads Herland in contrast to the patriarchal adventure narratives of H. Rider Haggard, most notably, She. The narrative also could be considered a lost race story, offering the novum or novelty of a lost racial history as a form of estrangement. It operates in that liminal space that Louis Marin argues defines the historical preconditions of the utopian narrative, despite the fact that the narrative falls out of the historical period that Marin argues operates as the horizon of the genre. Although there are some limitations to placing Herland, and the work of Gilman squarely within the traditional utopian form, engaging with the form allows for a productive understanding of the ideological horizons of the novel, along with its spatio-temporal logic. In the end, the novel ends up looking a lot more like traditional science fiction through its engagement with evolutionary biology in the form of a reform Darwinism in conversation with Social Darwinism and eugenics, but that shift to science fiction can only be understood through an engagement with the utopian form.

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Interlude (6): An Interview with Richard Lewontin

An interesting interview with scientist and activist Richard Lewontin. Worth a glance. I recommend his Biology as Ideology and Not In Our Genes, which is a collaboration with a number of other politically radical scientists.

Part Two: Critique of Take Back UCI (self-critique)

      I'm now back from the Labor Notes conference, and have caught up on the sleep that I missed out on due to some enthusiastic grad student organizers from University of Wisconsin-Madison (never trust a Wisconsin grad student when he says he has 'a little bit of whiskey up in his hotel room.'  Their idea of 'a little bit' is far different than ours.)  I'm going to produce a bit of a write up of the conference later in the week, but I want to complete my thoughts on the (self) critique of Take Back UCI that I began on Thursday.  That initial comment got quite a bit of reads, but not much in the way of responses.  Hopefully, folks can begin a sort of conversation with the continuation of the piece here.  One last note, before I begin, my initial response got a fairly snarky and thoughtless response from Dmitriy Kunitskiy, host of the fairly uninteresting KUCI show, Countdown.  I'd like to distinguish my problems with the organization from his, which seem to be focused on both his fear of social justice movements and genuinely public spaces.  In any case, here is the second part of this article.

4. A lack of independent spaces for undergraduates:  This issue is a little more abstract than some of the other issues that I brought up in the first section of the article, but I think that it is equally significant.  One of the things that has struck me in the years that I have been at the University of California-Irvine is that there isn't a lot of spaces that are controlled by students.  The one exception might be the Cross-Cultural Center, but there seems to be a lot of admin control over that space, particularly manipulating the politics of that space through a lot of games around funding.  I don't want to dismiss the many great folks who do work there or some of the interesting projects, either, but it isn't independent space.  I'm used to the broader freedoms that we had at the university of minnesota, where the progressive student organization had a permanent office in the student center.  This was a space that we controlled with a very minimal rent that was paid for through the occasional benefit show at the whole (we once had a show where both Lifter Puller and Dillinger 4 played).  This gave us a place to meet, hang out, store stuff, talk, and think things through.   A number of folks are proposing a sort of independent, radical student library.  I think that this would really help activism a lot in Irvine if it was a genuinely independent undergrad space.

5. Media: Don't get me wrong.  There are a lot of limitations within this category that don't have anything to do with us.  It's not really surprising that we're not getting good coverage from the Orange County Register and the corporate media, but there is a lot of independent alternatives even in our area.  We have a number of potential contacts within KUCI, which we haven't taken as much advantage of as before.  We're not going to get a reasonable hearing from Countdown, but there are a number of interesting left wing folks on the station.  In addition, the OC Weekly has sympathetic folks, and there is the LA Pacifica station, which has expressed interest in us as well.  We've left press releases and connections to the last minute and haven't done the follow through on those connections, either.  Furthermore, we have lacked the independent media production that we have seen in other parts of the UC system.  Tetsuro Namba has produced some remarkably good analyses of the situation in UCI, but those essays haven't gone any farther than the local campus activist circles.  This is work that could contribute to the fight across the state, and we haven't created or followed through on the blog infrastructure to communicate with the rest of the state about those issues. (There are some things remaining from the 2009-2010 protests, but they haven't been utilized lately.)

6.  Provincialism:  One of the most frustrating things about the Irvine activist scene has been its lack of connection with the rest of the UC system, with its networks, its actions, etc.  These connections could contribute to having a better sense of the conflicts, ideas, and actions that are going on around us.  Moreover, we could contribute to the pool of ideas and actions that are going on.  We need to get our activists onto other campuses, and other cites of struggle, which the university is just one.  There are certainly some informal connections to the struggles in Santa Ana, as well as some older connections with the State University system that need to be rebuilt and strengthened, but those are limited to a small group of folks.  Similarly, we have connections to the rest of the UC system through union reform, but those connections are limited to a small group of folks, and haven't filtered down to the rank and file activists, particularly undergraduate activists.  I want to make it clear that I am not arguing that the activism outside of our small pond is superior to ours, far from it, but that engaging with folks involved in similar, but not the same project, can give us some perspective and creative ways of approaching our own projects.  I'd like to see our activist community tied into all social justice issues, but the question of the defense of public education seems to be the best place to start, given the common issues.  I also think that this needs to move beyond the university level to both the community college level as well as the CSUs.  Our common ability to think and act can be increased by this sort of communication, and I believe that we have as much to contribute in these conversations, as we have to receive.

I think that's it for now. 

a short critique of the activist practices of take back uci (self-critique)

      In an attempt to start writing a bit more frequently, I thought I would send a brief critique of some of the current practices of Take Back UCI, which is an implicit self-critique because I've been involved pretty heavily in the group.  I'm not making any universal claims about movement politics through this engagement, and I'm not sure how valuable these comments will be outside of our particular context.  I'd be curious if resonates with other folks issues or not, though.  Perhaps we could get a small conversation going through this in the comments.  I'm just going to present a list of my thoughts in no particular order.

1.  Process.  In the three to four years that  I have been involved in UCI activist groups, this has been one of the most serious problems that has run through all the various groups and coalitions that I have been a part of.  Unfortunately, Take Back UCI is no exception to this.  Our meetings often run far longer than they should.  We repeat ourselves in multiple meetings, and decisions frequently are not followed through on.  Our lack of procedure additionally leads us to reinventing the wheel for a lot of our protests, taking a lot of time for stuff that should be routinized in order to focus on more interesting and serious problems.  In addition to this, the forms of informality lead to an informal mechanism of exclusion of new folks getting involved in the group.  These are all issues that could be solved through creating an atmosphere where meetings were guided by a set of simple rules that were discussed at the beginning of each meeting, rules that would guide conversation, and give new folks a more solid position to engage with the issues at the meeting.  The question of follow up is a slightly more vexed question, but having more formalized notes as well as expanding on our designation of tasks could work towards resolving these problems.

      It's notable that these same issues existed in the movement two years ago with far less of a negative impact, but those activist structures were far more hierarchical in nature.  The informal structures worked well when small groups of individuals were making the decisions, rather than the horizontal structures that we are trying to work with.  It's important to also note that those processes were only successful through a massive amount of labor on the part of those small groups, so I'm not criticizing them, but I do want to note that informality, rather than leading to strong democratic and horizontal organizing, often contributes to an atmosphere in which small, insider groups make the decisions, and that makes it extremely difficult to get into those groups.  In many ways, I think that we have been trying to combine informality with grass roots structures, thinking that they are compatible forms of organizing, when in many ways they are not.  If we want to use meeting spaces to fight the multiple structures of oppression in our society, rather than replicate them, we need structure.  Not endless structure, but real mechanisms of decision making and follow through that allow for meaningful access and contributions for all.

2.  Graduate Students.  Yes, I am part of the problem.  Graduate students have contributed to the shutting down of meeting space, through our tendency to talk too damn much in meetings.  We're trained to do this sort of thing, and our classes are often structured on the expectations that we can an will speak up as graduate students.  The problem is that this often freezes out undergraduates, and creates conversational settings that are not accessible to everyone involved.  At the same time, we as graduate students haven't been doing enough talking outside the meeting setting, as a colleague has noted.  We need to be doing a lot more work talking to our fellow graduate students and to the professors that we have greater access to, that is to say, we need to do more of the day to day organizing to enable bigger and more intensive actions.  We need to encourage our friends and colleagues to teach the budget, and to bring these issues of public education into the classroom.  In effect, we need to step back in meeting spaces, and step up as organizers in the spaces of the university where we have some influence.

3.  Outreach.  This is something that where we have had some substantial issues.  We should be in regular and formal contact with the various organizations in the cross-cultural center, with various social groups, and out fliering.  These are the sort of mechanisms that allow for events to bring thousands, rather than hundreds. We have been making an effort to talk to undergrads in various classrooms, but only in relationship to urgent actions.  We need to engage with the social, cultural, and political life of the university to a greater extent.  We should be talking to dance groups, the folks who run Acrobatics Everyday (they put on indie music shows), along with the substantial social and political groups on campuses.  These groups have ideas and skills that can contribute to the movement.  I'm not saying that they will be immediately on board.  Our university has a powerful effect of depoliticization, but we can only become stronger through these interactions.  We should begin every quarter by sending activists out to these various groups, along with making plans for that quarter, to invite them in to our processes, to criticize them, and to ask for there input into where we should be going, even if they don't want to be at our meetings

I have a few more points to make, and each of these deserves a great deal more time, but I'm going to leave there because I need to get on a plane to the Chicago Labor Notes conference soon.

Old Labor History Paper

     The fact that I am going to the Labor Notes conference made me think of this old dinosaur.  There are certainly some issues with the writing and citation here, but I think it might be worth taking a glance at.  I wrote this in the senior year of my undergrad years.  Some of my future interests are evident.

     "What we labor for--The abolition of idleness, want and oppression; the prevalence of industry, virtue and intelligence."

                                      --Voice of Industry[1]

            The concept of 'moral reform' and its implications has created considerable controversy amongst historians; it was a movement of contradictions traveling from the shadow of the asylum to women's emancipation to the daily drill of the clock.  This vast cat's cradle of narratives has been approached from a number of different angles.  There has been a continual examination of 'moral reform' from a traditional American perspective.  This has spawned a number of different responses.  There has been a response that has examined the way that moral reform played in forming institutions.  There has also been a labor response.  Other historians have examined it from the perspective of women. Perhaps the most interesting work has been the attempt to examine the issue from the cross section of both labor and gender.  It looks at the issues as interconnected rather than placing a cause on just one of the issues.

            A moment should be spent on explaining what is meant by 'moral reform.'  The first thing is that 'moral reform' was a national phenomenon that could be seen in the East, from Maine to Georgia and in the West as well.  Its beginnings could be seen in the great religious revivals of the 1810's, although it could be argued that the main impetus came from the American revolution and the notions of the Rights of Man that arise from the French Revolution.  From the revivals, it moved in a number of directions from abolitionism to utopian societies and temperance societies.  The examination of labor as a matter of reform came into discussion only much later, because of the rise of the factory.

            Of the approaches towards understanding moral reform, the more traditional approach tends to accept the reformers at their word.  A good example of this is contained Walters' book, American Reformers 1815-1860.2  Walter generally sees reformers within the rubric of progressivism bringing up connection with both the progressive movements of the early 20^th century and the New Left movement3.  The most interesting information included was the material detailing the beginning of the shift to industrialization, which places the moral reform movement within that context.4

            A later book in this tradition is Steven Mintz's Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre-Civil War Reformers.5 Mintz explicitly discusses issues of institutional control, control over the working class, etc.  He acknowledges these concerns, those being of class and gender, but tries to transcend them.  Mintz brings up the urban poor explicitly at two points.  The first moment is in his attempt to quash the labor historians' criticisms.  The second occurs when he benignly assures us that the moral reformers felt a genuine solidarity with the poor. 6 He shows the specter of societal breakup, but he does not tie it to the rising industrialism.7 In effect, both these authors are driven to present a culture of 'moral reform' that transcends its material conditions.

            The problems that exist within these more contemporary authors working from the more traditional narratives, the dismissal of the divisions and contradictions within 'moral reform', can be seen in magnified form within some of the earlier perspectives on this subject. There was a propensity to focus on the leadership, rather than social concerns.  While this leadership certainly bears some consideration, one cannot truly discuss 'moral reform' without examining the actions of the thousands of men and women who made up the independent organizations that proposed the reforms, distributed the pamphlets, and made up the meetings that made up the ambiguous 'moral reform.'  Many of the collections of original sources fall into this spirit of the heroic individual.  For example, Henry Steele Commager's The Era of Reform 1830-18607 and Lorman Ratner's Pre-Civil War Reform: The Variety of Principles and Programs8 both provide a collection of documents from various leaders of a number of reform movements.

            The institutional model tends to be more cynical in the manner it discusses 'moral reform.'  This model deals with only a limited portion of the morass that makes up moral reform for the reason that only certain parts of moral reform touch upon institutions and their creation.  A number of examples came out in the 1970's and 1980's.  A History of Social Welfare and Social Work in the United States by James Leiby is an early example of this in what Leiby himself calls a frankly 'provisional' book.9 The primary point of interest is the rise of support for institutional reform on the part of certain moral reformers. Leiby's techniques on analyzing the antebellum era are a bit crude; separating discussion of religious, secular, and institutional ideas without examining their coevalence too thoroughly.10 Later books tend to be more thorough and more critical in their examination of the formation of the 'indoor aid' or what would be referred to now as institutional support and the individuals who supported it.  This certainly holds true for the second edition of From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America.  It examines institutions in a manner that is much more integrative, although there is less time spent on the idea of moral reform and individual moral reformers.11 Michael Katz's In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare also follows largely in the same vein.12  This a side of moral reform that is important to remember in the celebratory messages of independent civic organizations. 

            The labor historians', specifically New Labor History, work is the most interesting response to the assumptions made by the general historians.  Sean Wilentz's Chants Democratic was the greatest influence on the writing of this paper, because he begins to look at the issues of moral reform within a class context.13  He examines the entrepreneurial uses of moral reform and uses of moral reform on the part of radicals.14  Also, he looks at opposition to moral reform, at least to its religious aspects, as well.15  He touches on issues of gender, but doesn't deal with them very well.16  The primary problem with Wilentz's book (other than gender, which is considerable in of itself) is that there seems to be a view of society very crudely built on Marx's so-called Base-Superstructure model, which refuses to see that the superstructural elements are as influential upon the Base as vise versa.17 This fact does not negate the interesting and useful ideas that the school of historians produces, but it does act as a serious flaw to their constructions.

            There are a number of other examples that merit examining in this field.  For example, Herbert George Gutman's book, Work, culture, and society in industrializing America: essays in American working class and social history, is another good example in this tradition.18 Gutman edited another book, which has even more relevance, The New England Working Class and the New Labor History.  This book contains a specific essay that deals with the issues of the conditions that the women lived under in the Lowell factory system.19 There is also a collection of primary sources, edited and commented upon by Phillip Foner that includes many pieces written by factory operators, including some included in my primary sources.20

            There is also quite a bit of material that discusses the issue of moral reform from a feminist position.  There are numerous websites, books, and collections of primary sources discussing this issue from the position of women's empowerment.  This material has a tension with the labor historians' tendency to ignore gender and blindly criticize the moral reform movement. They also note the blindness that more traditional scholars show for the special role that women play in the 'moral reform movement.  This tends to take the more positive view that the more traditional school takes, while emphasizing the role of women in it.

            There has been a more recent movement to look at the issue of moral reform within the rubric of both gender and class.  One example is Lori D. Ginzberg's Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth Century United States.  This is a feminist piece that specifically looks into issues of class, while looking at the role of women in moral reform.21  Probably the example that is most applicable to my work is Teresa Anne Murphy's Ten Hours' Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England.  It essentially is the reverse of Ginzberg's work, looking at issues of gender within a primarily labor context.  It also attempts the same weaving of class, culture and gender that I am interesting in engaging in while looking at some of the same material.22

            It is those three avenues that I am interested in exploring and the way that those three issues interweave with each other.  I am interested in the way that the growing working classes engaged in moral reform in its movements, particularly the labor movement, in a different manner than the middle-classes.  But I am also interested in showing the way that the culture of moral reform and its various movements from temperance to phrenology were influential to the creation of this new class in the growing industrialization.23  To put it another way, labor historian Phillip Foner writes the following assessment of the literature of the factory women:

            Some of their writings contain a strong strain of morality, a concern with respectability, and perhaps a naïve faith in Progress of Man and Woman, and the inevitability of justice for the laboring or producing classes.  But the militant factory girls made it clear that justice was due them because they produced the wealth that enabled the corporation owners live in luxury, while the mill women endured unceasing toil, inadequate wages, and stunted lives.  They also made it clear that justice would only come through organization and struggle.24

It is this notion that Foner engages in that I want to combat.  The notion that there is a way of removing the wheat of class justice from the chafe of moral reform.  When one makes such an effort, one misses the nuances and complexities of the given individual situation and is left with the gray monolithic field of the utopian class struggle.

            This examination occurs within the confines of New England, and despite the fact that both phenomena are occurring nationally, and to some degree even internationally, their impact and interaction is very distinct within New England.  One can see differences between it and the mid-Atlantic region, let alone the dramatic differences between it and the southern and western regions.  As Teresa Anne Murphy points out, "Religion and reform structured the discourse of labor activism in antebellum New England and distinguished it from labor movements elsewhere."25  Although this discourse of religion and reform could be seen in New York and Philadelphia, it wasn't inculcated within the movement to the degree that it was in New England.  It then probably makes sense to begin looking at the distinct nature that New England society takes on, first in the context of industrialization and then in the context of the various independent 'moral reform' movements occurring within it.  After that, the next step will be to examine where the Voice of Industry fits into the scheme of culture and industrialization.  It will also show a certain transformation as the editorship changes hands.

            When precisely the beginning of industrialization began is a rather vague process, but by the time of the 1820's and 1830's it was well underway, particularly in the Middle Atlantic States and New England.26 This led to a process of urbanization.  There were 46 "urban areas" of 2,500 or more in 1810 to 393 in 1860.27 The process of moving towards a more industrial oriented economy would only really begin to take off during the civil war, but the antebellum era began to provide the seeds that would lead to that construction.

The process of industrialization is a particularly significant process within New England and it takes on specific characteristics that make it unique. Teresa Anne Murphy states this difference out simply, "In the lives of New England working people, capitalists were a far more visible and potent presence than they were elsewhere."28 This can be seen rising out of the relative unity of New England elites, as opposed to the differences between mercantile and manufacturing pursuits, which would remain distinct in areas such as the Middle Atlantic States.29 This doesn't mean that all difference had disappeared.  There were still differences between rural and urban apparent, as well as issues dealing with religion, but the overall homogeneity of the elite was still strong.30

            This translated into the stronger influence over the lives of working people.  Unlike in Middle Atlantic states, where master artisans acted as the primary responsibility for transforming the relations of production, New England saw a visible group of merchant capitalists acting as a primary influence on this, either acting on direct control or providing a tone for others.  The move of trade had moved their capital from trade into textile mills.  There were also many more connections between machine shops and textile mills than in other places.31

            The general mood of 'moral reform' can be seen as a tension between the ideals of the society that were formed out of the revolution, and the contradictions that were evident in the society. Moral reform comes out of a certain progressive spirit and optimism around the revolution.  The revolution was combined into a sort of progressive millenarianism that believed in an inevitable march forwards. This can be seen in the various movements from temperance onwards, and certainly in the labor movement, which continually insists upon its republican virtues.  However, there certainly was not as much agreement to what the reform should be.  Not only was there variety concerning this question on the level of utopian societies, etc., but there were different views that came out of class position and class sympathies.

Another important aspect of the moral reform movement is that it is a movement that is highly gendered feminine.  Women were both the primary actors within the movement and the ideal placed before it.32  This placed women within an ambiguous position within the labor movement, because simultaneously put them in a suspect position as representatives of a movement that was often coded as middle-class and it also was the primary vehicle that they could get involved in the labor movement.33  By the time of the Voice of Industry however, this position was somewhat less ambiguous and women were playing an increasing role in the working class movement at least within the context of New England.

            The culture of moral reform also played a unique role within New England society.  While the movement was certainly national, and one could see an impact on the society that ranged from Michigan to Alabama, the largest and most intense impact could be seen within the states that made up New England.  This had a number of reasons behind it.  A number of those can be seen because of the composition of the society, also the role that it played in the revolution, and lastly the role that industrialization played.

            New England had a relatively homogenous society.  It had some immigration, but the level of immigration was significantly lower than the nearby Middle Atlantic area.  The Lowell area, for example, had an Irish population of 20%, as opposed to much higher percentage in New York and the other Middle Atlantic States. Despite the tensions between the new immigrant population, particularly the flood of pauperized Irish immigrants after the potato blight and the older English immigrants, New England didn't have the same level of violence that were seen in Philadelphia and New York at the same time.  There was no equivalent to the Kensington riots of 1844.34  This created less competition for moral reform with movements such as Nativism that tended to flourish in the more heavily immigrant-oriented Middle Atlantic States.

            The trends of industrialization and urbanization proved a great challenge to this narrative of inevitable progress.  A great deal of concern can be seen of the disturbances and crime that these trends were creating.  This terror of disorder isn't something that is limited to certain sections of the population, even within the Voice of Industry one can see the specter of this threat is raised frequently.  Whether seen as a formation of the unstable proletariat or the rising of a class of aristocratic factory owners that oppress that group, this trend is seen as the primary challenge to the institutions of republicanism.

            The Voice of Industry rises out of the nexus of these issues.  One can see a serious discussion of many of the issues brought up above, and this paper will eventually examine these issues and the way that the paper represents the positionality of class within this debate and the way that the culture of reform impacts the creation of this emerging class.  But first, there needs to be an examination of the paper itself.

            The Voice of Industry originated in Fitzburgh, Massachusetts in May 29, 1845.  William F. Young initially published the paper.  The following November, it war combined with two other labor papers and moved to Lowell under a publishing committee of Young, Sarah G. Bagley (president of the Female Labor Reform Association), and Joel Hatch.35  Eventually, Young gave up the paper because of ill health and Bagley took up the operations and Female Labor Reform Association purchased the paper, although it was published under the guise of the New England Labor Reform League.36  The editorship and publishing returned to him at another point, where he work alongside Mehitabel Eastman after Sarah Bagley left the paper.37   There were a couple other formations of editorship as well.  It failed soon after the collapse of the 10-Hour workday struggle and the collapse of the unions. 

            The paper covered a variety of issues and came from a great number of sources.  One could find articles discussing issues ranging from the obvious attacks on capital, and labor meetings, to things such as temperance, slavery, and phrenology.  There are many small articles excerpted from other papers of the region, as well as speeches by important 'moral reformers' such as Robert Owen and Horace Greeley.  The paper makes an interesting shift in its contents beginning with its transference to Lowell.  The paper openly called for contributions of female mill operators and put Sarah Bagley in charge of the newly opened 'female department.'  The factory girls' articles filled an even more prominent role when the Female Labor Reform Association bought up the paper and the vast majority of the content was made up of commentary and literature by mill operators.

            There was a literary tradition on the part of the factory operators long before the formation of the FLRA and their contributions to the Voice of Industry.  The structure of the Lowell system (originally the Waltham system) was in itself a sort of reform on the excesses of the English factory system.  One of the ways that this image was produced was through the narrative of the 'genteel factory girl.'  A great deal of emphasis was placed on the cultural improvements the girls were engaged in, from pianos to hymns to lyceums.  Literature played an important role in this and the Lowell Offering acted as a conduit for the women's work.  The publication contained some interesting implicit criticisms of the factory system early on.  However, this disappeared as the factory owners invested in the publication, even though its editor Harriet Farley was a former factory operator, and articles and poetry critical of the environment at the factory were not published in its later stages.  This led to a public debate within the papers of the day between the editor of the paper, and Sarah Bagley, a militant reformer within the textile mills.  The fallout would eventually lead to the collapse of the paper.  Before the move to the Voice of Industry, the factory workers were also involved in the publication of papers ranging from the Factory Girl's Garland, Factory Girl's Album, etc.  Even when the Voice of Industry moved to Lowell, women continued to contribute articles and commentary to more liberal newspapers such as the Manchester Democrat. Still the Voice of Industry became the primary voice for these concerns and after the move to Lowell, the only one that gave any autonomy to the women's voices.38

            In discussing these issues of moral reform and class, the Voice of Industry can be split into a number of different topics.  At the same time, those topics should be examined in terms of the chronological order of the paper in order to look at the differences that the paper takes under different ownership and editorship.  To begin with, it would be interested to examine the ways that the Voice of Industry takes up some of the traditional issues of moral reform such as disorder in the city, temperance, slavery and religion and look at the way that they simultaneously took up these reforms and framed them in a decidedly different manner than many of the mainstream middle-class organizations.  The issue of gender will be discussed next, and then the construction of class in the terms of moral reform.

            This issue of disorder in the city is a considerable one amongst moral reformers.  This can be seen in the original religious revivals that acted as an impetus to the movement.  The same fear can be seen within the pages of the Voice of Reason as well.  This fear is abound in morbidity.  Perhaps the best example of that is the series of narratives and suicides that occur in various short articles in the newspaper.  Then there is a related topic that can be construed, the degradation that occurs to the individual in more abstract terms.

            The specter of suicide, inspired by poverty or alcohol, and the act of murder for those same reasons, can be found throughout the pages of the Voice of Reason.  There's a certain morbidity, an obsession with death that can be seen throughout the paper, the unearthing of mysterious bodies being a favorite topic, but the narrative of dissolution is an important one.  Here are a couple examples.  There are an influx of titles such as "Robbery of Pepperell and arrest of the robber," "Distressing suicide of a female," and "The murder at East Kingston."39  There's the tale of the man who strangled himself, mistaking his own throat for another's and the tale of the woman who committed suicide after her savings was stolen.40

            However, there is something going on beneath these stories that is different than the middle class narrative focused on the same issues.  There's a certain level of sympathy and understanding.  The stories point to issues such as poverty for the acts that are committed.  Even the man who nearly killed his children in some act of madness is presented with some sympathy.  These are individuals that are seen to be trapped in a system more than they are malevolent.   As the Voice puts it in a description of a murder, "And yet there is no need of improvement in this murderous state of society."41  Implicitly tying the murder to the unreformed nature of society.

            One can see the same narrative play out in more abstract terms in some of the moral writing.  The view is presented that the current system encourages the lack of industry and honest work because it disdains those qualities for the idleness that is shown by the rich.  The sons and daughters of hardworking workers and farmers then take up these undesirable traits.  They try to live by the example of the rich, looking for anyway to make their living without the use of 'honest industry.'  When they discover that this isn't possible, they sink into the worst kind of debauchery possible.  This is in a way the narrative underlying all the particulars that are discussed above.  It is the thread that connects murder with suicide and suicide with madness.   This narrative is ingeniously constructed in the first issue:

            "…on productive industry she [public opinion] has placed a stigma which induces him to leave it.  When his plans, schemes, and speculations for a livelihood without useful labor, prove abortive, and he becomes discouraged, looses his self respect, falls into dissipation and crime, (of which she alone is the generator) she stands ready with her grab-hooks of law, officers of justice, prisons, and gallows to punish him, to which the various departments of society even to the church respond Amen!  And all this for the public good and safety."42

            The narrative acts ingeniously.  It turns the traditional narrative of the dissolute youth on its head.  Instead of falling into sin because they don't behavior as their social betters do, it is precisely the emulation of the upper classes that leads the callow youth to his or her predicament.  But at the same time a common concern is embraced.  The terror of the factory owners, priests and schoolteachers can also be seen in the emerging working class and its representatives.  The youth that enters the gilded palace of sin that is the city, while seen as an object of pity, is still something that is a great potential danger.  The city and industrialism act as the primary threats to the young republic.  They threaten to spill the city into the conditions that could be seen in the cities of Europe.  Those conditions are brought up fairly commonly within the pages of the Voice of Industry.

            This danger is something that gets discussed throughout the paper's course.  However there is a distinct reduction in this content when the paper moves to Lowell.  There are a few reasons for that.  The first is that simply by taking on the load of two other papers there isn't as much space that is available for this sort of material. There are other changes that occur because of this, for an example, the feature fictional story section is also truncated and at times completely cut.  But there also seems to be a conscious effort to cut down on the sheer level of morbidity that is emblematic of the Fitzburgh period.

   The issue of temperance is one that gets brought up again and again within the paper.  The individual who causes the dissolution of society discussed above is frequently an imbiber of alcohol.  He (and it is almost inevitably a he) is capable of truly spectacular deeds.  He has strangled himself to death mistaking his neck for another's, he has nearly butchered his children in an orgy of fury, and his path inevitably leads to death.43  This wildman, this pathological alcoholic is common to the vast majority of temperance discourse.  But there needs to be some distinctions drawn between the view of temperance held within the pages of the Voice of Industry and those by more middle-class reformers.  The first is in the way that the Voice identifies heavily with the Washingtonian movement.  This heavily ties into the notion of moral suasion as opposed to the notion of legal suasion.  The last issue is the criticisms that the Voice frequently levels against other individuals involved with the temperance movement.

            By the time of the publication, the Washingtonian movement was by in large finished.  However, clearly its legacy had left an impact.  The organization was formed in 1840 and lasted well into the 1840's although its most important stage ended in 1843.  The primary difference that the movement reflected was in the fact that it was made up of working class and lower-middle class women.  That led to a significantly different way of approaching drinkers and also a different way of looking at them.  This consisted of actively approaching individuals with alcohol problems and attempting to minister to their problems.  They also were more sympathetic to the plight of drinkers, realizing that the circumstances of their lives frequently led to their problems.  They were also much less critical of members who fell off the wagon temporarily.44

            These points allude to the position that Voice took on supporting 'moral suasion', that is using the techniques that were employed by the Washingtonians as opposed to the position of 'legal suasion' that was beginning to become popular with other segments of the temperance movement.  These sections were interested in temperance more as a means of control while the Washingtonians and the Voice were more interested in using the movement to empower themselves and take greater control of their lives. 

            The critiques that the Voice of Industry places on other individuals in the temperance movement are frequently focused on this issue of 'moral suasion', that is temperance through voluntary means, vs. 'legal suasion', that is temperance through some form of prohibition.  The paper carries on a fierce battle with a rival The Sentinel in the early part of its publication in Fitzburgh on just this question. 'Legal suasion' is referred to as a "small and illiberal means to support a particular bias."45  It also accuses 'legal suasion' activists of "asking no favors of moral suasion or the better feelings which belong to humanity."46  This clearly again repeats the notion of the Washingtonians' desire for uplift as opposed to social control by the 'legal suasion' advocates.  The paper clearly shows some class awareness by its continual reference to their opponent as 'the professor' along with the more innocuous 'the bachelor'47

            This class element can be seen in some of the other critiques placed on the temperance movement.  One good example can be seen in the fact that the paper criticized a prominent temperance speaker for charging too much money to hear his speech.  The paper stated "to our surprise at the very portals of the sanctuary professedly dedicated to god and humanity stood the "golden calf" in the shape of "12 1-2 cents admittance… a virtual prohibition on the poor inebriate…."48 Another way that this is used on these lines can be seen in an article on temperance, which ties the notion of that:

            "Our present tedious system of half paid labor, is a generator of intemperance, men who exhaust too large a portion of their physical powers require a stimulus, and many of them will have it; others being deprived of suitable associates shut out the whole long day from congenial companions will seek some source of gratification, though it be the haunts of dissipation.  And avarice; intemperance's twin sister, is ever ready to furnish such gratification, and steal away their hard earned pittance."49  

            The issues around temperance are consistent throughout the publication.  This places it in a different position than many other workingmen's organizations in New York and Philadelphia.  This does not mean to imply that temperance didn't have an impact on these other locations.  One certainly cannot dismiss the enormity of the Washingtonian movement.  However, there existed considerably more ambiguity even on official levels, for example, veteran union organizers in New York saw nothing wrong with having meetings in taverns and many workers saw being able to drink at work as a part of controlling their labor.50

            The issue of slavery is certainly an interesting one, particularly the way that a correlation between the chattel slavery of the south is tied to the notion of 'white slavery' that occurs within the mills and manufactories.  There is a clear stance take against the institution of slavery at a number of locations in the paper, and one cannot see a significant change in this policy through its publication. A good example of this rhetoric can be seen in a letter sent to the editor by one "A Factory Girl.":

            "Compare and contrast the condition of the slave with that of your own; while you enjoy the liberty of conscience, and possess all of the natural and endearing relations of human existence, the slave who is made in the image of the God who "made of one blood all the nations of the earth," is denied the rights, aye the name of human beings--are bought and sold like cattle--families scattered, and hearths made desolate--infants torn from the found embrace of a mother and sold by the pound!"51

 However, one can detect notes of ambiguity within this.  There is the joke "A certain poet sings of "dark eyed maidens of the south."  We grant him that the farther down south he gets the more numerous the dark-IES become."52  and at one point the argument for abolition is made on the premise that then the former slaves would stay in the south.53

            The totality of the issue of 'white slavery' is not one that can be delved into the level that it requires in this paper.  But what does need to be discussed about this topic is the way the New England labor movement both embraces and appropriates the language of abolitionism.  The Voice of Industry inevitably takes the abolition view on topic ranging from the war with Mexico to slave catchers and runaway slave laws, however they also ask why is that abolitionists who are so concerned with the atrocities committed in the south against slave, but refuse to look at the horrifying conditions that workers are faced with in their own backyard.54  Out of this comes the notion of the white slave, which takes up the language abolitionism to deal with the issues of the new working class.  One manifesto in favor of the 10-hour workday includes the statement; "Tell them we will be no longer slaves!"55

The topic of religion also comes up frequently in the paper.  It takes the view that most reformers take on this issue, one that religion should be judged on deeds rather than obscure doctrines.  The paper frequently spends time attacking various religious sects.  The statement, "Intolerance--Being irreligious for the sake of religion, and hateing our fellow creatures out of a pretend love of the creator"56 is quite indicative of these feelings.

However, the critique went beyond this into issues of class.  The Voice of Industry actively criticized much of the clergy for being hand in hand with the ruling classes.  They showed how this church behaved in an elitist manner in an article titled 'Aristocracy in Church." "Trinity Church people are exercising their ingenuity to keep the common herd at a respectable distance."  After explaining the church's policies, the paper makes sure to drive the class message home, " The church is dedicated to God but the inside is private property.  This is a new pattern of reform, but with a fortune of thirty millions in Hand, Trinity can afford to have original ways of her own."57  This construction of religion also plays a significant role within class construction, which will be discussed later on.

The issue of gender, that is in this case the thin veil for discussing the role that women play in a space that is so often clearly demarcated within masculine terms, needs to finally be elucidated.  Perhaps it would be best to begin by discussing masculinity, its mirror image, within the labor milieu and more specifically within the paper.  Then the whole tangle of femininity will be unraveled within the context of the paper, examining notions of that play into the idea of the cult of femininity that dominates the 'moral reform' ideology and the way that allows for women's access into the public sphere of labor organizing and the way that it restricts it.

  The early working-class movement was definitely a masculine movement and the use of the term 'workingmen' was not coincidental.  The New England labor movement certainly didn't escape this ideology.  Men were the subjects of discussion within the pages of its publications, the words of its speeches, etc.  Women were able to place a word in edgewise more often because of the connections to moral reform that existed but even in the late 1840's women labor activists still had to battle individuals such as "the Spectator", who still insisted upon a view of femininity based on weakness and childishness.58

The view that men frequently took of women workers could be termed 'dependent workers.'59  The men in organizations in the thirties saw women as being to weak to be able to negotiate fair contracts with capitalists.  Like child labor, their labor was best protected through legislative means.  Teresa Anne Murphy puts this best, "An assumption that guided the petitioning efforts60 of male workingmen in 1832 was that women and children were the same category of workers: dependents, who were unable to organize themselves to combat their employers.  This perception would continue, even as the activities of female industrial workers in 1834 challenged these assumptions."61  This bias can also be seen in the early pages of the Voice of Industry, despite its efforts to look at the interests of women.  A good example of this can be seen in a discussion of women as boarding house keepers.  This discusses how companies want to hire "widow women and defenseless women, as keepers of Corporation boarding house keepers" because their "circumstances would require them to submit to many burdens" and the women were forced to submit "without a murmur or protest."62  Still another example of the ambiguous position that women are held in can be seen the repeating of this joke.63

This left women in a tenuous position within the labor movement.  As it was said before, the idea of moral reform, the way for women to become involved in the public sphere and remain safely in the folds of the 'cult of domesticity' was coded middle class and was viewed with considerable suspicion even among New England workingmen.  Still it was a place to work from for women and was thus taken advantage of.

The notion of the cult of domesticity is a fascinating one, although one usually looked at within middle-class terms.  This occurs because it was coded in that manner by the middle-class reformers who took the idea up.  However, it can also be seen in the ideas of the factory girls as well.  A good example can be seen in an article entitled "The Rights of Women."  After a great deal of time is spent establishing women's equality this important qualifier is placed upon it, "And, in doing this, we shall encroach on no domestic duty or privilege founded on sexuality, reason and common sense.  Let her as she has to be, remain the woman; and let her appropriate and specified duties be domestic, or engage in any line of action in any calling which shall not interfere with their discharge."64 (italics added)  This can be seen at another point, where Sarah Bagley is speaking to the New England Workingmen's Association on behalf of the Female Labor Reform Association:

"We do not expect to enter the field as soldiers in this great warfare; but we would like the heroines of the Revolution, be permitted to furnish the soldiers with a blanket or replenish their knapsacks from our pantries."65

Coded within this speech, Bagley is making assurances to the workingmen that the women involved in the Association will not step outside their gendered roles.

            It would be easy to continue in this vein, to show the continued collusion that the FLRA and many of the factory girls have with traditional gender roles, but in that repetition, something else would be missed.  One thing that would be left out for instance would be the class elements taken up in the use of domesticity.  While middle-class women claim to be superior wives because of their culture, the factory girls claim the same because of their industry in the workplace. example66  It is at this point where the ideas of the women writing for the Voice of Industry are in fullest agreement with the ideas in Lowell Offering.  The Offering also looks to defend the virtue of the factory girls against the charges of, "the population of Lowell is made up of 'scraps' and refugees--the cast off 'non-essentials of refined society."67

            Also the murmurs of resistance to the men's assumptions would also be missed.  The missives against the women's would be allies are naturally more hidden and muffled, but it still can be seen.  The statement made by operatives, "The operatives can unite and they will yet give evidence to their employers that "Union is strength""68 may be a comment directed primarily towards the employers, but it also can be seen to be directed towards their male counterparts who see the women as 'dependent workers.'

It is also of some value to return to the statements that Sarah Bagly made to the Workingmen's association made before.  While creating a domestic role for the women, she also insisted, "We claim no exalted place in your deliberations, nor do we expect to be instrumental of any great revolutions, yet we would not sit idly down and fold our hands and refuse to do the little that we may and ought to…."69  There other examples that one can see.  Another strong example can be found of in the Factory Girls’ Album:

            “Away with the mean prejudice and jealousy which sneer at women for trying to get an honest living.  Girls deprive journeymen of employment, and the latter cry aloud in consequence.  As well might the Mississippi boatmen protest against steamboats.  Say, that this or that is not a woman’s place or a woman’s business?  Has poor woman no fit place but the kitchen or factory? Can her hand wield no implement but the needle and the dishcloth”70

            It also should be stated that there are further traces of dissatisfaction on the current state of things.  Ellen Munroe wrote a piece criticizing the way that girls are raised, pointing while boys are allowed to grow strong, “almost everything that can be, is done, to enervate and weaken girls, both mentally and bodily.”71  Also, they respond that much of their weakness is created by having to work the excessive hours at the factory.  In effect, they criticize both the factory owners and the paternalism of their fellow workers.

            At this point there needs to be a change of pace, before this section the emphasis has been on the impact that being a factory operative or artisan had on the ideas of moral reform, but the reverse needs to be done.  There already is a start of this in the section before looking at the dual role of gender and labor.  Now there needs to be an investigation into how, the culture of 'moral reform' impacted the creation of the rising working class of New England.  The primary document that will be looked at is a speech by the Labor Reform League of New England delivered to an audience in Nashua, New Hampshire, but other documents will be discussed to back this point up.

            The first and most important point is that the whole notion of workers' rights is constructed heavily within republicanism.  The rhetoric of the Voice of Industry frequently comments on the superior patriotism of the workingman, and his superior position as citizen despite his depravations.  In fact, the whole labor struggle is colored in these terms within the speech, "in the present contest for the realization those acknowledged 'inalienable rights, s'set forth in the Declaration of American Independence and among which are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."72

            This can be moved into a broader spirit within the discourse.  The body of the speech reflects this:

            "The object then of the present movement, among the producing classes of this country and Europe, is to enquire into the cause of these great evils which are scattering desolation over the Race, and blighting the fairest fruits of human excellence, and when once discovered, to use such means as the wisdom of the age shall develop to bring about a peaceful, philosophical and radical Reformation."73

This paragraph perfectly captures the relationship between the culture of moral reform and working class identity.  It ties this new class of producers into the narrative of progress, and gives them a privileged position as the ones who will unlock the secrets to find and destroy the great evils that stalked the society such as disorder and dissipation.  It holds with the reformers' beliefs that rational thought can eventually solve all problems and the millenarian beliefs of a dramatic change soon to come.

            The best example of the value placed on contemplation is best seen in the rhetoric of the ten-hour movement.  The logic for the movement is well presented here, "This is proposed as a means rather than an end; its object being to give the operatives time to cultivate their moral, mental, and physical powers, therefore of primary importance, as forming the basis of true prosperity and without no people can enjoy the blessings of rational liberty."74  This ties into the ideas above.  Workers, who are the way to the future, need to have the time to create the abilities to fulfill their destiny.

            There are definite religious overtones within this as well.  At one time the paper refers to the class struggle as, “the combat between unholy oppression and equal rights for all.”75 The elite classes are not only failing as republicans in their duties but as Christians as well.  This is well phrased by an operative’s letter from Manchester:

            “Shall we ever remain subjected to the tyrannical will of a corporated body of men who, although they bear the title of christians, have ho more christian feeling and sympathy for those in their employ than Heathen.”76

The paper even quotes the Bible in this venue. “The laborer is worthy of his hire—Bible.”77  The need for a movement comes from the need to receive the rights granted workers by God that have been taken away from them by supposed Christians who do not live up to their duties, instead to sit in luxury.

            There is something utopic in the image of the world that the movement wants to create.  It is a world where, “Industry is not only a duty binding upon all men, but it is one of the most fruitful sources of real enjoyment and peace.”78   This world can only be created by “cultivating a love of industry, whether physical or mental” and once this world is created, “neither despair nor vice can penetrate” this virtuous world of labor.79  This may be a world wear “the last shall be first and the first shall be last”, but is definitely a world that bears a definite resemblance to the ideals of the Protestant work ethic that is so often associated with the middle class.  There is conflict, but it occurs within the bounds of a common culture.

            This antebellum world was soon to disappear, engulfed by immigration and the civil war.  New formations of class and culture were soon to rise up in the preceding years.  The beginnings of the economic revolution that were begun in the antebellum period were to explode during the civil war and any hopes of turning from this new form of economy were to be dashed.  It also cut deeply into the optimistic ideals of the culture of 'moral reform'.    Immigration similarly added problems to this.  Many immigrants simply had no interest in living up to the ideals set up by others.

            The specter of the factory and the idyll of the artisan's shop played important roles in the formation of 'moral reform.'  It was the fear of the chaos, isolation, dissipation, etc. that was created in the new cities that the factory produced, which drove the morbid imaginings of reformers whether middle-class or working class.  But at the same time, the ideas of  'moral reform' were deeply involved in the formation of both the factories themselves and the workers' organizations as well.  In effect, the field of events coalesced together rather than one element acting as the causation for the others.

            There is a need to look at class as a localized phenomenon.  What it means to be a worker, a capitalist, or middle-class is woven together with the other complex elements of a society, and becomes meaningless when one tries to remove the strand from the other elements that compose it.  This is not to say that a formation of discreetly separated geographic regions should replace class or any other phenomenon as the universal.  What is New England during the antebellum era is the coming together of a number of different elements, which changed quickly when those elements changed.

            There will always be attempts to compare events of different times, regions, cultures, etc. and there is real value in that.  However, as soon as one attempts to create a universal essential notion of class out of these phenomena, the ideas will fail to understand the complexities of the individual circumstances in which class is located.  In that case, the universal notion of class will only be a pale shadow of the different individual manifestations.

---

[1] Voice of Industry

2 Ronald G Waters, American Reformers 1815-1860, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Hill and Wong, 1978.)

3 Ibid., ix-xiv.

4 Ibid., 3-6.

5 Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America's Pre Civil War Reformers (Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1995).

6 Ibid.,

7 Ibid.,

7 Commager, Henry Steele, The Era of Reform: 1830-1860 (Malabar, Florida: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1982; reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1960.)

8 Ratner, Lorman, Pre-Civil War Reform: The Variety of Principles and Programs (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.)

9 James Leiby, A History of Social Welfare and Social Work in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.)

10 Mr. Leiby separates his chapters on Social Welfare between, 1:   American Society, 1815: The Rural Democracy; 2:  Religious Ideas About Social Welfare; 3: 1815-1845, Secular Ideas About Social Welfare, 1815-1845; 4: The Poor Law, 1815-1845.  As these chapters imply, there is a far to discreet separation of these various ideas into autonomous parts.  Ibid., vii, 6-47.

11 Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, Second Edition (New York: The Free Press, 1979.)

12 Michael Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare (New York: Basic Books, 1986.)

13 Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.)

14 ibid., 145-153,157-168.

15 ibid., 153-157.  Wilentz lies out a discourse of anti-evangelicalism from workingmen that sprouts from the ideas of Thomas Paine and finds itself in Thomas Skidmore's ideas as well.

16 For an interesting critique of Wilentz's views on women, see Ruth M. Alexander, ""We are Engaged as  a Band of Sisters": Class and Domesticity in the Washingtonian Temperance Movement, 1840-1850"

17 "The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life--and, next to production, the exchange of things produced--is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in human society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is divided into classes or orders is depended what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged.  From this point of view the final causes of all social changes are to be sought not in men's brains, not in man's better insight into truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.  Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian or Scientific

18 Herbert George Gutman, Work, culture, and society in industrializing America: essays in American working class and social history (

19 Jonathan Prude, "The Social System of Early New England Textile Mills: A Case Study, 1812-1840", Ed. Herbert G. Gutman and Donald H. Bell, The New England Working Class and the New Labor History (Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1987.)

20 Phillip Foner ed., The Factory Girls (Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1977.)

21 Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.)

22 Teresa Anne Murphy, Ten Hours' Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England (Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press, 1992.)

23 Ibid., 2-3.

24 Phillip Foner, The Factory Girls, xxv.

25 Teresa Anne Murphy, Ten Hours' Labor,

26 Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 4-5.  More specific discussion can be found in Teresa Anne Murphy, Ten Hours' Labor, and even Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic.

27 Ibid., 5.

28 Teresa Anne Murphy, Ten Hours' Labor, 20.

29 Ibid.,

30 Ibid., 30

31 Ibid., 16-20.

32 Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 1, 11-14.

33 Teresa Anne Murphy, Ten Hours' Labor,

34 Ibid., 23.

35 Phillip Foner, The Factory Girls, 75.

36 Ibid., 99-100

37 Ibid., 194.

38 Phillip Foner, The Factory Girls, 74-75.

39 Voice of Industry, June 12, 1845, Voice of Industry, August 7, 1845

40 Voice of Industry, July 3, 1845

41 Voice of Industry, June 12, 1845

42 Voice of Industry, May 29, 1845

43 Voice of Industry, #25

44 Ruth M. Alexander, ""We are Engaged as  a Band of Sisters": Class and Domesticity in the Washingtonian Temperance Movement, 1840-1850" also Teresa Anne Murphy, Ten Hours' Labor, 100-130.

45 Voice of Industry, July 24, 1845

46 Voice of Industry, July 24, 1845

47 There are a number of references to this including Voice of Industry, September 11, 1845, Voice of Industry, September 25, 1845.

48 Voice of Industry, May 29, 1845

49 Voice of Industry, June 5, 1845

50 Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic, 255.

51 Voice of Industry, September 25, 1845.

52 Voice of Industry, August 14, 1845

53 Voice of Industry

54 A good example of this rhetoric is the following from The Mechanic, October 5, 1844.  “I, for one, have been greatly disappointed in men who have heretofore advocated the cause of humanity, but whose acts of late do not agree with their professions—men who would stand up and dole out pity for the souther[n] slave, but would crush with an iron hand the white laborer of the north.  A TEN HOUR WOMAN.”  Philip Foner, The Factory Girls, 276.

55 Voice of Industry, January 22, 1847

56 Voice of Industry, May 29, 1845

57 Voice of Industry, November 6, 1846

58 For this debate see Voice of Industry, January 22, 1847, March 5, 1847, April 16, 1847

59 Teresa Anne Murphy, Ten Hours' Labor,

60 this pertains to the ten hour work legislation that was being petitioned for.

61 Teresa Anne Murphy, Ten Hours' Labor, 50.

62 Voice of Industry, September 25, 1845

63 Voice of Industry

64 Voice of Industry, May 8, 1846

65 Voice of Industry, June 5, 1845

66 Voice of Industry

67 Operatives' Magazine, December 1841, Phillip Foner, The Factory Girls, 46.

68 Voice of Industry, May 15, 1846

69 Voice of Industry, June 5, 1845

70 Factory Girls’ Album, Exeter, N.H., April 25,1846, Philip Foner, The Factory Girls, 299.

71 Boston Bee, reprinted in Voice of Industry, March 13, 1845

72 Voice of Industry, October 9, 1846

73 Voice of Industry, October 9, 1846

74 Voice of Industry, October 9, 1845

75 Voice of Industry, September 25, 1845

76 Voice of Industry, December 4, 1846

77 Voice of Industry, September 25, 1845.

78 Voice of Industry, December 11, 1846

79 Ibid.