Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Revised)

From diaries, letters, account books, and censuses, Dublin reconstructs employment patterns across the century as he shows how wage work increasingly came to serve the needs of families, rather than of individual women. He first examines the case of rural women engaged in the cottage industries of weaving and palm-leaf hatmaking between 1820 and 1850. Next, he compares the employment experiences of women in the textile mills of Lowell and the shoe factories of Lynn. Following a discussion of Boston workingwomen in the middle decades of the century - particularly domestic servants and garment workers - Dublin turns his attention to the lives of women teachers in three New Hampshire towns.