Labor History Commons^™

Stray Threads: Factory Women In Fiction From The Freehold Farm To The Rented Room, 1840-1875, Meghan Wadle

English Theses and Dissertations

As industrialism unmoored agrarian-based American values surrounding independence, individualism, and the gender roles attached to labor, it demanded imaginative solutions for these potentially broken ideologies in antebellum fiction. This project, in two parts, explores how factory women stood at the center of the industrializing U.S.’s cultural identity crisis. In Part One authors from Herman Melville to Harriet Jacobs imagine women laboring in the industrial marketplace as a form of deviant dependency. Here, sexualized depictions of female laborers symptomatize national anxieties about how economic change might transform political freedom by simultaneously modifying traditional forms of patriarchal control. In Part Two, Lucy …