Women and Rural Outwork

In considering Thomas Dublin's article on New England women, "Women and Rural Outwork" and Seth Rockman's work on wage labor in early Baltimore, "A Job for a Working Man", both examine the transitions of America's labor market during the 19th century and more importantly the rise of wage work and its effects on gender and race notions between employers and workers.

Much was transformed in the course of the revolution. The textile industry, non-industrial wage labor increased; urban centers grew; outwork occupations and commercial agriculture transformed the rural labor market. These economic developments coincided with dramatic changes in politics and reform, family life, and more importantly women's increased role in the labor force. All of these effects are crucial in understanding the rise of wage work and it's role in not only defining gender and race, but reinforcing those existing notions of gender and race.

In the eighteenth through the nineteenth century the ideology of separate spheres was the dominate thought on gender roles. Patriarchal property relations and prevalent cultural assumptions of female dependence bound women both inside and outside of marriage. Women's place was in the private sphere; domestic labor, family life, and the home. Men's place was in the public sphere, in a political and economic world which was becoming increasingly separate from home life as the Industrial Revolution progressed. Gender ideology was crucial to women's experiences in the early republic. Rising capitalism brought on significant shift in family life that devalued women's domestic work, thereby increasing their economic dependence on men and reinforcing the long-standing notions of female inferiority making women more vulnerable to exploitation. Even so, there still were opportunities for women's labor to serve the needs of an industrializing economy. Men and women competed for wage-earning labor, however, relative to laboring men, working-class women faced greater challenges on account of their gender. Rockman demonstrates how even the most determined and industrious working woman could never earn a living wage. Women faced patriarchal condescension from employers and workingmen alike as they attempted to find work outside of the home to ensure personal and familial survival. In addition, Dublin expressed that wage work done at home both reinforced the traditional patriarchal farm family economy, and prepared the way for full-time wage workers, operating independently within family wage economies to displace those earlier agricultural arrangements.

Seth Rockman considers this diverse workforce, exploring how race, sex, nativity, and legal status determined the economic opportunities and vulnerabilities of working families in the early republic. Rockman argues that the American working class emerged from the everyday challenges of these low waged workers. Their labor was indispensable to the early republic's market revolution. The economy opened up new possibilities for some Americans precisely because it closed down opportunities for others. Here are workers free and enslaved, male and female, black and white, immigrant and native born, all struggling to survive. This is evident through close attention to the workings of labor markets according to skill, race, ethnicity, gender, age, and legal status.

Opportunities for wage work expanded steadily for rural women in New England in the start of the 19th century. The demand of services in an urban boomtown converted many household tasks into marketable commodities. Home manufacturing did not introduce wage work into the system, but it greatly advanced it while also serving to reinforce the traditional patriarchal farm family economy. Women continued to work at home as they shifted from production for family consumption to production for wider markets. Outwork had a contradictory impact on the transition to wage labor for New England women. The early cotton textile mills gave rural women their first taste of social and economic independence. It offered women an alternative to factory employment, allowed them to live at home, fulfill their domestic responsibilities, and continue in the family farm economy while still earning wages. In this respect, outwork was an alternative to the emerging system of urban female wage labor and became the major source of paid employment for New England women. Women entered the commercial economy in ways that challenged both republican and middle class notions of female dependence.

In using mixed-race labor, Baltimore employers did not create a golden age where race did not matter. Employers had little allegiance to racial precepts that deemed certain work beneath the dignity of those with white skin, and Baltimore's demography assured that most menial tasks would fall to workers of European ancestry. They reached no consensus on who should work where but their goal was to mobilize as much labor as cheaply as possible.

In Baltimore, no manual labor or menial work was limited exclusively to people of one racial group or legal status. Baltimore employers hired enslaved, free black, immigrant and native born white workers and paid them the same wages to do the same work. Race, ethnicity, legal status, and nativity bore no substantive relationship to the days or weeks worked, and "white skin did not protect some men from backbreaking labor, nor spare them the supposed indignity of working with men who were legally un-free or members of a denigrated racial caste." "Employers determined how work would be recruited, rewarded, or compelled. The city's heterogeneity gave employers an array of choices allowing them