Men, Women, and Work

Mary H. Blewett is a professor emerita of history at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her books include The Last Generation: Work and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1910-1960, and Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in Nineteenth-Century New England.

• Acknowledgments   xiIntroduction   xiiiCHAPTER ONE   Origins of the Sexual Division of Labor, 1750-1810   3CHAPTER TWO   The Rise of Early Labor Protest, 1810-37   20CHAPTER THREE   The Social Relations of Production in the Rural Outwork System, 1837-45   44CHAPTER FOUR   Women and the Artisan Tradition   68CHAPTER FIVE   The Early Factory System and the New England Shoe Strike of 1860   97CHAPTER SIX   Crispin Protest in the Post-Civil War Shoe Factory   142CHAPTER SEVEN   Hard Times and Equal Rights, 1873-80   191CHAPTER EIGHT   New England Shoeworkers and the Knights of Labor   221CHAPTER NINE   Militancy and Disintegration, 1892-1910   267Conclusion   320APPENDIX A   The Accounts of Charles Fisher, 1837, and William Peabody, 1835   326APPENDIX B   The U.S. Census of Population: Lynn, Haverhill, and Marblehead, 1860; Lynn, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910   329Abbreviations   353Notes   355Bibliography of Primary and Unpublished Sources   425Index   431

Winner 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 History