Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-cnmwb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-18T13:41:01.452Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Victorian Values in the Marketplace: Single Women and Work in Boston, 1800–1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Susan L. Porter
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Lydia J ——, daughter of a widow with five children, was admitted to the Boston Female Asylum, an orphanage run by women, in 1826, at the age of four. When she was 11 she was apprenticed to a Boston physician and his wife. On her eighteenth birthday, Lydia agreed to remain with the family as a salaried servant, but six months later she left “to learn the business of dressmaking.” Lydia’s specialized training in a needlework trade supported her until her marriage, four years later, and in all likelihood at later periods in her life.’

Type
Special Section: Women and Labor
Information
Social Science History , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , Spring 1993 , pp. 109 - 133
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1993 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abbott, E. (1910) Women in Industry. New York: D. Appleton.Google Scholar
[Author Unknown] (1865) “Needle and garden: The story of a seamstress who laid down her needle and became a strawberry-girl.” Atlantic Monthly 15: 88–97; 165-177; 316-329; 464-476; 613-621; 673-678; 16: 47-60; 185-93; 283-90; 419-34.Google Scholar
Bemard, R., and Vinovkis, M. (1977) “The female school teacher in antebellum Massachusetts.” Journal of Social History 10: 332-45.Google Scholar
Blewett, M. (1988) Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Bloch, R. (1978) “American feminine ideals in transition: The rise of the moral mother, 1785-1815.” Feminist Studies 4: 101-26.Google Scholar
Boston, City of. Births Registered in the City of Boston (1629-1848). Boston Alphabetical Death Records (1629-1848). City of Boston Consolidated Index of Marriages (1629-1850). Records Pertaining to Boston Churches (1629-1850). Boston City Registrar’s Office.Google Scholar
Boston Female Asylum. Indenture Contract for Mary T—— (September 26, 1820). Shattuck Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.Google Scholar
Asylum, Boston Female. (1800-1875). Record Books. Massachusetts State Library.Google Scholar
Boston Gazette (1800-1810).Google Scholar
Boydston, J. (1986) “‘To earn her daily bread.’“ Radical History Review 35: 6–25.Google Scholar
Cogan, F. (1989) All American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America. Athens: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Dublin, T. (1985) “Women and outwork in a nineteenth-century New England town: Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, 1830-1860,” in Hahn, S. and Prude, J. (eds.) The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 51–70.Google Scholar
Dublin, T. (1979) Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Dudden, F. (1983) Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Glaseo, L. (1975) “The life cycles and household structure of American ethnic groups, Irish, Germans, and native-born whites in Buffalo, New York, 1855.” Journal of Urban History 1: 339-64.Google Scholar
Groneman, C. (1977) “‘She earns as a child—She pays as a man,’“ in Erlich, R. (ed.) Immigrants in Industrial America. Charlottes ville: University Press of Virginia: 33–46.Google Scholar
Handlin, O. (1974) Boston’s Immigrants. New York: Atheneum.Google Scholar
Home for Aged Indigent Females. Register. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.Google Scholar
Kerber, L. (1980) Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Kessler-Harris, A. (1982) Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Knights, P. (1973) Plain People of Boston, 1830-1860. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kulikoff, A. (1971) “The progress of inequality in revolutionary Boston.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series 28: 375–412.Google Scholar
Lasser, C. (1982) “Mistress, maid and market: The transformation of domestic service in New England, 1790-1870.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University.Google Scholar
Laurie, B. (1989) Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Noonday.Google Scholar
Lebergott, S. (1964) Manpower in Economic Growth: The American Record Since 1800. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Lerner, G. (1960) “The lady and the mill girl: Changes in the status of women in the age of Jackson.” Midcontinental American Studies 10: 5–17.Google Scholar
McGaughey, R. (1973) “From town to city: Boston in the 1820s.” Political Science Quarterly 88:191–213.Google Scholar
Massachusetts Commonwealth of. Records of Births, Marriages, and Deaths (1841-1903). Division of Vital Statistics.Google Scholar
Massachusetts Commonwealth of. Records of Births, Marriages, and Deaths (1841-1903). Vital Statistics of [the Various Towns and Cities], Massachusetts, to the Year 1849. 220 + volumes. (1902-present) Published variously.Google Scholar
Matthaei, J. (1982) An Economic History of Women in America. New York: Schocken.Google Scholar
Monahan, T. (1951) “One hundred years of marriage in Massachusetts.” American Journal of Sociology 56: 534-45.Google Scholar
Norton, M. B. (1980) Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Osterud, N., and Fulton, J. (1976) “Family limitation and age at marriage: Fertility decline in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, 1750-1850.” Population Studies 30: 481-89.Google Scholar
Pease, J., and Pease, W. (1990) Ladies, Women, and Wenches: Choice and Constraint in Antebellum Charleston and Boston. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Pease, W., and Pease, J. (1985) The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charlestown, 1828-1843. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Penny, V. (1863) The Employments of Women: A Cyclopedia of Women’s Work. Boston Walker, Wise.Google Scholar
Pessen, E. (1973) Riches, Class and Power before the Civil War. Lexington, MA: D. C Heath.Google Scholar
Phillips, W. (1818-1819) “Account of servants.” Willard Phillips Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.Google Scholar
Porter, S. (1984) “The Benevolent Asylum—image and reality: The care and training of female orphans in Boston, 1800-1840. Ph.D. diss., Boston University.Google Scholar
Rorabaugh, W. J. (1986) The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Ryan, M. (1981) Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Salmon, L. M. (1897) Domestic Service. New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Stansell, C. (1986) City of Women, Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Strole, C. (1986) “‘Beyond one’s control’: Life course and the tragedy of class, Boston, 1800 to 1900.” Journal of Family History 11: 43–54.Google Scholar
Sutherland, D. (1981) Americans and Their Servants. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Thernstrom, S. (1973) The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1900. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tryon, R. (1917) Household Manufacturers in the United States, 1640-1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
United States Census, Schedule 1 (1850).Google Scholar
Vinovskis, M. (1972) “Mortality Rates and Trends in Massachusetts Before 1860.” Journal of Economic History 32: 184–212.Google Scholar