The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860 By Barbara Welter

The attributes by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her
neighbours and society could be divided into four cardinal virtues-piety, purity,
submissiveness and domesticity

"It is, however, certain, that in whatever situation of life a woman is placed from her cradle
to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind,
are required from her.

Woman said the physician, with clinical precision that the woman has a head almost too
small for intellect but just big enough for love.

The debate over women's education posed the question of whether a "finished" education
detracted from the practice of housewifely arts. Again it proved to be a case of semantics, for
a true woman's education was never "finished" until she was instructed in the gentle science
of homemaking.

WOMEN, WORK, AND PROTEST IN THE EARLY LOWELL MILLS: "THE

OPPRESSING HAND OF AVARICE WOULD ENSLAVE US" By THOMAS DUBLIN

Before 1850 the textile mills of Lowell women comprised most of the workforce. Adjacent to
the mills were rows of company boarding houses and tenements which accommodated most
of the eight thousand factory operatives. In 1834 and 1836 they went on strike to protest
wage cuts, and between 1843 and 1848 they mounted petition campaigns' aimed at reducing
the hours of labor in the mills.

It will examine the basis of community in the experiences of women operatives and then the
contribution that the community of women made to the labor protests in these years as well as
the nature of the new consciousness expressed by these protests.

Mill agents assumed an attitude of benevolent paternalism toward their female operatives,
and found it particularly disturbing that the women paid such little heed to their advice. The
strikers were not merely unfeminine, they were ungrateful as well.

The Ten Hour Movement (1840s), seen in these terms, was a logical outgrowth of the
unsuccessful turn-outs of the previous decade. Like the earlier struggles, the Ten Hour
Movement was an assertion of the dignity of operatives and an attempt to maintain that
dignity under the changing conditions of industrial capitalism. The Lowell Female Labour
Reform Association was organized in 1845 by women operatives

The Association was affiliated with the New England Workingmen's Association and sent
delegates to its meetings. It acted in concert with similar male groups, and yet maintained its
own autonomy. An important educational and organizing tool of the Lowell Female Labor
Reform Association was the Voice of Industry, a labour weekly published in Lowell between
1845 and 1848 by the New England Workingmen's Association. Female operatives were
involved in every aspect of its publication and used the Voice to further the Ten Hour
Movement among women.

Repeated labor protests reveal that female operatives felt the demands of mill employment to
be oppressive. At the same time, however, the mills, provided women with work outside of
the home and family, thereby offering them an unprecedented. That they came to challenge
employer paternalism was a direct consequence of the increasing opportunities offered them
in these years. The Lowell mills both exploited and liberated women in ways unknown to the
pre-industrial political economy.

WOMEN AT WORK: THE TRANSFORMATION OF WORK AND COMMUNITY IN

LOWELL

The focus of the scholar is on the experiences of the first generation of American women to
work outside of the home setting, examining, in turn, their newfound independence, the
unprecedented demands industrial capitalism placed on them, and women’s responses to the
changing order in which they lived and worked.