Women writers and the female experience during the American industrial revolution

Women Writers and the Female Experience during the American Industrial Revolution

With the changing environment resulting from the American industrial revolution, the roles of the American worker were evolving drastically. This change effected many aspects of the American social climate, particularly manifesting in changing working roles for American women. Though many of the jobs available were factory jobs, many American women started to gain ground in this changing workplace.

This development for women in the workplace was crucial in the development of the women's rights movements. The experience for women in the workplace from a literary standpoint often portrayed women as a backdrop, performing light factory work that men did not want to do or felt was in line with what was considered “women’s work.” The documentation of this work was often written from outside perspectives. As stated by Judith Ranta in the book Women and Children of the Mills,

“Well into the nineteenth-century the typical factory work schedule for men, women, and children was twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week. Therefore, writing time had to be wrested from scant leisure moments, after days spent in noisy stifling, dangerous mills. (Ranta 1998).

Much of what we know of early nineteenth century women writers and the experience of working during the American industrial revolution is written by the middle class and not the working class. The female factory worker experience has been uniquely documented through the turn of the century writer Betty Smith in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. This excerpt taken from Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn details the first-day experience of the main character Francie, as she works in a factory where they make wire flowers in New York in the early 1900’s:

You’ve got the idea now,” said the forelady to Francie. “You’ll make a good stemmer in time.” She went away and Francie was on her own; the first hour of the first day of her first job.
Following the forelady’s instructions, her left hand picked up a foot length of shiny wire. Simultaneously her right hand picked up a narrow strip of dark green tissue paper. She touched the end of the strip to a damp sponge, then, using the thumb and first two fingers of each hand as a rolling machine, she wound the paper on the wire. She placed the covered wire aside. It was now a stem.
Francie’s back hurt and a shooting pain ran through her shoulder. She must have covered a thousand stems, she figured. Surely it was time for lunch. She turned around to look at the clock and found that she had been working just one hour!
“Clock watcher,” commented a girl derisively. Francie looked up, startled, but said nothing.
She got a rhythm to her work and it seemed to come easier. One. She set aside the covered wire. And a half. She picked up a new wire and a strip of paper. Two. She moistened the paper. Three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten. The wire was covered. Soon the rhythm became instinctive, she didn’t have to count and it wasn’t necessary to concentrate. Her back relaxed and her shoulder stopped aching. Her mind was freed and she started to figure things out.
Soon even the speeding up became automatic and again Francie’s mind was free. Covertly, she studied the girls at the long table. There were a dozen of them, Poles and Italians. The youngest looked sixteen and the oldest, thirty, and all were swarthy. For some unaccountable reason, all wore black dresses, evidently not realizing how unbecoming black was to dark skins. Francie was the only one wearing a gingham dress and she felt like a silly baby. The sharp-eyed workers noticed her quick stares and retaliated with their own particular brand of hazing. (Smith 1943)

This passage highlights many unique aspects of the female working climate. Whereas male factory work was often individualized, female factory workers typically labored in large groups. Female factory work was often thought of being performed with hands whereas male factory work was often done with backs. This passage highlights the often competitive nature of the work among women and the often hostile environment women worked in and against each other.

Betty Smith’s novel is unique in that it depicts a female character as the foreground for the novel instead of a backdrop. This is an important development for women writers and workers during this time period as it provided a literary base from which women moved from more romantic aspects of late eighteenth century literature to creative non-fiction that depicted a much more realistic portrayal of life for the working woman.

Though Smith’s book has stood out as an example of literary excellence for decades, the story of Francis has often been described as a stereotypical poverty based hero’s journey. Though this aspect of the novel appeals to a broader audience, it does not incorporate or lend itself to literary critical analysis simply because there has never been an academic audience for women’s factory work literature. It is only within the last two decades that this kind of literature has been re-explored. An excerpt taken from Women and Children of the Mills: An Annotated Guide to Nineteenth-Century American Textile Factory Literature states,

“This material gives the present-day reader access to the experience and mentality of the mill workers, and, with corporate and technological history, draws a multi-faceted and complex picture of the process of industrialization of nineteenth-century America. It would be more accurate, however, to say that this rich store of material is a potential source of enlightenment, since is remains largely unexplored by literary scholars and critics. (292)”

Betty Smith was often questioned as to whether the main character was in fact a portrayal of her own life or of that of a completely fictional character. Smith never directly answered the question but her biography provides many similarities between that of Betty Smith and Francie. As stated in a biography of Betty Smith taken from http://web.njit.edu/~cjohnson/tree/bio/bio.htm,

“One of the strengths of Betty Smith’s novels are that they provide concrete descriptions of the conditions of everyday working life in various blue and white collar jobs throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. In that sense she serves as a cultural historian, documenting a social reality about which few authors had first hand experience: the lives of working women in early twentieth-century New York.”

A unique aspect of Smith’s work (as well as the most controversial) is that it comes from first-hand working knowledge. Though there are many creative non-fiction pieces during this time period that describe the women factory worker, Smith’s portrayal provided a realistic approach to creative non-fiction, developing her audience to a much wider range. Smith does this by writing Francie’s story as a hero’s journey, and portrays Francie as incorporating many aspects of the lucrative American dream during this time period.

Liela Rupp writes in the article Reflection on Twentieth-Century American Women’s History,

“The nineteenth century emerges from historical scholarship as a dynamic period in which the process of industrialization transformed women’s work and family roles. Research on nineteenth-century American woman has shed light on a variety of topics previously unexplored and, more important, has led the way in defining the themes and conceptual frameworks of women’s history.” Through further analysis over a wider range of texts, this aspect of literature could be explored in much more depth as well, developing a literary base from which to explore this aspect of women’s history.

References

• New Jersey’s Institute of Science and Technology, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” New Jersey’s Institute of Science and Technology,

http://web.njit.edu/~cjohnson/tree/bio/bio.htm,

• Ranta, J. 1999. Women and Children of the Mills: An Annotated Guide to Nineteenth-Century American Textile Factory Literature. Westport: Greenwood Press.
• Rupp, L. 1981. Reflections on Twentieth Century American Women’s History. Reviews in American History 9 (2): 275-284.
• Smith, B. 1943. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. New York: HarperCollins.