One of the most striking features of working-class history from the 1870s to the 1890s is the presence of a vibrant, cohesive, even ‘universal’ working-class culture, paradoxically distributed in separate, localized, occasionally competing forms of social organizations and customs. The gulf between working-class and middle-class values, behaviors, and everyday life was perhaps greater than at any time before or since; and it occasionally surfaced in dramatic confrontations with the industrial order. Yet due to the uneven development of the country, the recruitment of different immigrant groups to different industries at various points in the evolution of work relations and housing stock, divisions between skilled and unskilled workers, and other cleavages, the working-class ethic assumed divergent cultural and political forms. The middle class confronted – and workers operated within – a multiplicity of working-class cultures. These comprised a clear-cut alternative to bourgeois individualism and work patterns without coalescing into a unified national movement that could sustain a political and economic challenge to the emerging industrial order. ‘This moral universality amid the particularities of the workers’ daily sectoral struggles’ was the peculiar characteristic of late-nineteenth-century labor.1
The absence of a unified ideological or structural challenge to American capitalism should not be confused with lack of militancy. As Steven Ross points out: ‘In the two decades after the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, with its grand celebration of American industry and progress, there were more strikes and more people killed or wounded in labor demonstrations in the United States than in any other country in the world.’ Over the course of the period, as we shall see, a greater sense of class solidarity was forged, culminating in the Great Upheaval of 1886. But while this upsurge changed the terms of debate and struggle within American industry, labor was unable to maintain its organizational and ideological gains after 1886. (Ironically, by the end of the 1890s more effective national organizations and campaigns were being built, but many of the values and institutions that had challenged bourgeois cultural hegemony steadily eroded, and the ‘moral universality’ was ‘ruptured.’)2
To understand the role of the family in the working class during the Gilded Age, it is necessary to grasp both the specificity – even fragmentation – of working-class experience and organization and the universality of working-class values. There was tremendous variety in the work experiences of the wage-earning population. In industrial cities such as Philadelphia and Detroit, marked variation was the norm in the scale of firms, rates of pay, application of mechanical power, the proportions and relationships of skilled and unskilled labor in any industry, and the organization of production and authority within various work settings. American industries tended to have far greater pay differentials between skilled and unskilled workers than prevailed in Europe, while other aspects of industrial employment also varied. Textile mills in Massachusetts regulated the work pace and even the personal lives of their employees in strict detail, but they also put up with high employee turnover and rehired workers who had left without proper notice. European observers were amazed by the extent to which speed-ups and sobriety had been imposed on American textile workers: cotton workers in the 1870s operated four looms instead of the two worked by their English contemporaries. Yet as late as 1904 managers gave in to workers’ tendency to vote with their feet by closing down the mill on the day the circus came to town. The Winchester Repeating Arms factory in New Haven, Connecticut, began to require on-time attendance only in the 1890s, while skilled iron- and steelworkers set their own hours and hired their own help.3
These differences hampered the emergence of movements that could raise demands or coordinate actions extending beyond a craft or local community. Although local communities, especially in smaller, one-industry towns, often provided some support for workers’ demands against absentee capitalists, this usually occurred on the basis of older, ambiguous republican slogans or on a new consciousness of ethnic homogeneity. It thereby imposed limits on the growth of workers’ organization and class consciousness. While the petty bourgeoisie sometimes aided workers by blocking elite projects, ‘the ideological and programmatic influence of such a political force on the workers was certainly at least as pervasive as the obstacles it raised to the wishes of the industrialists.’4
David Roediger has shown that the St Louis General Strike of 1877 failed in part because its unrepresentative leadership – disproportionately composed of skilled workers, small proprietors, professionals, and white-collar workers – refused to mobilize unskilled workers or to sanction the widespread cooperation of Blacks and whites that occurred at the rank-and-file level. Identification with local institutions, he argues, encouraged some labor reform but also ‘limited the tactical flexibility of labor organizations by committing them to a local boosterism shared with the upper and middle classes.’ This divided skilled workers from the ‘underclasses’ and accentuated racism ‘as a means of expressing those workers’ inclusion in the community by dwelling on the otherness of Black workers….’5
The tremendous divisions between big cities and small towns also impeded solidarity. In places such as Rochester, even the Knights of Labor ‘desired social harmony and wished to preserve the sense of individual moral accountability possible in a small town.’ Despite the radicalism of full-time organizers, local groups were likely to join Knights of Labor head Terence Powderly in condemning militant actions in the big cities.6
Even the strongest protest movements in small towns rarely mounted a supra-local challenge to business interests or to the two-party system; and working-class political alignments were often cross-cut by conflicts over cultural or local issues, especially as immigration mounted. In the big cities, politics was based on the ward system and its patronage apparatus. Machines filled the gaps left between the private sector and government, and bosses parleyed local constituencies and favors into particularistic power bases. Labor often found itself unable to compete with these machines. In addition, the waves of immigrants that poured into the larger cities entered the workforce at different places and with a different set of experiences: factors that initially prevented their collective identification, as well as setting them apart from small-town workers. These conditions are reflected in the way contemporaries, both pro- and anti-labor, usually talked about the working or producing classes.
Over the course of the century, America recruited the bulk of its working class through immigration. While the majority of manual workers in America were native-born, many came from recently immigrated families, and first-generation immigrants – one-seventh of the population – were more than two-fifths of the workers in manufacturing and extractive industries. Immigrants made up a majority of the workforce in some of the larger cities, and their ethnic characteristics often seemed to determine their lives and values more than their occupational experience. This has led some historians to elevate ethnicity above class in discussing American family history.
Certainly each group of immigrants drew on its own heritage to develop distinctive work and family patterns, and ethnic divisions frequently cut across class solidarities. But ethnicity cannot be readily or rationally disentangled from class in American history. Ethnicity was fundamental to the making of the American working class, not a historically separate feature laid on top of or opposed to class formation. Most ethnic subcultures evolved out of the working-class experience of immigrants, ‘and people did not divide ethnic and class feelings into separate components in their minds.’7
True, there were important variations in family and gender patterns by ethnic group. While many differences between immigrants and native-born Americans – and among different immigrant groups – are explicable by economic and demographic factors, important cultural differences are equally evident, especially for females. One study, for example, found that non-ethnic variables accounted for all the so-called ethnic differences in labor-force participation for boys, but not for girls. Girls from immigrant families started work and left home earlier than girls from native-born families, but there were also variations among immigrant groups. Irish women tended to withdraw more completely from paid employment after marriage than did Germans. German immigrants tended to socialize in family groups, while Southern Italians maintained stricter sex segregation. Polish families tolerated children’s peer groups far less than did Irish, Italian, or black families. Italian mothers who had to work outside the home chose cannery and field work over factory work because it permitted them to work alongside their children. Polish women preferred domestic work to factory work after marriage, while Jewish women avoided domestic work and sought industrial employment, whether at home or in the factory. Immigrant groups had different propensities to purchase their own homes, in part because of different experiences of proprietorship in Europe. Immigrant families consistently had higher fertility rates, higher rates of child labor, and lower percentages of non-kin living with them than did natives. Multivariant analyses of such patterns generally find that ethnic differences ‘remain significant even after allowing for the varying occupational distribution.’8
But the same study that judged ethnic differences more significant than occupational ones also found that only 8 per cent of the Irish and 6 per cent of the Canadian household heads examined, as opposed to 34 per cent of the native-born, were non-manual workers. Immigrants were so overwhelmingly working-class that their tiny ‘middle class’ was not in any way comparable to the native-born middle class. Most immigrants who rose to middle-class status did so through manipulating their working-class environments, becoming petty landlords, shopkeepers, or ethnic power brokers. This led them, regardless of occupation, to share the class and cultural characteristics of their neighborhoods, giving an impression of independence to “ethnic” factors that actually reflected a particular group’s location in the larger industrial system. Another study purporting to show the impact of ethnicity after ‘controlling’ for occupation found that literal location in the city greatly modified even supposedly ethnic patterns in fertility. Micaela di Leonardo points out that ‘the households that immigrants formed, while labeled by themselves and others as “ethnic,” varied greatly depending on region, era, and economic circumstance’ rather than flowing from some constant cultural ‘tradition.’9
Differing ethnic patterns, moreover, should be related not just to premigration values but to separate times of arrival, conditions of leaving the old country, and points of entry into American industry, all of which fit groups into the labor market and housing system in distinctive ways. Different nationalities arrived with dissimilar skill levels and age or gender distributions, as well as disparate values, and these interacted with the particular state of the housing stock, the configuration of the labor market, and the reaction of previous arrivals to forge ethnicity and class together. Immigrants drew on older cultural patterns in adapting to their new conditions, but they drew selectively, often recasting their old values considerably or highlighting characteristics that had not been predominant in the old world.10
If ethnicity and class cannot be disentangled in their origins they also served overlapping functions, as sources of mutual aid, joint action, and collective identification against bourgeois individualism. Nevertheless, unions and cultural/ethnic institutions were often alternative ways of responding to the pressures on workers in America and of organizing to meet their needs. Sometimes ethnic ties could facilitate labor solidarity. German bakers in Chicago, for example, first organized successfully because they could count on local support from fellow Germans in their neighborhoods for boycott and label campaigns. Such successful organization in turn allowed the bakers to recognize that the growth of larger bread manufactories required supra-local and intra-ethnic institutions. Jewish solidarity provided a powerful radical base for organizing in the New York garment industry. Sometimes, however, even groups that built a common cultural community outside of work competed with each other on the job market, while in other areas workers called united job actions but failed to build solidarity outside the workplace.11
Up until 1880, many ethnic areas were merely small enclaves – perhaps a block or two – that maintained their links to the larger working-class communities of which they were a part. In Philadelphia, industrial affiliation rather than ethnicity remained the ‘primary organizing factor’ in white residential patterns. In Lynn and Pittsburgh, a centralized working-class district helped overcome differences among the waves of ethnic groups that poured into various levels of the factory, allowing ethnicity to complement rather than compete with class organization. At Fall River and Worcester, on the other hand, scattered mills and housing concentrations reinforced the divisions introduced by segregated hiring practices and led to deep divisions within the working class. In many areas ethnic divisions deepened in the late nineteenth century, as ‘increasing class segregation of housing was overlaid by simultaneously expanding ethnic differentiation.’12
Immigrant families, then, faced special circumstances and created varied strategies for coping with them, while the working class often divided along ethnic lines. But in analyzing the changing patterns of family life in the nineteenth century, it is possible – perhaps even necessary – to discuss immigrant families as part of a general working-class configuration, remembering that they tended to be found in the lower occupational strata. As Richard Ostreicher comments: ‘Each of the ethnic working-class cultures included components of mutualism, solidarity, and egalitarian politics which provided the basis for a common ground on which they might come together….’13 Each also had family structures and strategies that are best explained by their articulation with the industrial system.
The black family, however, despite its almost completely working-class character, requires distinctive treatment, for the position of black workers in the industrial system was qualitatively different from that of other ethnic groups. Their residential patterns, unlike those of the Irish, Germans, and native whites, cannot be explained by their industrial position; they seldom had access to factory jobs except when temporarily imported as strikebreakers; and new immigrant labor, far from pushing native-born Blacks up in the occupational scale, generally pushed Blacks out of the industry or job category entirely. Not surprisingly, Blacks developed some special family patterns which deserve separate consideration. We will return to the black family after examining white working-class families.
For all the differences outlined above, working-class people shared many common experiences and values which imparted a distinctive cast to their family patterns, despite important variations by occupation and ethnicity. The majority of the working class lived very close to minimum levels of subsistence. Forty per cent of industrial workers fell below the poverty level of $500 per year; another 45 per cent barely stayed above it. Another 15 per cent comprised highly skilled workers, usually Protestant and native-born, who might earn two to three times this amount. But the exceptionally high pay that could be earned by skilled workers did not always compensate for other aspects of the American industrial system – seasonal layoffs, no public social security measures such as pensions or unemployment compensation, no national labor party, unsafe working conditions, and possibly a harsher attitude than elsewhere in the industrializing world toward welfare for men (though not for women and children, who were ‘allowed’ to be dependent in proportion as men were required to be independent). The cumulative impact of all this, claims Peter Shergold, was that by the early twentieth century even skilled workers’ higher pay and greater social mobility still left American workers as a group behind their British counterparts. The British worker
generally had longer leisure time … ; he was far less likely to be killed or maimed while at the workplace; he labored under less pressure: and he was provided with superior social services and facilities – hospital accommodations, city-based unemployment benefits, garbage collection, park space, and so on.14
Earnings of male workers, moreover, especially for manual workers but also in the skilled trades, peaked very early, leaving families vulnerable as the father aged and the children left home. A ‘man of 23 earned as much as or more than a man two score years his senior.’ In Michigan, only 5.2 per cent of the workers surveyed in 1885 had savings accounts to help them through layoffs, illnesses, or old age. In addition to these shared insecurities, most workers also encountered authoritarian or arbitrary treatment on the job, increasing pressure to conform to industrial discipline, and numerous attempts at paternalistic control over their leisure lives. They simultaneously gained common experiences in organizing to resist such control, both at work and in their communities.15
Another common experience for American workers was geographic mobility. Population turnover in the cities, small as well as large, seems to have ranged from 40 to 60 per cent in any decade during the nineteenth century. Such high transiency rates may have hampered the consolidation of working-class political and union institutions in some ways, but they also helped to establish a universal working-class culture, marked by an openness to newcomers and a recognition of the need to give and receive aid through associational networks and personal hospitality. Much migration was organized through kinship or ethnic networks, while some was a result of occupational and labor solidarities. Migration was also not simply a one-way, one-time process. Communication and assistance flowed in both directions and set up far-reaching linkages among working-class people.16
The effect of these common experiences on working-class family life was twofold. On the one hand, reliance on distinctive family strategies was greatly reinforced; on the other, there was a constant need to look beyond the family for other sources of aid and solidarity. Like the middle-class family, the working-class family in the nineteenth century was the primary source of class reproduction. Working-class status translated directly into specific family strategies and family position greatly influenced an individual’s place within the working class. The family, moreover, was the main institution available to cushion the shocks of a deflationary period in which falling profit rates led to cut-throat competition, frequent layoffs, and attempts to impose more control over labor.
Low rates of pay, chronic economic and personal insecurity, and the lack of developed state or trade union institutions to provide social welfare measures ensured that the working-class family had to organize itself as an economic unit, closely coordinating its reproductive and domestic strategies with its position in industrial production. In some factories, especially the mills, families contracted to work together. The male might be paid the wages for the entire family and be held responsible for supervising their behavior on the job. Many industrial enterprises recruited labor through the extended family networks of immigrant males, while in the sweated trades whole families worked together on various parts of a product that was being made on piecework terms. Even in areas where families did not work together, most working-class families required one or more secondary earners in order to make ends meet. Child-rearing strategies and husband–wife interactions had to reproduce ‘a collective family economic unit.’17
For unskilled and semi-skilled workers, high fertility rates were a rational response to the problem of declining income for an ageing father. Among French-Canadian textile workers, ‘one child wage earner could boost the family income, on average, by more than half, and two child wage earners could double it.’ Among these workers, large families were the most likely to escape poverty.18 In other industries too the employment of children could allow the family to buy a house, which would then serve as security when the father’s income fell off and the children had left the family. It is no wonder that birth rates rose among unskilled and semi-skilled workers in this period, independently of religion and national origin.
In many industrializing cities, ‘ethnicity became an increasingly important factor in fertility. The reason, however, rested not in culture but in the dominant class position of different ethnic groups’:
The great rise in Irish Catholic fertility was at least in part a function of its working class character, and the decline among the Scottish Presbyterians, English Methodists, and Canadian Protestants related to the prominence of business-class occupations among them. Ethnicity, in short, served as a mediator between class and fertility.19
While most working-class families put their children to work early, they were unlikely to have the wife working outside the home unless the husband were incapacitated in some way. First-generation immigrant wives often worked, but second-generation immigrant families tended to withdraw wives from the paid labor force. Although this is sometimes interpreted as assimilation, it can be more plausibly explained by the exigencies of life in working-class America, where the sharp split between domestic and productive work and the lack of national social security systems or large-scale workers’ aid organizations required a full-time worker in the home if wage-earners’ returns were to be translated into a minimum level of comfort and long-term security. As Michael Haines observes: ‘Child-rearing was apparently an adequate substitute for a wife’s labor-force participation outside the home and … a good investment for later stages in the life cycle.’20
We have already noted Jeanne Boydston’s calculation that a woman’s work inside the home, prior to the Civil War, had more value than her potential earnings outside. This conclusion would apply equally to the postwar period, given the continuity of wage differentials by gender and the failure of new technology to ease household chores and food preparation. The wife who stayed home, coordinated the schedules of the working members of the family, made their clothes and food, and possibly took in boarders or did home work as the children aged might contribute more to the family economy than one who worked for wages that were often less than a third of men’s. As late as 1905, a national survey found that women’s wages averaged $5.25 a week. Assuming year-round full employment, seldom possible for women, their average yearly wage would have been $273.00. When one considers that the work week necessary to earn this sum was often sixty hours, it seems likely that the income earned by a working wife would not equal the extra expenditures on clothes, transportation, food, and cleaning that would have been necessary to maintain a barely comfortable living. Unless the family was living substantially below subsistence (as were many Blacks), the family was better off having the wife free to prepare food, keep house, and perhaps earn a little extra money by taking in boarders or doing some piecework on the side.21
Homemaking in the nineteenth-century working class was still a full-time job. Many working-class families, even in the cities, had to grow at least part of their own food, because of the prohibitive cost of fresh vegetables. As late as 1890, half the families in the main centers of coal, iron, and steel employment kept livestock or poultry, grew vegetables, or both. Almost 30 per cent grew enough food so that they purchased no vegetables other than potatoes. Of 7,000 working-class families interviewed between 1889 and 1892, fewer than half purchased even prepared bread. Other prepared foods were beyond the means of most working-class families. The housewife, consequently, was involved with food preparation on an almost full-time basis. Workers could seldom afford ice boxes – ice alone cost 42 cents a week in Pittsburgh – nor could they afford to buy larger, theoretically more economical quantities of food, so that marketing and cooking had to be done almost daily. Margaret Byington’s 1910 study of the steel town of Homestead found that twenty-one of the ninety families spent less than the 22 cents per person a day estimated to be the rock bottom figure for adequate nutrition. The average expenditure was 24 cents, leaving most families a ‘surplus’ of only 2 cents. Survival on such budgets required careful, constant work, and a housewife might increase the real income of her family more by staying home and devoting herself to such work full-time than by going out to look for a job.22
Susan Strasser has pointed out the limited diffusion of nineteenth-century technology into most American households. Few homes had the mechanical cooking or cleaning devices that were illustrated in popular journals. Laundering was an arduous and time-consuming task, requiring hours of work even for the few who owned machines. The job must have been particularly demanding when the family included workers in heavy industry. In Pittsburgh, working-class homes in the 1880s had no indoor water. Women had to haul water by hand for every task, from cooking to cleaning, and then dispose of it afterwards. Wood and coal stoves required hours of tending and cleaning, while the soot they produced made general housecleaning a formidable undertaking. In 1893 the Commission of Labor revealed that only 47 per cent of New York City’s families, 30 per cent of Philadelphia’s, 27 per cent of Chicago’s, and 12 per cent of Baltimore’s had inside toilets. In the New York City tenement district of the 1890s, only 306 of 255,000 residents had access to bathtubs.23
In these circumstances, working-class families who wished to maintain a modicum of cleanliness or to eat nutritious and adequate meals would, if they could afford to, assign a full-time worker to household tasks. Given the higher wages of the husband and the earnings advantage of youth, this was most likely to be the wife.
The day-to-day economic dependence of family members upon one another created strong pressures against individualism and toward family solidarity. Such solidarity extended beyond the nuclear family. Contrary to older myths, immigrant extended family networks were not broken up by the process of migration or the transition to industrial work. Such networks were often the impetus to and the means of migration; family connections determined where immigrants would live and helped newcomers adjust to city life, while links with the community of origin were maintained to the extent that many migrants sent remarkably high proportions of their wages back to relatives they had left behind. Evidence suggests that immigrant families were more cohesive in America than in the Old World, as they settled together, sought work together, extended the length of parent/child co-residence, and often incorporated other kin into their households. Immigrants, of course, were especially likely to work at piecework or home industry, thus reinforcing extended kinship networks, but extended family networks were important among the entire working class, for males as well as females. Most visiting and vacationing, for example, was done in the homes of relatives.24
The same factors that strengthened general reliance on family strategies prevented the nuclear family from operating as an entirely independent unit, even where kin were not present: ‘The prevailing native middle-class culture stressed the value of independence and self-reliance, but even workers who fully believed in these virtues could never know when they, too, would need the help of neighbors, friends, or fellow workers.’25 In consequence, the working-class ethos extended beyond job-related acts of solidarity – supporting strikes, boycotts, and associations – to less formal means of sharing resources, even with newcomers seeking work. As we shall see, working-class families made fewer divisions between family and street life or public and private roles than did middle-class families, though they drew sharper distinctions between work life and personal life. They did accept a clear division of labor on the basis of gender, however, and often formulated it in terms of domesticity.
The working-class family partook of several elements associated with middle-class domesticity: the wife seldom worked for wages outside the home; a gender-based division of labor prevailed in the family and the workforce, defining men as producers and women as potential wives and mothers; and home-ownership was an important value often linked to ideas about the sanctity of the home. ‘Next to being married to the right woman,’ editorialized the Ontario Workman in 1872, ‘there is nothing so important in one’s life as to live under one’s own roof.’ The author then waxed eloquent in his dramatization of what home-ownership meant to a working-class wife:
We have our cosy house; it is thrice dear to us because it is our own. We have bought it with the savings of our earnings. Many were the soda fountains, the confectionery saloons, and the necessities of the market we had to pass; many a time my noble husband denied himself the comfort of tobacco, the refreshing draught of beer, wore his old clothes, and even patched-up boots; and I, O me! I made my old bonnet do, wore the plainest clothes, did the plainest cooking; saving was the order of the hour, and to have ‘a home of our own’ had been our united aim. Now we have it; there is no landlord troubling us with raising the rent, and expecting this and that. There is no fear in our bosom that in sickness or old age we will be thrown out of house and home, and the money saved to pay rent is sufficient to keep us in comfort in the winter days of life.26
In the absence of social security, home ownership could mean the difference between a comfortable old age and a miserably impoverished one. Since male earnings dropped sharply with age and few pension plans existed, such sacrifices to buy a home were rational and even imperative, despite the fact that they frequently meant pulling children out of school to maximize purchasing power for the home.
This is not to deny a partial acceptance of middle-class values here. Religious and political organizations stressed economic individualism and the possibilities of upward mobility. Upper- and middle-class women influenced working-class women and children in their role as Sunday school teachers, charity workers, or even employers of maidservants.27 Perhaps even more important was the exceptionally strong and pervasive presence of a lower middle class in America and the real, if limited, possibilities for advancement into white-collar work. The earnings advantage of skilled over unskilled labor created a small group of workers who could afford some of the comforts of middle-class domesticity and who undoubtedly spread such values and aspirations to other sections of the class. It is also worth remembering that middle-class domesticity, in its original form, was critical of excessive accumulation, ambition and individualism – values that would have resonated positively for working-class people.
But it will not do to see working-class family values and organization as a mere reflection or even creative adaptation of middle-class values. First, many working-class family values and practices, such as early employment of children, insistence on the role of active leisure in personal life, and toleration of youthful peer groups outside the family remained remarkably distinct (even though they were later adopted – and reworked – by the middle class). Second, even practices and values that were similar in form possessed a very different content.
The demand for a family wage, for instance, did not necessarily originate in acceptance of middle-class values about woman’s sphere. One possibility is that withdrawal of the wife’s labor may have been a more or less conscious attempt to resist the exploitation of the family. Hans Medick has commented that the early phases of capitalist expansion rested ‘on an increasing exploitation … of the total family labour force.’ As competition reduced returns to labor the preindustrial family typically increased its expenditure of labor, falling back on ‘self-exploitation’ to ensure the subsistence of the family. Although Medick is here talking about handicraft production, so that his remarks apply particularly to home industries in nineteenth-century America, the same principle operated in many early factories, where men could not earn enough to support their family without mobilizing the labor of other family members.28 Withdrawal of wives from the workplace and the use of domestic ideology to demand a family wage may have represented one attempt to break this pattern, especially as changing technology and increased employer control over work led to a deterioration in the wages and working conditions of industries that had initially offered relatively good opportunities for women workers.
Skilled workers had another reason to oppose the employment of women. It was not simply male prejudice which led to the charge that women were often hired to undercut male wage rates. Women were certainly not hired because employers wished to affirm any commitment to sexual equality or female capacity. They were hired only where and when they could be paid less than men. The employment of women often led to a decline in wage rates for the entire industry involved, as with the transition to a female labor force in the clerical field. Given the craft-union mentality of the time, the logical response of organized workers was to attempt to exclude the cheap competition, and many wives probably acquiesced in this primitive attempt to maintain their husbands’ wage rates. The probability that this consideration weighed more heavily than simple male prejudice is supported by the fact that male unionists often worked amicably and showed strong solidarity with women workers who were not directly competitive with them, as in the shoe industry.
Of course, the exclusion of women from jobs was not a long-term solution to employers’ attacks on workers’ living standards, given the unequal power of craft unions and industrial employers. A craft organization that successfully limited entrance to the trade and maintained high wages was soon likely to find its entire craft obsolete, as employers substituted new jobs or mechanized the task completely. The only long-run solution, as some women and men began to recognize in the 1880s, was to eliminate the source of cheap labor and strikebreakers by achieving equal pay. Nevertheless, in the context of the nineteenth-century labor movement, poorly organized and divided along craft and ethnic lines, most working men responded to the problem of competition from cheap labor by attempting to exclude women (and Blacks or Chinese) from the labor force. The reluctance of men to have their wives work was thus a logical – if ultimately ineffective – response to a real problem, not merely an irrational patriarchal prejudice.
Martha May argues that the demand for a family wage originated among male and female workers, against middle-class, employer, and state opposition. It ‘represented a dual claim to subsistence and industrial justice to its early advocates,’ as well as a desire to remove the power of economic and social superiors over the working-class household. Clearly the demand did not benefit working women, especially single or widowed ones, in the way it benefited working men: it adopted the limiting theory of the fundamentally different natures of men and women, elevated the male public role, and obscured the productive activity of women in the household. ‘But gender divisions remained subordinate to class claims; the working-class family ideology continued to be qualified by its emphasis on subsistence, justice and the demand for better hours and wages,’ unlike the middle-class family ideology, which explicitly made domesticity a substitute for labor reform or modification of the market system. ‘The arguments for the family wage invoked the interests of the entire family, thus going beyond a simple assertion of gender privilege.’29
Unlike middle-class domesticity, which reduced morality to gender roles, the working class used gender roles to raise larger issues of industrial justice and social democracy. In the radical union town of Cripple Creek, for example, ‘Miners opposed capitalism partly because it forced women to work and destroyed the home’; they justified unionism on the basis that it made a dignified life possible for families. Only in the twentieth century was the family wage demand transformed by Progressive reformers and conservative unionists into a cross-class issue that divided workers on the basis of gender more than it furthered the aims of class autonomy.30
Similarly, working-class rhetoric about the sanctity of the home had an entirely different content than did similar sentiments in the middle class. The home, argues Linda Schneider, was ‘a symbol of autonomy’ for working-class people, a place where workers could assert their own standards of comportment, escape factory regulation, and resist middle-class interference into their leisure life. It was also a counterweight to the opportunities and pressures in industrial society that might lead individuals to abandon class and family obligations.31
The sexual division of labor within the working class, and the ideologies of male and female spheres, could actually elevate labor solidarity outside the home. Where men and women were not in competition for jobs, for example, their sense of mutual dependence and complementary roles could heighten labor militancy. In Louisville, male spinners and female weavers cooperated in labor organization and militant strike activity; women’s labor efforts garnered strong support from the male labor movement during the 1887 woolen strike. In Troy, ideas about proper work for men and women helped to create an economy based on male labor in the iron foundries and female work in laundering, but the fact that most female industrial workers were single or widowed allowed an ideology of the domestic family to coexist with support for women’s economic rights. Many of the predominantly Irish women among the Troy collar laundresses were the sisters, daughters, or in-laws of male ironworkers, and the powerful male union movement in Troy showed them what organization could do. The Troy Collar Laundry Union, organized in 1864 by Kate Mullaney, was strong enough by 1866 to donate $1,000 to the Iron Molders’ Association when ironworkers were locked out by their employers. The laundrywomen organized a strike in 1869 and received in their turn substantial financial and organizational support from the Troy Molders and several New York City Unions. (The invention of a new paper collar, however, which threatened the very existence of the collar laundresses, gave employers enough leverage to break the strike.) Carole Turbin suggests that the strong labor community in Troy was supported by the sexual division of labor in both the city and the home:
Since the city was dominated by two industries, one employing women and the other employing men, when men went out on strike they could rely on the earnings of female family members in the other industry and vice versa…. [T]he relationship between industrial structure and family patterns is an important part of the explanation for Troy’s strong labor community.32
During the latter part of the nineteenth century women proved again and again that acceptance of prevailing gender distinctions did not necessarily moderate militancy. In 1875 the male textile workers at Fall River voted to accept a pay cut announced by the employers. The women held their own meeting afterwards and voted to strike, on their own if necessary. The men then reversed their decision, joined the women, and together the men and women of Fall River won their strike. In the 1880s, women members of the Knights of Labor led militant strike actions that earned them the praise of Terence Powderly, head of the Knights, as ‘the best men in the Order,’ a phrase that evidently did not rankle as it would today. Women also used the ideology of gender to shame men into taking part in strikes or to get away with actions for which men might have more readily been shot, such as harassing militia members, crossing military lines to run messages for strikers or bring supplies, and tossing strikebreakers into ditches or subjecting them to the ‘water cure’ – dowsings in buckets of cold water. Moreover, as we have already seen, where men and women did not manage to cooperate, a shared sense of gender could occasionally reinforce and harden the class solidarity of women workers. ‘We are a band of sisters,’ wrote a mill operative in the Voice of Industry, ‘we must have sympathy for each other’s woes.’33
Still, it would be wrong to romanticize working-class domesticity any more than middle-class domesticity, or to deny the ultimately conservatizing effects of the Victorian sexual division of labor in the working class. Steven Dubnoff has found that among Lowell mill workers, parents had a much greater tendency to work consistently whatever the wage rate (though women were absent more often then men), than non-parents; single boarders tended to trade extra income for leisure, taking more absences when they received more pay. Parents, in other words, were forced to develop a ‘moral orientation’ toward work, while boarders, both male and female, were ‘strongly calculative’ in absenting themselves from work once immediate economic ends were met. Daniel Walkowitz also points to the conservative role of the working-class family in the Gilded Age: it was ‘a relatively small private-interest group … [that] filled the normative role of accommodator, while … the neighborhood usually remained the arena for collective organization.’34 The self-sacrifice of the wife at home – some accounts even indicate that women denied themselves food to feed male workers – gave her little of the middle-class woman’s ‘expanded sphere,’ while the ‘privileges’ of the male worker also forced him into steady employment, limited his mobility, and hampered his ability to stay out on strike.
Parents were not the only ones constrained by family responsibilities. Many young people sacrificed their personal dreams of education or independence to work for the family unit. The role of secondary wage-earners in the family, especially when they were young women, also inhibited labor organization. The majority of the female industrial workforce prior to 1920 was composed of young single women living with their parents. On the one hand, since they were not primary breadwinners, they were not forced to organize in order to survive; on the other inasmuch as their small wages made the difference between family subsistence and absolute poverty, these women faced many pressures to keep on working whatever the conditions and pay. A study of Italian women in industry, undertaken between 1911 and 1913, found that two-thirds of the workers were under twenty-one and more than 80 per cent lived with a parent or parents. Almost all simply turned their pay checks over, unopened, to the head of the family. Such women were unlikely to be able to resist family pressures against striking or other activities that might jeopardize the family’s weekly subsistence. Many females shared the situation of thirteen-year-old Fannie Harris, who testified before a New York legislative committee on female labor that she had been earning $2 a week, for sixty hours’ work, at a necktie factory:
Q. What did you do with that two dollars? A. Gave it to my mamma.
Q. Did your mamma give you anything to spend? A. Yes, sir … two cents every week …
Q. Have you got any older brothers and sisters? A. I have an older sister.
Q. Does she work? A. Yes, sir.
Q. Does your mamma work? A. Now she ain’t working because I am working, but before, when I didn’t work, she worked …
Q. Does your papa do anything; does he work? A. Yes, sir; he works, but just now he is not at work – he is sick.35
Adopting domesticity was in some ways, then, a defensive maneuver with long-run disadvantages. It was a response partly to the deterioration of working conditions for women, partly to the threat of industrialization to skilled craftsmen, and partly to the failure of middle-class women to address the special needs of women workers. As May points out, ‘the family-wage ultimately … worked against the interests of working-class men, women and families, by accepting and deepening a sexual double standard in the labor market.’ The double standard allowed the state to forestall union demands by granting charity to women without ‘providers’ and employers to hold down women’s wages on the grounds that they worked for ‘pin money.’ It also gave some women an incentive to act as strikebreakers or non-union workers. Finally, the double standard closed off opportunities to explore alternative family and gender roles within the industrial working-class that might have strengthened working-class solidarity. By the early twentieth century, indeed,
Middle-class social reformers and activists came to embrace the family wage as a means of restoring social-stability, while some employers recognized its possibilities as a means to control and divide labor. At the same time, within the ranks of organized labor, the family wage increasingly became a defense of gender privilege. Defense of gender privilege, in turn, was closely connected to a craft exclusiveness that hampered male organizing as well as female.36
The most important thing to grasp about working-class domesticity and family life, however, whatever their pros and cons for labor organizing, is that they had a different social content than did middle-class domesticity and family life. Working-class gender roles were not always as clearly divided, nor were they defined along the same lines, as middle-class ones. Although the separation of paid work and home life appeared earlier in the working class than elsewhere, this was not necessarily equated with the separation of male and female spheres. Home remained a center of important productive activity and of mixed-gender leisure activity for both men and women. The earliest working-class taverns, for example, were often located in private homes, and up through the 1870s much drinking ‘remained rooted in the … kitchen grog shop. The saloon, as a spatially distinct public and commercialized leisure-time institution, had not yet entirely triumphed.’37
City officials increasingly legislated against kitchen taverns and women liquor-sellers, thereby creating the very split between home life and male sociability that they later denounced, and encouraging the male saloon to develop as ‘the mirror image of the male factory.’ Yet like the factory, the public image of the saloon as a male preserve hid significant participation by women. Perry Duis denies that the saloon was
a uniquely male preserve. In small ‘ma and pa’ operations the wife was at home behind the bar as well as behind the stove preparing the free lunch…. The crusades against the dance hall and the white slave menace after 1900 also indicate that drinking became less sexually divided as the years passed, while Boston license officials fought a losing cause … to enforce temporary segregation-of-sex rules.38
Although some working-class wives complained of husbands who ran off to the saloon, in Boston and Chicago at least ‘Court statistics ranked drinking low on the list of causes of divorce.’39 Most working-class women seem to have had no objection to their husbands bringing home a bucket of beer from the local tavern. Home-based beer parties were quite common, with both sexes participating.
Under normal circumstances, the saloon was perhaps less a competitor to the working-class family than a necessary supplement to it. The majority of its regular clients were the bachelors who made up such a high proportion of the working-class city population. It provided these men with food, companionship, a mailing address, often even a place to sleep. Additionally, the saloon served certain functions for married men that were in the interests of the entire family – they provided free lunches or cheap breakfasts, information or even contracts for work, and political patronage. Finally, women also utilized the saloon, which was often rented out for social functions or meetings. Women as well as men bought beer or wine, usually in little pails to take home with them, though German beer gardens were gathering places for the entire family.40
Despite an ideology of male production and female domesticity, necessity often blurred the distinctions. Although married working women tried not to work outside the home they did much income-generating work within it, taking in boarders or lodgers, doing laundry, preparing food goods for sale; and the cash raised in these ways was often an important component of the family’s budget. Working-class families were also far more vulnerable than the middle class to economic and personal catastrophes that might force a wife into wage-work. Working-class men and women blamed the capitalist, not the woman, when married women had to work. Few derogatory comments about the lack of femininity of women workers, no matter how dirty and arduous their work, are to be found in working-class writings.
Although distinct male and female networks existed in the late-nineteenth-century working class, comments Kathy Peiss, ‘there was no simple or rigid gender-based dichotomy between public and private realms of leisure.’41 Part of the reason for this was the increase in young women working outside the home. By 1890 nearly four million women, almost one in seven, were so employed, one million of them in factories. The proportion of working women in domestic service shrank from 50 per cent in 1870 to 38 per cent in 1890. These women had a period before marriage when they worked and socialized, and might even live, away from their families and in contact with young men of their class.
Ironically, the lack of physical amenities in working-class homes and the greater amount of housework to be done there may also have diminished the distance between male and female responsibilities:
In the 1880s, when the first modern investigations of working-class family life were undertaken by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, one of the findings that most shocked and dismayed the middle-class male investigators was that working-class men would cook, clean, and care for the children while their wives were at work and they were not.42
When housewives got sick in urban tenements, someone had to haul water, dump excrement, and tend the fire; the working class did not have servants to protect men from these realities.
As we have seen, there were important limits on the privacy of the middle-class family. Male business and female kin networks cut across the couple relationship, while the family often felt it had to live its life on display, proving to neighbors, peers, and social superiors its ‘respectability’ and conformity to middle-class standards. Yet the middle-class family also emphasized economic privatism, put itself forward as a self-sufficient unit, and sanctioned a degree of ambition for individual mobility, at least for males. The working-class family, by contrast, did not put forward privacy or escape from community obligations as an ideal. The boundaries of the nuclear family, both conceptually and physically, were far more fluid than in the middle class.
Conditions of life in the industrial working class strongly militated against a withdrawal into the nuclear unit. We have already noted the increase in extended families and subfamilies between 1850 and 1880 in urban, industrial areas. Boarding and lodging seem to have increased for the working class as well. Once characteristic of the middle class, these became in late-nineteenth-century cities more of a working-class phenomenon, though particularly associated until the end of the century with native-born Americans. (Newly settled cities in the West, however, tended to follow older patterns, where boarding and extended families were more common among affluent sectors of the population.) The incidence of boarding or lodging at any given census was 15 to 20 per cent (more in the cities), but a substantial majority of native-born workers probably lived in such settings at some time in their life, for boarding was associated with what some authorities call the life cycle but might be more usefully termed the job cycle. Working-class youths tended to lodge when they were selecting among occupations or establishing themselves in the job. After gaining a family, a steady job record, and a home, they were more likely to take in boarders.43
The choice of boarding over residence with relatives is sometimes interpreted as preference for an economic transaction over an affective relationship, but this seems dubious, since lower-class families who lived together also had to operate on economic principles in order to survive. (Family sweatshops in which children as young as four or five had to work all day, pasting roses onto hats or fetching materials, can scarcely be offered as examples of affective relationships.) More likely, the prevalence of boarding among the native-born working class testifies to occupational and ethnic solidarities (the match between boarders and household head was close in both categories) and to the greater income security of these workers: boarding seems to have offered an institutionalized way of progressing from mobile worker to settled household head while receiving the financial benefits of co-residence. Immigrants, on the other hand, until the turn of the century were less likely to take in boarders than to share housing with relatives. The difference is probably related to the divergent job experiences of these members of the working class. Immigrants tended at first to fill low-skilled jobs involving entire families, or to work in preindustrial jobs as family units. Such families would naturally tend to live together. It was also more difficult for low-paid immigrant workers to establish the independence to become or take in boarders.44
Although increasing numbers of white-collar workers lived a significant distance from their workplaces, most blue-collar workers continued to live within a mile of their jobs, often within a block or two. With fellow workers nearby, crowded and uncomfortable tenement apartments, and little money to spend on travel even for day trips, working-class men, women, and children did much of their socializing out of doors:
Streets served as the center of social life in the working-class districts, where laboring people clustered on street corners, on stoops, and in doorways of tenements, relaxing and socializing after their day’s work…. [O]rgan grinders and buskers played favorite airs, itinerant acrobats performed tricks, and baked-potato vendors, hot-corn stands, and soda dispensers vied for customers. In the Italian community … street musicians and organ grinders made their melodies heard above the clatter of elevated trains and shouting pushcart vendors, collecting nickels from appreciative passers-by. Maureen Connelly, an Irish immigrant, remembered listening to the German bands that played in Yorkville…. ‘Something was always happening,’ recalled Samuel Chotzinoff of his boyhood among lower East Side Jews, ‘and our attention was continually being shifted from one excitement to another.’45
The lack of separation between family and neighborhood life in the working class helps to explain the fact that the sexual division of spheres was different, and often less rigid, than in the middle class. Some areas of recreation were gender-specific (more of these for men than for women). A male leisure culture grew up around cigar stores, barber shops, workingmen’s or ethnic societies, and saloons. Women often combined domestic chores with social time by doing laundry in tenement yards or congregating at the pumps and fire hydrants where they got their water; they also simply hung out on stoops or fire escapes while their children played nearby. But the separation of working-class men and women should not be exaggerated. Many men brought beer home for socials with kin and neighbors, and ‘workers who were too tired, poor, or temperate [to go to taverns] “congregated in groups on the leeside of some house”….’ Interestingly, George Bevans’s 1913 study of New York workmen found that the higher-paid native-born workers, not the immigrants and unskilled laborers, spent the least amount of leisure time with their families. This contradicts the usual portrayal of immigrant and manual laborers as particularly ‘macho’ and patriarchal in comparison with more ‘enlightened’ natives.46
For the many working-class couples who spent a majority of their leisure time in each other’s company, family recreation was seldom confined to the nuclear unit. When families were not socializing outdoors they might set up evenings at another family’s apartment. These often involved shared housekeeping or cooking by the women alongside male card-playing. In an article derived from her detailed investigation of life at Homestead in the early twentieth century, Margaret Byington offers us a glimpse of life in the courtyards of working-class housing, where women exchanged pleasantries as they did their wash and waited to use the pump, men gathered to play cards on summer evenings, and on pay Saturdays households pooled funds to buy beer and socialize.47
Boarding and lodging ensured a turnover of unrelated people within the household and seem to have contributed to labor solidarity in working-class communities. In many nineteenth-century labor disputes, for example, the fact that workers boarded in other workers’ homes ensured strong community sympathy for a strike and facilitated mutual aid during hard times. Even in expanding rural towns where families were experiencing a contraction in the yards where neighbors had formerly gathered, porches became places of neighborhood sociability. In Middletown, the Lynds found that it was only the ‘business class homes’ that began after 1900 ‘to divert the money formerly put into front porches to … other more private and more often used parts of the house.’48 These ‘business class’ families were to become increasingly worried by the continuing sociability of lower-class households: the turn of the century saw a concerted effort to impose middle-class ideals of privacy on lower-class families.
Meanwhile, however, most working-class families provided little space for privacy and next to no support for personal ambition and individual mobility. Wages were pooled within the household, and the educational prospects or future earnings of children were often sacrificed to the security of the family unit. And not only that of the co-residential family: between 1851 and 1880, Irish immigrants sent $30 million back to the Old Country through the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank of New York alone. Immigrants also financed local churches with donations that represented an extremely high proportion of their income.49
Gender divisions within the working class, moreover, were less connected to the aim of family self-sufficiency than in the middle class, and more rooted in a mutualistic tradition of reciprocity that put group solidarity above family ambition. Where the middle-class cult of domesticity supported rather than challenged the world of business and the free play of the market, the working-class cult of domesticity sometimes complemented and extended union organization or worker resistance to the industrial order. In the 1880s, for example, the Knights of Labor set up cooperative laundries and stores to socialize women’s work. The Knights also organized picnics, sociables, and railroad excursions that ‘brought the family together within the context of the wider working-class movement. For all their talk of “hearth and home,” the Knights of Labor conceived of the family, not as an isolated haven from the world, but rather as the cornerstone of the working-class community.’ Leon Fink argues that the Knights
beckoned both to wage-earning women and workingmen’s wives to join in construction of a ‘cooperative commonwealth,’ which, without disavowing the Victorian ideal of a separate female sphere of morality and domestic virtue, sought to make that sphere the center of an active community life.50
If working-class manliness meant, as in the middle class, the ability to work hard to support a family, it also meant meeting one’s responsibility to the labor movement and standing up for workers’ rights. If working-class womanliness meant – as in the middle class – being a good wife and mother, it could also mean being a dedicated ‘union girl.’ The female members of the New York Knights of Labor, in a nice blend of gender and class solidarity, passed this resolution:
whenever the Knights of Labor girls went to a picnic or ball they were to tell all the brother Knights that none of the latter were to walk with a non-union girl in the opening promenade so long as a union girl was without a partner. Should any male Knight violate this rule, all the girl Knights are to step out of the promenade and boycott the entire crowd.51
One of the major differences between working-class and middle-class family life in the nineteenth century lay in the former’s active opposition to industrial values. While the middle class organized its domestic affairs to produce a sanitized, idealized version of the bourgeois work world, the working class pioneered what has become the modern split between personal life and work activities. The split between work and leisure (often formulated as a split between work and life) is not precisely identical with the division between male and female spheres. Indeed, this split has since come to blur many of the older divisions between these spheres.
I have argued that the nineteenth-century middle-class family excluded the cross-class interactions and conflicts of the industrial world but governed its relations according to industrial notions of time, work discipline, property rights, and economic privatism. Children were introduced to wage-work and profit notions through allowances tied to the performance of certain tasks and by rewards for saving. Middle-class authors such as Louisa May Alcott recommended that children be taught the principles of business on a small scale by selling produce from their own garden spots, receiving object lessons on the value of capital accumulation, and acquiring their own little savings banks. Working-class families, age roles, and gender divisions, we have seen, were clearly opposed to such notions. In important ways, working-class personal life ignored time discipline, downplayed private accumulation, and rejected the division of life into separate arenas of work and play, effort and relaxation, competition and cooperation, amateur and expert. The divorce of personal life from work principles raised the possibility that working women could claim a share of personal life; and a mixed-sex leisure culture had begun to develop by the end of the century.
‘Long in advance of the hesitant middle-class recognition of the claims of leisure,’ comments Daniel Rodgers, ‘workers dreamed of a workday short enough to push labor out of the center of their lives.’ Two major crusades for the eight-hour day were launched in the late 1860s and 1880s respectively.52 The second provoked bloody repression and led to a number of changes in class strategy on both sides. Meanwhile, though, workers implemented in daily life what they were unable to win formally.
When workers could no longer drink on the job, they drank on their breaks – as ostentatiously as they could manage. Enterprising young boys picked up ‘growlers’ from workers, filled them with beer, and carried them back on long poles to the factory gate in time for lunch breaks, receiving a penny each for their efforts. Away from work, working-class leisure activities were characteristically strenuous rather than contemplative, and generally hostile toward middle-class values and practices. Theaters attracted a male, working-class audience quite unlike the female, middle-class audience that patronizes plays today. Audience participation during the acts was the rule, not the exception. Francis Couvares writes that working-class sports such as racing, boxing, bowling, and ball games ‘demanded no clear separation between professional and amateur’ and that ‘most music-making remained amateur through the 1880s.’53
Other areas of ethnic/working-class leisure revolved around Fourth of July activities, street festivals, and fairs that were generally far too boisterous and hostile to the rich for middle-class sensibilities. It was working-class and immigrant groups who first adopted participatory and competitive sports. Demands for public play areas also came from the working class, often against vehement opposition from the middle classes. Middle-class reformers responded by banning circuses from public property and positioning ‘Keep off the Grass’ signs in the parks.54
Ironically, many working-class conceptions of leisure were to be adopted by the middle and upper classes around the turn of the century, though only after their implied criticism of bourgeois individualism was blunted. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, was to link working-class notions of active sports to support for imperialism in speeches such as ‘The Strenuous Life’ (1902). Working-class sports such as baseball and boxing became professional, commercialized businesses. The theater gradually became a respectable place where matinees were attended not by unemployed workers and youngsters playing hooky from school but by middle-class women who politely kept their comments to themselves and saved their applause until the curtain.
Another area of difference between working-class and middle-class families in the nineteenth century was in workers’ development and toleration of a youth culture, which seems to have complemented rather than rivaled working-class community and family life. Youth peer groups were hated by civic authorities because they were able to express class hostilities without the restraints faced by their parents: ‘During strikes, these gangs would often gather at the factories, break windows, and join in harassing the scabs.’ Park reformer Frederick Law Olmstead contrasted the middle-class family scene – a ‘tea-table with neighbors and wives and mothers and children, and all things clean and wholesome, softening and refining’ – with such a working-class youth group, expressing the blend of fear and distaste they evoked in the middle class:
Consider how often you see young men in knots of perhaps half a dozen in lounging attitudes rudely obstructing the sidewalks, chiefly led in their little conversation by the suggestions given to their minds by what or whom they see passing in the street, men, women, or children, whom they do not know, and for whom they have no respect or sympathy. There is nothing among them or about them which is adopted to bring into play a spark of admiration, of delicacy, manliness, or tenderness. You see them presently descend in search of physical comfort to a brilliantly lighted basement, where they find others of their sort, see, hear, smell, drink and eat all manner of vile things.55
As Olmstead’s lurid portrayal reveals, the most visible of these groups were male. Girls tended to be more tightly controlled by their parents, though Kathy Peiss has recently argued that by the end of the century the growth in wage-work for single working-class women had provided them with incentive and opportunity to play a role in developing a newly autonomous leisure culture for working-class youth of both sexes.56
Many of these comments about working-class families apply equally to Blacks, who also had a rich community life, a strong youth culture, an orientation toward extended family networks, and values and behaviors clearly opposed to bourgeois individualism. But mention should be made here of the special characteristics of black families in industrializing America, particularly in view of persistent myths that black family and community life was destroyed by slavery and that the resultant ‘matriarchal’ structure of black communities resulted in a ‘tangle of pathology’ which prevented Blacks from achieving upward mobility. This alleged ‘disorganization’ of black culture and family life has been variously attributed to the ‘legacy of slavery,’ the disruptive effects of migration North, and a ‘culture of poverty’ caused by severe material deprivation but reinforcing that deprivation by creating ‘weak ego structure, confusion of sexual identity, a lack of impulse control, and … little ability to defer gratification and plan for the future.’57
Attacks on these stereotypes have come from many different angles. First, numerous researchers have demonstrated that Blacks developed their own culture and community both before and after slavery, maintaining group traditions while flexibly adapting and innovating where necessary. The rich community life constructed by Blacks in the period under consideration here is revealed in the list of groups that participated in the 1883 parade celebrating the twentieth anniversary of emancipation in the District of Columbia:
Hod-carriers Union (500 men), Sons and Daughters of Liberty (50), Fourth Ward Ethiopian Minstrels (26), West Washington Union Labor Association (40), Young Men’s Social Club, Washington Star Pioneers (20), Washington Brick Machine Union Association (16), Gay Heart Social Club, Cosmetic Social Club, the Invincible Social Club, Knights of Labor, East Washington Social Club, Knights of Jerusalem, Chaldeans, Knights of Moses, Galilean Fishermen, Sons and Daughters of Samaria, Osceolas, Solid Yantics, Monitor, Celestial Golden Links, Lively Eights, Imperials, Independent Fern Leaf Social Club, The Six Good Brothers, Twilight Social Club, and the Paper Hangers’ Union.
A newspaper reporter commented in the same year that there were approximately 100 black societies in Washington, D.C., ‘supported almost entirely by the laboring colored people.’58
Second, many researchers have argued that the incidence of broken and female-headed families among nineteenth-century Blacks has been exaggerated: two-parent nuclear families were in actuality the normal residential unit. Herbert Gutman reports that between 1855 and 1880, 70 to 90 per cent of black households were male-headed, and at least 70 per cent were nuclear. In Ohio, as well, most black households were nuclear and headed by males.59
However, it is important not to overstate the resemblance of black families to what has become the white, middle-class ideal. In Boston, Elizabeth Pleck initially reported that only 18 per cent of black families were headed by just one parent in the late nineteenth century, but more extensive research convinced her that this statistic seriously underestimated the extent of household dissolution. Pleck now estimates that about 25 per cent of black households in northern cities and 34 per cent of those in southern cities were female-headed during this period.60
What is at issue is the source of this phenomenon, and this brings us to a third critique of arguments about the legacy of slavery and migration: the important structural differences that did exist between black and white families cannot be attributed to either slavery or migration. In Boston and Philadelphia, the highest proportion of one-parent households was found among long-term residents rather than ex-slaves or migrants from the rural South. In both North and South female-headed families were associated with urban poverty, unemployment, and underemployment rather than with the heritage of slavery or the direct effects of migration.61
Between 1880 and 1900 the number of two-parent nuclear families among urban Blacks seems to have declined in at least some areas. Although this change is partly attributable to a rise in the proportion of female-headed households, the greatest single cause was increasing numbers of augmented households or subfamilies – a marked rise in the co-residence of black families and individuals. By 1905, in New York City, one out of 7.9 black households included a subfamily, compared to one in 22.9 for Jews and one in 11.2 for Italians, while female-headed households represented 17 per cent of the black total and 7 per cent for both Jews and Italians. In New York, the proportion of nuclear families among Blacks had declined to 49 per cent by 1905; in Richmond it had fallen to 40 per cent by 1900. The decline in the proportion of nuclear families began earlier in Philadelphia, and centered in the poorest section of the black population. By mid century, almost one-third of the families in the poorest half of the black community were headed by women.62
Differences in black family structures, then, were direct consequences of urban poverty. Clearly, the viability of a household dependent upon a central male breadwinner declined for many Blacks during the second half of the nineteenth century. The most probable reason for this development is the increase in unemployment, underemployment, and job discrimination for black males. Job opportunities ‘narrowed both relatively and absolutely’ for northern and southern Blacks in the latter part of the century. In Buffalo, Blacks were driven out of skilled occupations between 1855 and 1905 and were hit harder than other groups by the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s. In Birmingham, Alabama, Blacks ‘were constantly pushed out of various occupations toward the bottom of the occupational hierarchy.’ Throughout the South, ‘traditional black artisanal skills, which had reached a high point in the late eighteenth century and were maintained throughout the antebellum period by free Negroes, were liquidated in the last decades of the nineteenth century.’63
The exclusion of Blacks from skilled trades and even factory work led to poverty and unemployment that undoubtedly made it necessary for many families to pool their resources and for others to split up, as members went different directions in search of work or security. It also produced high mortality rates for black males and led to diseases such as tuberculosis, which caused sterility among black men and women. Childless marriages were more likely than others to be dissolved. The increase in female-headed families also reflected a different consequence of racism: while black men suffered from constant unemployment, black women were able to find jobs in domestic service as white women domestics moved on to more desirable office and manufacturing jobs.
Elizabeth Pleck argues that at least in northern cities, it was the virulence of racist discrimination rather than the failure of Blacks to adopt middle-class values that best explains the high rates of marital dissolution in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, she suggests that the adoption of mainstream values was part of the problem rather than the solution, for the realities of racial discrimination made such values unrealistic guides to family life and caused strain in many marriages.64
The distinctive history of Blacks in America, compared to other ethnic groups, illustrates a point made by Eric Wolf about the different functions of racial and ethnic categories in the modern world:
The function of racial categories is exclusionary. They stigmatize groups in order to exclude them from more highly paid jobs and from access to the information needed for their execution…. While the categories of race serve primarily to exclude people from all but the lower echelons of the industrial army, ethnic categories express the ways that particular populations come to relate themselves to given segments of the labor market.
Thus, despite discrimination, ethnic groups in America have over time achieved at least limited job and residential mobility. Segregation and concentrations of poverty, however, have increased among Blacks over time, and this has required them to adopt qualitatively different coping strategies than those used by immigrant workers.65
We should regard those different coping strategies, however, less as a sign of disorganization than reorganization of family life. For the final critique to be leveled against the theorists of black family ‘pathology’ is that their assumptions about what is ‘normal’ and ‘functional’ are seriously flawed. Carol Stack and Demetri Shimkin have shown that the extended family networks of both northern and southern Blacks in the twentieth century provide flexible, effective ways of building community while coping with poverty and discrimination. That such networks functioned similarly in the nineteenth century is illustrated by James Borchert’s study of alley residents in Washington, D.C. Other studies reveal that black families maintained far tighter and more supportive kin ties than other urban families, more frequently taking care of elders, paupers, and orphans within the family rather than institutionalizing them.66
As in other sections of the working class, family life among Blacks, whether one- or two-parent, nuclear or extended, did not develop in isolation from the community; nor did it mirror the fragmentation of life characteristic of industrial capitalist society. Borchert writes that black Washingtonians ‘turned the alley into a commons where children could play safely, adults could lounge and talk, and people could even sleep on hot summer nights.’ Although ‘outsiders were made to feel uncomfortable,’ residents developed a strong community life, based on ‘clear lines of social order’ and expressed in extensive social rituals such as those around death and hospitality:
Extended kinship networks and the incorporation of friends and neighbors into the family made it difficult to determine where the family ended and neighborhood or community began. The distinction between work and recreation was also unclear in the alleys, if only because there was little time for activities that did not add to the family’s limited resources. Children’s work was also play, ‘Some women regard housework as a form of recreation,’ and men fished for both sustenance and pleasure.
Alley dwellers also ‘drew no sharp lines between the sacred and the secular. Like everything else in alley life, religion and folklife were intertwined almost completely.’67
The ways in which necessary adaptations to poverty interacted with creative innovations in family life and sex roles are well illustrated in the history of black women and children. As Eugene Genovese has pointed out apropos the slave community, far from there being a debilitating black matriarchy, male and female relations may have been healthier than in much of white society. Jacqueline Jones argues that after Reconstruction black women continued to play a leading role in work and community-building, helping black families to develop work patterns that gave them at least some independence from white interference. Nineteenth-century black children’s commitment to both work and education suggests that if anyone had a problem with weak ego structure it was the overprotected, passive children of the white middle-class families described by Sennett in Chicago.68
In the late nineteenth century many more black wives worked than white: Approximately 20 per cent of married black women worked for wages, in contrast to only 4 per cent of married white women. Elizabeth Pleck has examined different possible reasons for this and suggested as one possibility ‘that black women’s wage earning was a means of coping with [black men’s] long-term income inadequacy.’ Although other working men faced low wages and chronic unemployment, they had some possibility of wage raises over time. Jobs available to black men, by contrast, ‘were more often dead ends.’ Claudia Goldin reports that her research might support either ‘the hypothesis that black women worked to enable sons to remain in school or the hypothesis that they worked because their children were discriminated against in the labor market.’ The difficulty black children had in finding jobs certainly reinforced an emphasis on education: history bears out modern assertions by Blacks that they have to be twice as qualified as whites to earn almost as much. Even today, for example, Blacks with four years’ college education earn an average of $800 less per year than white high school graduates.69
Although poverty, discrimination, and commitment to children’s education explain much of the tendency for black wives to work, they do not account for all of it. Black wives were more likely to work than white wives from the same income level. This may have been due partly to realistic fear of discrimination and partly to a greater need to protect the family against the strong probability of downward mobility. But it may also have reflected a self-confidence and independence among black women connected to their central role in work and community, as well as an acceptance of and respect for that role by black men.70
A final characteristic of black families in the late nineteenth century runs counter to many impressionistic accounts: between 1860 and 1910 the fertility of Blacks was lower than that of their white neighbors in any given region except the South. And ‘by 1910 even southern blacks had lower levels of childbearing than did their white neighbors.’ Thus the high overall fertility of Blacks in the nineteenth century was a function of the fact that most Blacks lived in the South, a region whose economic and social characteristics tended to foster high fertility among most of its residents. In urban areas, black households were consistently smaller than white ones.71
The West is not often associated with the changes in class and family relationships we have been describing. Its image is one of heroic individuals escaping the constraints of both class and culture. Although most of these heroic individuals are male, some females have also begun to receive attention. Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Canary) served as an army scout and a Pony Express rider. Arizona Mary drove a sixteen-yoke oxen team for hire in the Southwest, while Mary Fields, an ex-slave, was a stagecoach driver carrying the US mail through Montana. Belle Starr became an outlaw folk hero. Etta Place, companion of ‘The Sundance Kid,’ planned many of the holdups in which he was involved and went to Argentina with Sundance and Butch Cassidy. Dona Tules, later known as Señora Dona Gertrudis Barcela, won fame as a gambler and ran her own luxurious gaming salon. Some women sought gold and adventure in such hazardous places as the Klondike. The Northwest Mounted Police reported that between 1897 and 1898, 631 women went through the Lake Tagish Post on the Yukon side of the Chilkoot and White passes.72
But these images obscure the central basis of western settlement – the process of capitalist industrialization which enmeshed the West in the same dynamic of class formation and gender roles as was evident elsewhere. The West was opened up by the railroads and the military more than by individual explorers and settlers. The Pony Express may be the outstanding symbol of western individual heroism, but it gave rise to more print than it ever carried, lasting only eighteen months before being replaced by the telegraph. Western settlement was dependent upon and shaped by the spread of industry and international commerce.
People who went West were predominantly middle-class in origin. The cost of moving West rose from about $600 in the 1830s to at least $1,500 at the end of the century. In neither period were these amounts of capital available to the ordinary working person. But the western experience did not re-create the middle-class family farms of the early republican period. Huge mechanized farms appeared almost from the beginning, wealthy ranchers hooked up with railroads and meat-packers to monopolize the best land and transportation centers, and speculators ended up with most of the land opened up by the Homestead Act. Scott and Sally McNall estimate that ‘probably less than one acre in nine went to the small pioneers.’73 Many settlers went broke and moved from failing farm to failing farm before eventually becoming wage-laborers. Those who were successful quickly created a new proletariat by importing Chinese and Mexican laborers.
Although single men predominated among migrants to the West during the first trip along the Overland Trail and during the Gold Rush years, most settlers moved in family groups, and neither the move itself nor the experience of living in the West fundamentally changed Victorian gender roles. The trip itself was probably the most difficult part of pioneering for women. A decision to move was usually made by men, while women dreaded leaving behind the company of friends and relatives, the sphere of religion and sisterhood that was their one source of self-esteem and autonomy in Victorian America. One westbound bride complained: ‘Nothing gives me such a solitary feeling as to be called Mrs. Walker…. My father, my mother, my brothers, my sister all answer to the name Richardson. The name W. seems to me to imply a severed branch.’74
Along the trail women’s worst fears were confirmed, as their possessions were the first to fall victim to the harsh exigencies of survival. The trail was littered with the remnants of women’s sphere: musical instruments, books, pictures, parlor furniture, knick-knacks, and china were sacrificed as the wagons had to be lightened. The bare necessities retained were, in the eyes of most women, men’s things: grain, livestock, tools.
An equally disturbing casualty of the trail was the Sabbath, by this time the one day on which women’s concerns and activities received deference. Women diarists invariably recorded their distress at the violation of this day. ‘Sabbath!’ exclaimed Velina Williams in her diary on 10 April 1853. ‘A beautiful morning. The wind lulled and it is decided we must cross the river. The waters … seemed to reproach us for disturbing them on this holy day.’75
The division of labor that defined male and female identities in Victorian America broke down along the trail, but only partly. While women took on men’s tasks, men seldom reciprocated. The result was that women often worked two jobs, fitting in the baking and laundering after camp was made. Kitturah Penton Belknap was uncharacteristically cheery in describing her duties along the trail:
When we camped I made rising [salt-rising bread] and set it on the warm ground and it would be up about midnight. I’d get up and put it to sponge and in the morning the first thing I did was to mix the dough and put it in the oven and by the time we had breakfast it would be ready to bake. Then we had nice coals and by the time I got things washed up and packed up and the horses were ready the bread would be done and we would go on our way rejoicing.
Other women exhibited more resentment. One, driven beyond endurance, actually set fire to her husband’s wagon in an attempt to make him turn back.76
As the trip proceeded, women learned tasks generally associated with men in nineteenth-century America. They began to fell trees, make bullets, drive the wagons, help build bridges. The diary of thirteen-year-old Mary Alice Shutes described cherished breaks for fishing with her uncles. Mary Eliza Warner, aged fifteen, reported that she ‘drove four horses nearly all day’ and played chess with Aunt Celia, ‘which Mrs. Lord thought was the first step toward gambling.’ Lydia Waters recalled climbing trees with the boys and learning to drive an ox team.77
For the older women, however, the addition of men’s tasks was simply another burden. Rather than giving women a sense of self-worth and productiveness, sharing work on the trail simply threatened their self-image as women. Because the general social relations and values of Victorian America were not affected or even called into question by the relatively short trip west, the breakdown of women’s sphere was experienced as a loss rather than an expansion of woman’s role. Women gave up all that made them unique and special without gaining any voice or place of reference in the male world to which they were admitted as temporary laborers, ‘draftees rather than partners.’ Consequently, women were often embarrassed by their new skills and longed to reestablish the symbols of domesticity that reinforced their image as women. Lydia Waters recalled that an officer and his wife laughed behind her back about her oxen-driving, while Mary Ellen Todd remembered that her pleasure in learning to crack the driving whip was mixed with shame over the unladylike nature of this accomplishment. Women clung to the sunbonnets that kept their faces pale, and tried to prevent their daughters from picking up wild habits. In their role as keepers of life’s biological markers, women depressingly catalogued the deaths along the way and wondered who would be next.78
The scarcity of women in the West has been exaggerated, but in some places it was severe for a short period. In 1850 rural Oregon had 137 men for every 100 women, while Portland had three times as many men as women. Women were particularly rare in mining areas and frontier towns. California in 1850 had a population that was 90 per cent male. (In all these areas, however, the next twenty years saw the sex ratio come to approximate that in the East.) Some women found advantages in this initial imbalance. One woman recalled of California during the Gold Rush that ‘the feminine portion of the population was so small that there was no rivalry in dress or fashion, and every man thought every woman in that day a beauty.’ But many women felt deeply the lack of female friends and relatives. As a Nebraska woman complained: ‘We do not see a woman at all. All men, single or bachelors, and one gets tired of them.’ Moreover, many women discovered that the scarcity of their sex simply meant they had to assume ever more work. Abigail Scott Dunniway described life as a wife in a nineteenth-century Oregon community,
composed chiefly of bachelors, who found comfort in mobilizing at meal times at the homes of the few married men of the township, and seemed especially fond of congregating at the hospitable cabin home of my good husband…. To bear two children in two and a half years from my marriage day, to make thousands of pounds of butter every year for market, not including what was used in our free hotel at home; to sew and cook, and wash and iron; to bake and clean and stew and fry; to be, in short, a general pioneer drudge, with never a penny of my own, was not a pleasant business for an erstwhile school teacher….79
The initial gains of women entrepreneurs soon faded once men, with more capital and social clout, moved in on their fields. As mining faded, males displaced women on the job market, even in ‘women’s work,’ or at least took over ownership of the enterprises, reducing former proprietors to the status of hired hands. The few early prostitutes who amassed fortunes and ran their own brothels were replaced by women who were exploited by pimps and kept only a small percentage of their earnings. A good example of the transition can be found in the history of Chinese women in California. They were extremely rare, and a few of the earliest Chinese women settlers were able to profit from this. Ah-choi, the second Chinese woman to land in San Francisco, was a prostitute who became a wealthy businesswoman. Later prostitutes, however, came as imports under the control of male entrepreneurs who had kidnapped or enticed them, married them under false pretenses, or actually bought them from their families.80
For a few exceptional women, especially in the fluid early days of settlement, the West offered special opportunities. For many others, however, it simply isolated them from the privileges of women’s sphere without giving them the advantages of men’s. The contradictory effects of the West on women are best summed up in a comparison of work patterns in East and West. Fewer women worked outside the home in the West than in the East. In 1890, when 17 per cent of all adult women in the nation were gainfully employed, the percentage was only 13 in the western states. The largest group of employed women in the West comprised domestics, a fact no longer true by 1890 for the nation as a whole. Opportunities for factory and office work were far fewer. Yet western women were more highly represented in the professions than eastern women. While nationally only 8 per cent of working women were in the professions, 14 per cent of working women in the West filled these occupations. Furthermore, both Wyoming and California had laws requiring equal pay for male and female teachers.81
Divorce rates were higher in the West and coeducation was more frequent. Wyoming was the first state to give suffrage to women. Utah was next, and by 1914 ten of the eleven western states had granted women’s suffrage, compared to only one eastern state. Yet the leaders of the suffrage movement, even in the West, came from the East, and western newspapers often praised their women as ‘angels in contrast with their strong-minded sisters in the East.’82
If the move West occasioned little change in Victorian family and gender roles, however, it brought massive disruption to the Indians who lived there. The period from 1870 to 1890 saw the final displacement of the Indians, ending with the shameful massacre at Wounded Knee in December 1890. Whenever possible, Indians were forcibly and destructively ‘modernized’ through introduction of private property, destruction of communal institutions and rituals, and imposition of the nuclear family. The 1883 Dawes Act broke up Indian tribal lands and allotted them to individuals; the Indians, explained Senator Dawes, ‘needed to become selfish.’ The Bureau of Indian Affairs attempted to introduce competitive values to Indian children and push Indians into more individualized modes of subsistence. Extended kin networks and communal ties survived, of course, and in some cases were rebuilt in response to poverty and oppression, but the old unity between family ties and social production was broken, with often disastrous results for individual self-image and effective community action.83
The role of racism in the settlement of the West can hardly be exaggerated. Not only did it justify war against the Indians, it also worked against Mexicans and Chinese, leading to the Oriental exclusion movement of the 1880s and 1890s. As in the South, racism helped to disguise the area’s position as an internal colony of eastern finance; but above all, it cut across potential alliances between farmers and workers as well as hindering unity within the working class. The myth of western individualism also hurt such unity, creating a tendency for farmers’ protests to rather vaguely identify ‘monopoly’ as the enemy and to reject ‘class feeling’ as ‘subversive of the social order.’84
There were times, of course, when divergent family strategies, ethnic and racial divisions, and local or regional variations were transcended or fused into a larger expression of class solidarity and united action. In 1878 the Knights of Labor, initially organized as an underground union to avoid repression, came out into the open by holding a national convention. The Knights quickly moved to the forefront of attempts to organize workers across religious, ethnic, and even gender divisions. They tried seriously to build not only a unified working-class culture and movement, but alternative working-class institutions. In addition to the cooperative stores and laundries discussed above, they even set up assemblies that allowed workers to settle domestic and community disputes without depending on the bourgeois court system.85
The Knights supported equal pay for equal work and helped to organize a number of female unions and strikes. By 1886 there were about 200 women’s assemblies and 50,000 female members. The Knights also organized black workers, recording 60,000 black members by 1886. At the 1886 general assembly the convention set up a women’s department to organize women workers, investigate their special problems, and agitate for equal pay. Leonara Barry, an Irish woman who worked in a hosiery mill, became the Knights’ General Investigator for women workers, a job that included both education and practical organization. Meanwhile, both the South and the West generated important opposition movements in the 1870s and 1880s: the Granger Movement and Populism. At times these movements seemed on the verge of transcending racism, utilizing the talents of women, and linking up with the industrial working class.
In 1885 the Knights of Labor won a series of strikes in the Southwest and in 1886 they helped to spearhead a national movement for the eight-hour day. In city after city during that year, the working-class ‘subculture of opposition’ coalesced into stronger organizations, mass marches, huge strikes, and independent political action. Between 1884 and 1886, membership in the Knights of Labor jumped from 50,000 to 700,000. Labor tickets appeared in 189 towns and cities in thirty-four states and four territories, and the Knights claimed to have elected a dozen congressmen in the November election.86
Swift and violent repression followed, as the business and middle classes responded in shock and outrage to this evidence of working-class disaffection and potential power. Sean Wilentz has suggested that Haymarket was just the ‘beginning of what may some day come to be recognized as the most intense (and probably the most violent) counter-offensive ever waged against any country’s organized workers.’87 The fledgling movement proved unable to withstand the assault. Within a year membership in the labor movement had dropped precipitously; by 1894 the Knights of Labor were effectively finished. With them went many of the institutions and associations that had nourished class solidarity and opposition. These losses were to have momentous long-range consequences for the evolution of working-class family life.
The reasons for labor’s defeat were many: ethnic, craft, and ideological divisions played an important role, as did the gap between small-town labor movements and large-city ones, and the lack of a strong reform wing within the middle class. The ability of the American political system to absorb working-class leaders without adopting working-class programs was also a factor; most of the Knights’ political victories involved collaboration with one of the major parties. Leon Fink comments that ‘the dominant two parties emerged from this period with a stronger grip than ever on the working class. Ironically, a movement that began by defying the contemporary party system may in the end have left workers even more firmly within its confines.’ Mike Davis also directs attention to the emergence of a ‘spoils system’ for local craft unions within the big-city political machines: ‘The overall effect … was to corrupt labor leadership, substitute paternalism for worker self-reliance, and, through the formation of ethnic patronage monopolies, keep the poorer strata of the working class permanently divided.’88
Labor was not wholly crushed. The American Railroad Union led important struggles, culminating in the Pullman strike of 1894; western and southern miners organized; Troy Collar Workers struck successfully; radical German workers in the Midwest and Jewish immigrants in New York built working-class socialist movements; the United Garment Workers was organized; the American Federation of Labor made important gains. There were serious defeats, such as the Homestead and New Orleans strikes of 1892, but important links were forged between the Farmers Alliance and the labor movement, and in 1895 it appeared that a new national coalition between populism and labor might well sweep the country. Yet the coalition was derailed before it had been clearly established. Racism and ethnic divisions were critical determinants of this outcome. The southern elite orchestrated a vicious attack on the Black-white alliance that had begun to emerge in the South, legalizing or extending segregation and whipping up racist fears, while in the North, Law and Order Leagues cooperated with the American Protective Association (founded 1887) to blame immigrants for both economic insecurity and social unrest. At the same time, there was a strong move ‘toward depoliticizing reform from above’ – ‘divesting economic decision-making from locally elected officials to appointed bodies (e.g., planning boards, zoning commissions, or insurance and banking commissions) and to the courts.’89
The revival of racial segregation in the South, the diversion of western workers’ concerns toward Oriental exclusion, the narrowing of political demands to the call for free silver, and (after 1896) a significant increase in farmers’ real income tended to dampen discontent, split the movement along racial lines, and divide farmers from industrial workers. The result was that those left out of the capitalist expansion – in the factories, the South, and the West – did not overcome their differences enough to mount a coordinated challenge to the system that so many of them resented.
The labor movement divided into a dominant reformist and a minority radical wing (itself split along ethnic and ideological lines), while the Populist Party was compressed into the Free Silver campaign. The working class splintered electorally, some workers supporting the Republicans in reaction to the agrarian and nativist tone of the Democratic Party, others withdrawing from electoral participation entirely (or, as in the case of southern Blacks, being directly excluded from the polls). While workers remained willing to act militantly and to raise issues of working-class solidarity, ‘the responses to such appeals to class solidarity were quite mixed…. Workers were neither consistently class conscious, nor consistently lacking in class consciousness.’ Instead, ‘as the excitement passed and the reinforcing network of an oppositional subculture atrophied, class loyalties once again had to compete with other alternatives.’90
A revival of working-class organization was to come in the twentieth century, though the declining electoral participation of American workers, the split between radicals and reformists, and the growing dominance of incrementalists in the mainstream labor movement were to change the nature of working-class culture and the role of families within it. In the meantime, one immediate legacy of the Great Upheaval was that recognition of class stratification and conflict was forced upon middle-class consciousness. Middle-class readers rediscovered poverty and exploitation as serious issues; their concerns converged with those of far-sighted businessmen and politicians who realized that some of the most pressing grievances had to be met if larger and more successful social explosions were to be averted. Some of the earliest expressions of this new attitude were heard in cities that had experienced the most powerful outbursts during the Great Upheaval. Chicago civic leader Franklin MacVeagh, for example, ‘abandoned his 1870s property-based Tory conception of municipal politics and endorsed “the rational demands of the workingmen.… I believe in democracy and democracy is impossible if in the long run workingmen are not a part of its conservative support.”’91
The attempt to found a conservative support for American democracy in the working class was part of a general transformation of social reproduction that helped to reshape both working-class and middle-class families into a form at once more private and more closely connected to the state. The defeat of the Great Upheaval set the stage for that transformation.
1. David Montgomery, ‘Labor and the Republic in Industrial America, 1860–1920,’ Mouvement Sociale 111 (1980), p. 204.
2. Ross, Workers on the Edge, p.xvi; Montgomery, ‘Labor and the Republic,’ p. 211.
3. Bruce Laurie and Mark Schmitz, ‘Manufacture and Productivity: The Making of an Industrial Base, Philadelphia, 1850–1880,’ in Hershberg, Philadelphia, pp. 43–92; Katz, Social Organization, p. 1; Montgomery, Beyond Equality, p. 40; Richard Ostreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875–1900 (Urbana, 1986), pp. 4–13; Rogers, Work Ethic, pp. 24, 161, 163, 171; Berthoff, Unsettled People, p. 327.
4. David Montgomery, ‘Gutman’s Nineteenth-Century America,’ Labor History 19 (1978), pp. 428–9.
5. David Roediger,’ “Not Only the Ruling Classes to Overcome, But Also the So-Called Mob”: Class, Skill, and Community in the St. Louis General Strike of 1877,’ Journal of Social History 19 (1985), p. 227.
6. Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, 1983), p. 57.
7. Ostreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation, p. 60.
8. Lawrence Glasco, ‘The Life Cycles and the Structure of American Ethnic Groups,’ Journal of Urban History 1 (1975); Betsy Caroli, Robert Harney, and Lydio Tomasi, The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America (Toronto, 1979); Richard Erlich, ed., Immigrants in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Charlottesville, 1977); Charles Mindel and Robert Hubenstein, eds, Ethnic Families in America (New York, 1976); Cecyle Neidle, America’s Immigrant Women (Boston, 1975); Allen Davis and Mark Haller, eds, The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790–1940 (Philadelphia, 1973); John Bodnar, Immigration and Industrialization: Ethnicity in an American Mill Town (Pittsburgh, 1977); John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960 (Urbana, 1982); Judith E. Smith, ‘Our Own Kind: Family and Community Networks in Providence,’ in Cott and Pleck, Heritage of Her Own; Steven Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress (Cambridge, MA, 1964); Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo (Ithaca, 1977); Claudia Goldin, ‘Family Strategies and the Family Economy in the Late Nineteenth Century,’ in Hershberg, Philadelphia, p. 293; Mfanwy Morgan and Hilda Golden, ‘Immigrant Families in an Industrial City: A Study of Holyoke, 1880,’ Journal of Family History 4 (1979), p. 62.
9. Morgan and Golden, ‘Immigrant Families’; Clyde and Sally Griffen, Natives and Newcomers; Davis and Haller, Peoples of Philadelphia; Tamara Hareven and Maris Vinovskis, ‘Marital Fertility, Ethnicity, and Occupation in Urban Families: An Analysis of South Boston and the South End in 1880,’ Journal of Social History 8 (1975), p. 84; Micaela di Leonardo, ‘The Myth of the Urban Village,’ in Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson, eds, The Women’s West (Norman, 1987), p. 279.
10. Hershberg, Philadelphia; Anthony Broadman and Michael Weber, ‘Economic Growth and Occupational Mobility in Nineteenth-Century Urban America: A Reappraisal,’ Journal of Social History 11 (1977), p. 69; Ostreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation; Griffens, Native and Newcomers, pp. 259–60; Katz, Social Organization, pp. 80–81.
11. John Jentz, ‘Bread and Labor: Chicago’s German Bakers Organize,’ Chicago History 12 (1983), pp. 24–35; Edward Bunbys, ‘Nativity and the Distribution of Wealth: Chicago 1870,’ Explorations in Economic History 19 (1982), pp. 101–9; Dirk Hoerder, ed., ‘Struggle a Hard Battle’: Essays on Working-Class Immigrants (Dekalb, 1986).
12. John Cumbler, Working-Class Community in Industrial America: Work, Leisure, and Struggle in Two Industrial Cities, 1880–1930 (Westport, 1979); Francis Couvares, The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City, 1877–1919 (Albany, 1984); Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York, 1983); Bodnar, Immigration and Industrialization; Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream (London, 1986), p. 43.
13. Ostreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation, p. 61.
14. Trachtenberg, Incorporation, pp. 90–91; Peter Shergold, ‘“Reefs of Roast Beef”: The American Worker’s Standard of Living in Comparative Perspective,’ in Dirk Hoerder, ed., American Labor and Immigration History, 1877–1920s: Recent European Research (Urbana, 1983), p. 101.
15. Michael Haines, ‘Industrial Work and the Family Life Cycle, 1889–1890,’ Research in Economic History 4 (1979), pp. 289–356; Katz, Social Organization, p. 280; Ostreicher, Solidarity, p. 14.
16. Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress; Charles Stephenson, ‘A Gathering of Strangers?’ in Milton Cantor, ed., American Workingclass Culture (Greenwood, 1979); Tamara Hareven, ‘The Dynamics of Kin in an Industrial Community,’ American Journal of Sociology 84 (1978).
17. Cumbler, Working-Class Community, p. 118.
18. Francis Early, ‘The French-Canadian Family Economy and Standard-of-Living in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1870,’ Journal of Family History 7 (1982), pp. 184, 188.
19. Katz, Social Organization, pp. 336, 343.
20. Haines, ‘Industrial Work,’ p. 291; Carol Groneman, ‘“She Earns as a Child; She Pays as a Man”: Women Workers in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York City Community,’ in Milton Canton and Bruce Laurie, eds, Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker (Westport, 1977).
21. Boydston, ‘Her Daily Bread,’ p. 19; Strasser, Never Done; Elizabeth Butler, Women and the Trades, Pittsburgh 1907–1908 (New York, 1909), p. 337; Wertheimer, We Were There, p. 214.
22. Robert Smuts, Women and Work in America (New York, 1974), pp. 11–12; Susan Strasser, ‘An Enlarged Human Existence?’ and Never Done; Susan Kleinberg, ‘Technology and Women’s Work: The Lives of Women in Pittsburgh, 1870–1900,’ Labor History 17 (1976); Margaret Byington, Homestead: The Households of a Mill Town (Pittsburgh, 1974), pp. 72–4.
23. Strasser, Never Done; Ryan, Womanhood in America, p. 214.
24. Robert Bieder, ‘Kinship as a Factor in Migration,’ journal of Marriage and the Family 35 (1973); A. Gordon Darroch, ‘Migrants in the Nineteenth Century: Fugitives or Families in Motion,’ Journal of Family History 6 (1981); Lawrence Glasco, ‘Migration and Adjustment in the 19th Century City,’ in Hareven and Vinovskis, Family and Population; Eugene Litwach, ‘Geographic Mobility and Extended Family Cohesion,’ American Sociological Review 25 (1960); J.S. and L.D. Macdonald, ‘Chain Migration, Ethnic Neighborhood Formation, and Social Networks,’ Millbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 42 (1964); Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (Ithaca, 1977).
25. Ostreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation, p. 16.
26. Katz, Social Organization, p. 131.
27. On the role of upper class women as Sunday school teachers, see Wallace, Rockdale; for comments on the acculturation patterns connected to the high percentage of young immigrant females living in the homes of native-born employers, see Lawrence Glasco, ‘The Life Cycles and Household Structure of American Ethnic Groups,’ in Cott and Pleck, Heritage of Her Own.
28. Hans Medick, ‘The Proto-Industrial Family Economy,’ Economic History Review 3 (1976), p. 304. For a discussion of how the peasant immigrant family was susceptible to a special exploitation in American industry, see Bodnar, Immigration and Industrialization.
29. Martha May, ‘Bread Before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions and the Family Wage,’ in Ruth Milkman, ed., Women, Work and Protest (Boston, 1985), pp. 3, 6.
30. Elizabeth Jameson, ‘Imperfect Unions: Class and Gender in Cripple Creek, 1894–1904,’ in Cantor and Laurie, Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker, p. 175; May, ‘Bread Before Roses,’ pp. 2–21.
31. Linda Schneider, ‘The Citizen Striker: Workers’ Ideology in the Homestead Strike of 1892,’ Labor History 23 (1982), p. 63.
32. Nancy Dye, ‘The Louisville Woolen Mills Strike of 1887,’ Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 16 (1982); Carole Turbin, ‘Reconceptualizing Family, Work and Labor Organizing: Working Women in Troy, 1860–1890,’ Review of Radical Political Economics 16 (1984), pp. 9–11.
33. Foner, Factory Girls, p. 90.
34. Steven Dubnoff, ‘Gender, the Family, and the Problem of Work Motivation in a Transition to Industrial Capitalism,’ Journal of Family History 4 (1979); Daniel Walkowitz, Worker City, Company Town: Iron and Cotton-Worker Protest in Troy and Cohoes, Newark, 1855–1884 (Urbana, 1978), pp. 119–20.
35. Kessler-Harris, ‘Where are the Women Workers?’ p. 356; Ryan, Womanhood, p. 207; Louise Odencrantz, Italian Women in Industry, A Study of Conditions in New York City (New York, 1919); Smuts, Woman and Work, p. 43.
36. May, ‘Bread Before Roses,’ pp. 7, 8; Jameson, ‘Imperfect Unions’; Andrew Dawson, ‘The Parameters of Class Consciousness: The Social Outlook of the Skilled Worker, 1890–1920,’ in Hoerder, American Labor and Immigration History.
37. Rosenzweig, Eight Hours, p. 43.
38. Ibid., p. 45; Perry Duis, The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880–1920 (Urbana, 1983), p. 2.
39. Ibid., p. 108.
40. Ibid., pp. 148–9; Jon Kingsdale, ‘The “Poor Man’s Club”: Social Functions of the Urban Working-Class Saloon,’ in Pleck and Pleck, The American Man.
41. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the Century New York (Philadelphia, 1986), p. 26.
42. Zaretsky, ‘Place of the Family,’ p. 217.
43. John Modell and Tamara Hareven, ‘Urbanization and the Malleable Household: An Examination of Boarding and Lodging in American Families,’ in Gordon, Family in Social-Historical Perspective; Strasser, Never Done, pp. 150–52; Hareven, ‘Family as Process.’
44. Modell and Hareven, ‘Urbanization and the Malleable Household,’ pp. 54, 55, 66, n. 10.
45. Sam Bass Warner, Street Car Suburbs: The Processes of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, MA, 1962); Hershberg et al., ‘“The Journey-to-Work”: An Empirical Investigation of Work, Residence and Transportation, Philadelphia, 1850 and 1880,’ in Hershberg, Philadelphia; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, p. 13.
46. Cumbler, Working-Class Community, pp. 155–6; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, p. 32.
47. Margaret Byington, ‘The Mill Town Courts and Their Lodgers,’ Charities and Commons 21 (1909), pp. 913–20.
48. Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown (New York, 1929), p. 26. For an example of the role of boarding in creating strike support, see Mary Blewett, ‘The Union of Sex and Craft in the Haverhill Shoe Strike of 1895,’ Labor History 20 (1979), p. 360.
49. Stephen Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress (Cambridge, MA, 1964); James Henretta, ‘The Study of Social Mobility: Ideological Assumptions and Conceptual Biases,’ Labor History 18 (1977), p. 175.
50. David Brundage, ‘The Producing Classes and the Saloon: Denver in the 1880s,’ Labor History 26 (1985), p. 39; Leon Fink, Workingman’s Democracy (Urbana, 1985), p. 12.
51. Montgomery, ‘Labor and the Republic,’ pp. 204–5.
52. Rodgers, Work Ethic, p. 155; Rosenzweig, Eight Hours.
53. Couvares, Remaking of Pittsburgh, pp. 39, 43.
54. Ibid., pp. 75–9, 108; Trachtenberg, Incorporation, pp. 146–7; Rosenzweig, Eight Hours, pp. 128–30.
55. Cumbler, Working-Class Community, p. 44; Trachtenberg, Incorporation, pp. 110–11.
56. Cumbler, Working-Class Community, pp. 154–5; Peiss, Cheap Amusements.
57. Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959); Oscar Lewis, ‘The Culture of Poverty,’ Scientific American 215(1966); Daniel Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Washington, D.C., 1965); Lee Rainwater and W.L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, MA, 1967); Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA, 1963). A good review of this literature and other perspectives on black families may be found in William Harris, ‘Research on the Black Family: Mainstream and Dissenting Perspectives,’ Journal of Ethnic Studies 6 (1979).
58. Levine, Black Culture and Consciousness; Gutman, Black Family; James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850–1970 (Urbana, 1980), pp. 208, 210.
59. Herbert Gutman, ‘Persistent Myths About the Afro-American Family,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6 (1975); Theodore Hershberg, ‘Free Blacks in Antebellum Pennsylvania,’ Journal of Social History 5 (1971–72); Paul Lammermeier, ‘The Urban Black Family of the Nineteenth Century: A Study of Black Family Structure in the Ohio Valley, 1850–1880,’ Journal of Marriage and the Family 35 (1973), p. 455.
60. Elizabeth Pleck, ‘The Two-Parent Household: Black Family Structure in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston,’ in Gordon, American Family, 1st edn, p. 165; Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston 1865–1900 (New York, 1979), pp. 182, 194.
61. Pleck, ‘Two-Parent Household’; Hershberg, Philadelphia, p. 451; Pleck, Black Migration.
62. Gutman, Black Family, pp. 448, 452, 521–6, 530; Hershberg, Philadelphia, pp. 348, 374.
63. Gutman, ‘Persistent Myths,’ pp. 205–7; Paul Worthman, ‘Working Class Mobility in Birmingham, Alabama, 1880–1914,’ in Tamara Hareven, ed., Anonymous Americans: Explorations in Nineteenth-Century Social History, (Englewood Cliffs, 1971), p. 197; Ira Berlin and Herbert Gutman, ‘Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves,’ American Historical Review 88 (1983), p. 1194.
64. Pleck, Black Migration, pp. 198–200.
65. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, 1982), p. 381; Hershberg et al., ‘A Tale of Three Cities,’ pp. 461–491.
66. Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York, 1974); Demetri Shimkin, Edith Shimkin, and Dennis Frate, eds, The Extended Family in Black Society (Chicago, 1978); Pleck, Black Migration, p :196; Borchert, Alley Life, p. 81; James and Lois Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in Antebellum Boston (New York, 1979).
67. Borchert, Alley Life, pp. 196, 220 and passim.
68. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 500; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow.
69. Elizabeth Pleck, ‘A Mother’s Wages: Income Earning Among Married Italian and Black Women, 1896–1911,’ in Gordon, American Family, 2nd edn, p. 502; Jones, Labor of Love; Claudia Goldin, ‘Family Strategies and the Family Economy in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Role of Secondary Workers,’ in Hershberg, Philadelphia, p. 305; E.J. Kahn, The American People (New York, 1973); Michael Reich, ‘The Economics of Racism,’ in Richard Edwards, Michael Reich, and Thomas Weisskopf, eds, The Capitalist System (Englewood Cliffs, 1972), p. 314.
70. Pleck, ‘A Mother’s Wages’; Degler, At Odds, pp.390–91.
71. Robert Wells, Uncle Sam’s Family: Issues in and Perspectives on American Demographic History (Albany, 1985), p. 50; Jones, Labor of Love, p. 114.
72. Grace Ernestine Ray, Wily Women of the West (San Antonio, 1972), p. 66; Laurie Alberts, ‘Petticoats and Pickaxes: Who Were the Women that Joined the Klondike Gold Rush?’ Alaska Journal 7 (1977); Wertheimer, We Were There, p. 257.
73. Scott and Sally McNall, Plains Families: Exploring Sociology Through Social History (New York, 1983), p. 9.
74. 1838 diary entry of Mary Walker, in Cathy Luchette, Women of the West (St George, Utah, 1982), p. 63.
75. Johnny Farragher and Christine Stansell, ‘Women and Their Families on the Overland Trail,’ Feminist Studies 2 (1975); Mrs Velina A. Williams, Travel Diary, April-September 1853,’ Oregon Pioneer Association Transactions, 1919, p. 181.
76. ‘Family Life on the Frontier: The Diary of Kitturah Penton Belknap,’ ed. Glenda Riley, The Annals of Iowa 43 (1977), p. 32; Nancy Wilson Ross, Westward the Women (Freeport, NY, 1970), p. 7; Lilian Schlissel, Women’s Diaries of the Westward Journey (New York, 1982); John Farragher and Christine Stansell, Women and Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven, 1979).
77. ‘Pioneer Migration: The Diary of Mary Alice Shutes,’ part II, in Glenda Riley, ed., The Annals of Iowa, pp. 567–92; Lillian Schlissel, ‘Diaries of Frontier Women: On Learning to Read the Obscured Patterns,’ in Mary Kelley, ed., Woman’s Being, Woman’s Place (Boston, 1979), pp. 57–8; Farragher and Stansell, Overland Trail, p. 157.
78. Farragher and Stansell, ‘Women and Their Families,’ p. 164; Mrs Cecilia McMillen Adams, ‘Crossing the Plains in 1852,’ Oregon Pioneer Association Transactions, Thirty-Second Annual Reunion (1904), p. 290; Lodisa Frizzell, Across the Plains to California in 1852 (New York, 1915), p. 29.
79. Julie Jeffrey, Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1880 (New York, 1979), p. 56; Christiane Fischer, ‘Women in California in the Early 1850s,’ Southern California Quarterly 60 (1978), p. 235; Dee Brown, The Gentle Tamers: Women of the Old Wild West (New York, 1958), pp. 64–9; Christiane Fischer, ed., Let Them Speak for Themselves: Women in the American West, 1849–1900 (Hamden, CN, 1977); Abigail Scott Dunniway, Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in the Pacific Coast States (New York, 1971), pp. 9–10.
80. Lucie Cheng Hirata, ‘Chinese Immigrant Women in Nineteenth-Century California,’ in Berkin and Norton, Women of America, pp. 223–44; Marian Goldman, ‘Sexual Commerce on the Comstock Lode,’ Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 21 (1978).
81. Wertheimer, We Were There, pp. 255–6.
82. Jeffrey, Frontier Women, p. 140.
83. D’Arcy McNichols, Native American Tribalism: Indian Survivals and Renewals (New York, 1973); Keith Basso, The Cibecue Apache (New York, 1970); Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, 1983); Albers and Medicine, The Hidden Half.
84. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge, 1971); Julie Roy Jeffrey, ‘Women in the Southern Farmers’ Alliance,’ Feminist Studies 3 (1975), p. 85.
85. Davis, Prisoners, p. 31.
86. Ostreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation; Fink, Working Man’s Democracy, pp. 26–7.
87. Sean Wilentz, ‘Against Exceptionalism: Class Consciousness and the American Labor Movement, 1790–1920,’ International Labor and Working Class History 26 (1984), p. 15.
88. Ostreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation; Couvares, Pittsburgh; Montgomery, Beyond Equality; Fink, Workingman’s Democracy, p. 226; Davis, Prisoners, p. 33.
89. Fink, Workingman’s Democracy, pp. 227–8. On the racist counterattack against Black-white alliances, see Joseph Cartwright, The Triumph of Jim Crow: Tennessee Race Relations in the 1880s (Knoxville, 1976); Woodward, Strange Career of Jim Crow and Origins of the New South; Howard Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1900 (New York, 1977); David Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860–1915 (Urbana, 1976); Davis, Prisoners, pp. 38–40.
90. Ostreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation, pp. 222, 230.
91. Richard Schneirov, ‘Class Conflict, Municipal Politics, and Governmental Reform in Gilded Age Chicago,’ in Hartmut Keil and John Jentz, eds, German Workers in Industrial Chicago: A Comparative Perspective (Dekalb, 1983), p. 200.