Status, ideology, and identity: Class ambiguity in the humor of the Lowell 'Factory Girls,' Anne Royall, and Fanny Fern (Massachusetts)

When women entered the public arena of industrial work, the status life of all women in nineteenth-century America became complicated. Women's humor published during this time period demonstrates the notion of women's social status in a post-industrial world where womanliness and wage work were contradictory terms. This dissertation examines the humorous treatment of the status, both self-ascribed and conferred, associated with a woman's varying degrees of subscription to the ideology of the women's sphere in the writings of women who experienced working-class culture first hand. The study considers evidence of status consciousness and mobility in the writings of the first working class of Lowell mill operatives, published in the factory periodical the Lowell Offering, and in the satire of two professional women writers---Anne Royall and Fanny Fern---in an effort to illuminate the roles subjectivity and ideological identity play in a woman's perception of her class position. Focusing on frequently satirized cultural markers---The Cult of True Womanhood; didactic and popular literature, fashion and manners; and leisure activities---the work examines the multiple sites of resistance and contest that question our understanding of the binary distinction between public and private---the space where working women problematically reside. In their humor and sarcasm, these writers illuminated nineteenth-century struggles for status and relative power by giving voice to a comparatively silent, non-homogeneous stratum of women whose class identity conflicted with their sociobiological identity---an identity defined by the societal category of woman. These voices both comprise the now disappearing topos "women's sphere" and participate in its demise and thus historicize the complexity of women's experience.