A thousand times I'd rather be a factory girl: The politics of reading American and British female factory workers' poetry, 1840-1914

This is the first feminist materialist study of poetry by 19th and early 20th century American and British female factory workers. In addition to recovering a body of writing nearly lost to literary history, this dissertation expands the definition and valuation of poetry as the cultural property of the middle and upper classes. The poetic production of women workers challenges traditional critical assumptions about the genre of poetry, expectations of authorship, and the poetic production of race, gender, and class subjectivity. The introduction details socioeconomic and poetic similarities and differences of American and British white working-class women. Comparisons of literary strategies suggest a self-conscious poetic voice employed by female poets laboring in American and British mills, the informal centers of working-class literary production. Chapter one examines the construction of poetic subjectivity by American factory poets in response to matters of slavery, abolition, and the anxiety of a white working class in antebellum America. Chapter two is concerned with the way a poetic subjectivity provides British, white, female factory poets to participate in and to stand outside of the poetic traditions of their day. Their poems, similar to those by American female factory operatives, feature not only customary versification and romantic subjects, but also experiment with poetic forms. These British poets construct subjectivity in response to their permanent status as laborers, a public rhetoric linking white factory workers with black slaves, and as an assertion of their national identity drawn in contrast to the immigrant Irish. The last two chapters focus on individual American and British poets who published their poetry in book form. The literary career of Lucy Larcom (1840-84) foregrounds the conflicted status of the individual celebrated as a working-class woman poet by middle class readers. Larcom negotiates poetic voice both to appeal to a middle and upper class audience as well as to distance herself from the perceived limitations of a "factory girl" public persona. Although they published volumes of poetry, British female working-class poets Ellen Johnston (1867) and Ethel Carnie (1908-14) were unable to sustain a literary career like their female American counterparts, or their British male contemporaries. This chapter compares and contrasts Johnston's and Carnie's poetics with the conventions of British factory workers Fanny Forrester and Gerald Massey as well as with the poetics of American Lucy Larcom.