FROM HOUSEHOLD LABORERS TO MILLHANDS: A STUDY OF WOMEN IN THE TRANSITION TO INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM IN ANTEBELLUM NEW ENGLAND

Between 1800 and 1860, economic production in New England shifted from agrarian households to mills and factories. Family and indentured labor, the basis of the household economy, gave way to wage-labor. Surplus goods, once traded in the local barter system, were increasingly sold on cash terms to merchants who represented distant markets. Both the exchange and production processes came to be viewed during this period in terms of profit maximization. Drawing upon recent neo-Marxist theory on modes of production, the author argues that these changes represented the transformation of New England from a precapitalist to a capitalist social formation.; One particularly critical aspect of the transition to capitalism was the emergence of wage-labor, yet relatively little is known about how or why early New Englanders became wage-earners. In this study, the author specifically asks: Why did thousands of young women, enmeshed in precapitalist work and social relationships, leave households in rural northern New England to take jobs in the large-scale textile mills that were established in Massachusetts beginning in the second decade of the nineteenth century?; In addressing this question the author attempts to reconstruct the social relations of production in New England's household economy and then, using a variety of historical sources, locates young women within these relations. It is argued that women held a subordinate position within the household and that this subordination led some women to look favorably upon millwork. At the same time, it is suggested, the hegemony of the early mill owners helped to facilitate the departure of women for the mills. Finally, the author demonstrates that a series of socio-economic developments in northern New England after 1800 produced economic strains on the region's farmers which, when coupled with the erosion of women's role in home textile manufacture, tended to negate any objections that the farmers might otherwise have had to their daughter's move to the mills.; The study is concluded with a discussion of proletarianization in antebellum New England and a call for historical research on the social forces that led household laborers in the region to become wage-earners.