In 1822, a group of Boston merchants and traders began their campaign to transform a riverbank below the thirty-foot falls of the Merrimack River into "the greatest textile manufacturing establishment in the country." These capitalists dug and improved the Merrimack canal, constructed machine shops, and built housing for mill executives, foremen and operatives. The cotton mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, and other New England sites began to employ the first female industrial labor force in the United States. Almost twenty years later, factory workers wrote and edited the Lowell Offering, a literary magazine showcasing the virtues and talents of the female operatives in verse, essays and short fiction (Eisler, 13-22). This ESSAY discusses the female Lowell factory worker as portrayed in the Offering. Although the magazine never expressed an overtly feminist view of the factory girls' condition, nor invoked a working-class consciousness similar to later labor expressions in Lowell, there is evidence of a narrative strategy and ideology speaking both to the factory women and the middle-class readership outside of the mill town. The paper's short stories, epistolary narratives and commentaries seek to legitimize an operatives' role within the feminine ideal of domesticity. In conforming to the norms of feminine literature, the Offering reconstructs the operatives' character. It subordinates the evidence for independence or autonomy to relate stories of familial or sentimental ties binding the factory girl to the world outside of factory life. The magazine sought to provide an answer to this question: given her new liberties, what kept the "factory girl" from losing contact with her moral sentiments? To a great degree, the economi... ... middle of paper ... ..., 1820-1865. Columbia Studies in American Culture Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942): 13-14. Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work: the Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Dublin, Thomas. "Women, work and protest in the early Lowell Mills: `the oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us.'" Labor History 16(1975): 99-116. Eisler, Benita. The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1840-1845). New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977. Welter, Barbara. "The Cult of True Womanhood." The Many-Faceted Jacksonian Era: New Interpretations. Contributions in American History, number 67, Edward Pessen, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977.
James, Edward, Janet James, and Paul Boyer. Notable American Women, 1607-1950. Volume III: P-Z. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Print.
Rebecca Harding Davis wrote “Life in the Iron Mills” in the mid-nineteenth century in part to raise awareness about working conditions in industrial mills. With the goal of presenting the reality of the mills’ environment and the lives of the mill workers, Davis employs vivid and concrete descriptions of the mills, the workers’ homes, and the workers themselves. Yet her story’s realism is not objective; Davis has a reformer’s agenda, and her word-pictures are colored accordingly. One theme that receives a particularly negative shading in the story is big business and the money associated with it. Davis uses this negative portrayal of money to emphasize the damage that the single-minded pursuit of wealth works upon the humanity of those who desire it.
Controlled by bells, a Lowell woman’s 11-hour work day began before dawn and ended after 6:30 in the evening. These bells were a constant reminder that their lives were centered on work, not their family. Developing a family and investing in the domestic culture is a key aspect of True Womanhood. By turning away from this family focus, women were straying from the True Womanhood ideals.
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Rubin attempts to convey the idea that Connie falls asleep in the sun and has a daydream in which her “…intense desire for total sexual experience runs headlong into her innate fear…” (58); and aspects of the story do seem dream like - for instance the way in which the boys in Connie’s daydreams “…dissolved into a single face…” (210), but the supposition that the entire episode is a dream does not ring true. There are many instances in which Connie perceives the frightening truth quite clearly; she is able to identify the many separate elements of Friend’s persona - “… that slippery friendly smile of his… [and] the singsong way he talked…” (214). But because of the lack of attachment with her own family, and her limited experience in relating deeply to others, “…all of these things did not come together” (214) and Connie is unable to recognize the real danger that Arnold Friend poses until it is too late.
When Oates first introduces Connie's father, she writes “Their father was away at work most of the time and when he came home, he wanted supper and he read the newspaper at supper and after supper he went to bed. He didn't bother talking much to them, but around his bent head Connie’s mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over” (Oates). This quote reveals two things to the reader; Connie has severe issues with the way her mother treats her and Connie does not have a well developed relationship with her father. The fact that Connie lacks a relationship with her father is the reason why she looks for attention from another male source which happens to be older boys that she randomly meets upon her nights out. Because of the poor relationship Connie has with her father she does not value herself or the way men treat her. This is made obvious to readers when Oates writes, “She spent three hours with him, at the restaurant where they ate hamburgers and drank Cokes in wax cups that were always sweating, and then down an alley a mile or so away, and when he left her off at five to eleven only the movie house was still open at the plaza,” (Oates). Connie goes on outings with these boys and tends to focus completely on what they want and puts very little value on her own wants or needs when it comes to men. This shows readers
In the short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” the author Joyce Carol Oates, tells a breathtaking story about a teenage girl named Connie. Connie is faced with an earth-shattering situation with a stranger who is known as Arnold Friend throughout the story. To the reader of the story, Connie could be seen as hopeless and self-absorbed, who is looking for someone to accept her. She uses her beauty to make herself feel mature and get the boys attention. However, when Connie ran into Arnold, her beauty only made her look like an easy target. Throughout the story, the character’s reactions made it clear to the reader Connie’s earth-shattering experience was only part of a dream.
Reading the story of Chopin "The Story of an Hour", we can understand and sympathize with women who is spending their won life in a society of inequality between men and women as well as we can see their desire of freedom is so strong but they have to pay for it by death, by their own life. Through the story, the author wants to convey such a desire of women; a crave of freedom, equality and a hope that the role of women in the family and society should be changed. However, the death of Mrs. Mallard is a sign of a failure and a standstill of a struggle that shows us the role of women still maintain as it is.
She feels like she must fill the void her father left in her life due to him never being there. “Their father was away at work most of the time and when he came home he wanted supper and after supper he went to bed” (126). Her father did not fulfill the role of a strong male figure in her life so she is looking elsewhere. If Connie’s father had shown her the love she craved, then she might not have fallen into Arnolds trap. Arnold plays off the void in her life by convincing her he will love her. “I'll have my arms tight around you so you won't need to try to get away and I'll show you what love is like, what it does” (133). He tells her he can save her from the boring, dejected life she is currently living in and that with him, nothing will ever be boring. Arnold tells Connie “your daddy’s house is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down anytime” (136). He knows that Connie’s relationship with her dad is dull, and barren just like a cardboard box, and he will break it down to save
Connie has the need to be viewed as older and as more mature than she really is, all the while still displaying childlike behavior. She shows this childlike behavior by “craning her neck to glance in mirrors [and] checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right” (Oates 323). This shows that Connie is very insecure and needs other people’s approval. Although on one side she is very childish, on the other side she has a strong desire to be treated like an adult. This longing for adulthood is part of her coming of age, and is demonstrated by her going out to “bright-lit, fly-infested restaurant[s]” and meeting boys, staying out with those boys for three hours at a time, and lying to her parents about where she has been and who she has been with (Oates 325, 326). “Everything about her ha[s] two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home” (Oates 324). Even her physical movements represent her two-sided nature: “her walk that could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearin...
One for at home with her family, and one for when she is out with her friends looking for guys. She loves that teenage boys and older men find her attractive. When she is not at home she walks and talks in a way to get the boys to notice her. She is trying to act more mature than she really is. She wants people to see her as a mature woman with experience. When in reality she just wants to look pretty for the boys, she has no interest in them perusing her sexually. Connie is a day dreamer and had this whole idea in her head of what romance and adulthood was. She really has no idea what adulthood is like and when the older man started showing her some interest sexually it terrified her. This man at her home was not her idea of romance or adulthood. However, she did not want him to know that. At first she was playing it cool, and she was calm. When the man started saying very sexual things to her it scared her, and she could not hide it. The man had Connie in a place where he knew he could get into her head and make her go with
Connie’s clothes and infatuation with her own beauty symbolize her lack of maturity or knowing her true self, which in the end enables her to be manipulated by Arnold Friend. Connie was enamored with her own beauty; in the beginning of the story Oates states that Connie “knew
The short story centers around the life of a beautiful girl named Connie and eventually, her vivid interaction with a man named Arnold Friend. Through descriptions of her actions and daily life, she
Murray, Janet Horowitz. Strong-minded women: and other lost voices from nineteenth-century England. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.
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