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Traditions and Customs of Lancashire Popular Radicalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Industrial America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Mary H. Blewett
Mary H. Blewett
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Lowell
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Extract

During a decade of constant turmoil in the 1870s, immigrant textile workers from Lancashire, England seized control of labor politics in the southern New England region of the United States. They were men and women who had immigrated in successive waves before and after the American Civil War to the United States, specifically to the textile cities of Fall River and New Bedford, Massachusetts and to the mill villages north of Providence, Rhode Island.

Type
Tradition and the Working Class
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 42 , Fall 1992 , pp. 5 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1992

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References

Notes

Thanks to colloquium participants Helmut Gruber, Bella Bianco Feldman, Joe Trotter, Bruce Levine. and Bruno Ramirez for their suggestions and support. This essay is part of Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in Late Nineteenth-Century New England(Amherst, forthcoming).

1. For recent work on immigration, see Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia, ed., Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics (Oxford, 1990);Google Scholar and Hoerder, Dirk, ed., “Struggle a Hard Battle”: Essays on Working-Class Immigrants (DeKalb, 1986)Google Scholar.

2. For additional documentation of primary and secondary sources, see Blewett, Mary H., “Manhood and the Market: The Politics of Gender and Class among the Textile Workers of Fall River, Massachusetts, 1870–1880,” in Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. Baron, Ava (Ithaca, 1991), 92–113Google Scholar.

3. Maynard, Steven, “Rough Work and Rugged Men: The Social Construction of Masculinity in Working-Class History”, Labour/Le Travail 23 (Spring 1989): 159–69Google Scholar.

4. Evans, Clare, “Unemployment and the Making of the Feminine during the Lancashire Cotton Famine,” in Women's Work and the Family Economy in Historical Perspective, ed. Hudson, Pat and Lee, W.R. (Manchester, 1990), 248–70Google Scholar.

5. See Rose, Sonya O., Limited Livelihoods (Berkeley, 1991), 154–84Google Scholar.

6. Benenson, Harold, “The ‘Family Wage’ and Working Women's Consciousness in Britain, 1880–1914,” Politics and Society 19 (1991):71–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Seccombe, Wally, “Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Norm in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Social History 11 (1986): 53–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Valverde, Mariana, “‘Giving the Female a Domestic Turn’: The Social, Legal and Moral Regulation of Women's Work in British Cotton Mills. 1820–1850,” Journal of Social History 21 (Spring 1988): 619–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Dutton, H.I. and King, J.E., Ten Percent and No Surrender: The Preston Strike, 1853–54 (Cambridge, 1981), 67Google Scholar.

10. McClelland, Keith, “Some Thoughts on Masculinity and the ‘Representative Artisan’ in Britain, 1850–1880,” Gender and History 1 (Summer 1989):164–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. In 1875 there were approximately 8,000 weavers, 1,500 carders, and 2,000 mule spinners in the Fall River work force. Women represented about one third of the striking weavers, and about half of the weaving work force.

12. By the mid-1870s, the work force in Fall River was one quarter (25.2 percent) native-born Americans, one third (33.9 percent) English immigrants, one fifth (20.7 percent) Irish immigrants, and just less than a fifth (17.3 percent) French Canadian immigrants.

13. Lincoln, Jonathan Thayer, The Factory (New York, 1912), 95Google Scholar.

14. Bohstedt, John, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790–1810 (Cambridge, 1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the importance of memories about the triumph of the customary over the market, see Charlesworth, Andrew and Randall, Adrian J., “Morals, Markets and the English Crowd in 1766,” Past and Present 114 (1987):200–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. “La survivance” promoted by French Canadian clergy included deep hostility toward the English in Quebec. See Gerstle, Gary, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (Cambridge, 1989), 24–27.Google Scholar For an excellent general study, see Yearley, Clifton K. Jr., Britons in American Labor (Baltimore, 1957)Google Scholar.