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The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America in Cambridge, Massachusetts was founded in 1943 when Radcliffe College, Cambridge, accepted the Woman's Rights Collection (WRC) . The WRC documents several woman's suffrage organizations and includes the papers of Maud Wood Park and other women active in the women rights movement. But it does not end with 1920, the year the federal suffrage amendment was ratified, and it includes the library's first labor collection, papers of Frances Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labor, 1933-45, and the first woman in the Cabinet. Thus despite the emphasis on suffrage and women's political and legal rights, labor issues, from the beginning have been an integral part of the Schlesinger Library. At about the time the WRC arrived at Radcliffe, president Wilbur K. Jordan and Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, of the Harvard University's history department decided to make it the centerpiece of a growing research library on women, rather than a static memorial to the suffrage movement. Soon after, in December 1945, another major labor collection arrived, the papers of Leonora O'Reilly. O'Reilly's papers make up one major series in the micropublication, "The Papers of the Women's Trade Union League and Its Principal Leaders," a project sponsored by the Schlesinger Library, edited by Edward T. James, and published by Research Publications Inc. in 1981.

The article focuses on the impact of the local conditions and the labor consciousness on the struggles for power among leather workers in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts. Locals of national organizations had little connection with the national unions. Consequently, when they did affiliate with national organizations, local concerns and group loyalty transcended national policies. The important ties with other outside unions were of an informal nature. Ties to nonlocal workers and unions were usually confined to feelings of brotherhood and solidarity, which manifested themselves in aid for union struggles. The paper shows how the workers rallied their community of fellow workers to fight against the companies. Since Lynn's wage earners viewed their city as a community of workers, the strike provides a picture of a community in struggle. The community gave the workers strength and support to resist the employers, their friends and relatives were workers and union members, and their unions controlled most of the shops in Lynn. The same community, however, also gave them a false sense of their power to affect their demands against organized capital.

Allis Rosenberg Wolfe's publication of five "Letters of a Lowell Mill Girl and Friends: 1845-1846," represents an important contribution to the study of the New England factory women. These letters, sent to the 22 year-old Harriet Hanson by her friends Maria and Lura Currier and H.E. Back and now in the Harriet Hanson Robinson papers in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, are among the only surviving manuscript materials that document the perceptions of the Yankee mill women of the 1840's. The following remarks are designed to clarify and extend our understanding of the letters' contents, now that they have at last been made more accessible. Wolfe publishes perhaps two-thirds of the letters, an unfortunate if possibly necessary, for reasons of space editing of such rare documents. The portions retained are well chosen, but the general character of the letters is inevitably blurred. In short, all five letters in the Robinson papers must be seen as representing the complex experience of those mill women who went back and forth between factory town and rural community.

Massachusetts workers have engaged in some of the most important struggles in American labor history. Yet, until recently, there has been no systematic attempt to document the Bay State's labor organizations. The Archives and Manuscripts department of the University of Massachusetts (UM) at Amherst hopes to ensure that the state's more recent labor history does not suffer due to negligence. UM previously had eight volumes of minutes and dues books of the Loom Fixers Association of Fall River, a small, elite craft union in the industry, and a minute book for the Fall River Yarn Finishers Union. But the paucity of labor records reflected both the lack of interest by repositories and the sporadic strength of textile unions until the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In 1986, the University acquired the records of the New Bedford Joint Board of the Textile Workers Union of America, documenting the resurgence of New England textile unionism from 1940 through its decline in the 1970s. The holdings of UM have begun to provide the raw material for the story of the Bay State's labor history.

In an incident that the Boston Globe politely referred to as "a little unpleasantness," the two epitomes of New England's labor reformers, Ira Steward and Wendell Phillips, turned a labor convention into a hot shouting match and put an end to their nearly decade long collaboration that briefly transcended both class and party. In the first convention of the newly founded Massachusetts Labor Union, Phillips read out and addressed the controversy that had recently erupted in the press over the conduct of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics Labor, the nation's first such agency, that Phillips and the Eight Hour League had lobbied the General Court to found three years earlier.

Herbert Gutman often prefaced his arguments by pointing out that "little is known" about the particular subject at hand. This certainly was true of women's history during his lifetime. Gutman's work and his presence in the historical profession contributed enormously to altering that fact. Gutman's approach to history did more than any particular study or article to inform and invigorate the field of women's history. The questions he posed, how he posed them, and the way he used sources opened new areas to historical study and freed us to consider the history of those who left no state papers, no archives, and no published documents. With a basically humanistic approach; Gutman considered history part science and part literature. He combined numbers from the census with poems written by slaves and workers. The implications of Gutman's approach proved critical for women's history. By probing sources in a new way, he opened the possibility of new questions as well. Arenas of life previously considered impossible to scrutinize from an historical perspective suddenly became important arenas of investigation. Gutman included women in his vision, not as appendages but on the stage of American life.

This article presents information on the first Labor day parade being organized at Boston. Thousands lined the side-walks of the parade route, while hundreds more stood on balconies and rooftops to catch a glimpse of this army of organized workers. At the head of the three mile procession were leaders of the Knights of Labor and the trade unions. Although day laborers and factory operatives participated in the demonstration, the skilled trades comprised the main body of the marchers. The events of 1886 marked the emergence of a viable and growing workers movement in Boston. The thousands of working people at Boston's first Labor Day parade marked the strong existence of the union of wage-earners. However, the kind of "self protection" the movement would ultimately promote is not clear. That would largely depend on the resolution of tensions and ambiguities within the labor movement in the future. The events of 1886 marked the emergence of a viable and growing workers movement in Boston. The upsurge in labor activity in recent times has revealed a movement undreamed of a year before.

The article discusses manuscript sources in American radicalism. Scholars interested in American radicalism must be prepared to travel widely if they expect to inspect manuscript sources. Virtually every state, almost every university library of any stature, has some such holdings. Socialists, and other radicals, were prolific writers of letters, memoranda, speeches and pamphlets. They also tended to keep extensive minutes of meetings of branches, committees, national boards, and even of factions. Moreover, most Socialists had a sense of history and preserved their records. Unfortunately, there is no single repository for this Socialist material. At one time it was expected that the Tamiment Institute-then called the Rand School-Library in New York would house the material. But Socialists, in the course of human events, split into innumerable factions, and the leaders of different factions gave their papers to various libraries some of them thousands of miles apart. There were also geographic reasons for the dispersion: the early Socialists of the Nineteenth century lived in Indiana, New York, Massachusetts, and (after 1880) California.

This article presents the journal of S. C. Hewitt, appointed lecturer of the Fall River Mechanics' Association and labor organizer in Massachusetts in the early 1840s. Students U.S. labor movement know that the most important development of the 1840s was the ten-hour movement, and that the organization which spearheaded this demand was the New England Workingmen's Association which came into existence in the fall of 1844 to give support to the shorter workday crusade. The association was largely the product of the mechanics of Fall River, Massachusetts. Early in 1844 these men organized a Mechanics' Association to further the ten-hour day in their community. The association distributed pledge cards binding the signers not to work for more than ten hours and conducted a number of strikes for the shorter working day. In April 1844, the Fall River Mechanics Association set up a publishing committee, headed by Thomas Almy, to print a four-page weekly paper, "The Mechanic," to advocate the cause of the oppressed mechanic and laborer in all its bearings. The Mechanics' Association secure the services of S. C. Hewitt as a lecturer. Readers of "The Mechanic" were already familiar with Mr. Hewitt.

In the 1890s, a desire for greater control of shop floor work induced Lowell Machine Shop management to mechanize components of the machine tool manufacturing process. This effort resulted in the removal of the firm’s skilled workers, who were an experienced source of ingenuity and, as others have shown, a community that diffused technical knowledge between firms. At the same time, the firm began paying larger dividends to shareholders instead of investing in the research and development of new products. These decisions damaged the firm, and shortly after the turn of the century, manufacturing operations at the Lowell plant ceased. Because in this period the Lowell Machine Shop was one of the most important capital goods firms in the United States, both in terms of national market share and reputation, this case raises questions about the degree to which specialty producers retained skilled workers and paid dividends. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers a response to the articles within the issue that reviewed the book "Empty Mills," by this article's author. Particular focus is given to the textile industry in the U.S. from the 1950s through the early 21st century, including in regard to deindustrialization and the textile industry in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Historians of prisons have emphasized in various degrees the importance of ideological, social, and economic factors in the development of the penitentiary, and of the particular role of convict labor. Yet regardless of their assessment of the early 19th-century prison as an institution of social control, proto-industrial exploitation, benevolent rehabilitation, or merely the logical response to a rising rate of crime, historians have paid much more attention to the ideal of reformers and administrators than to the actions of the convicts and staff who lived and worked within the walls. Despite reformers' visions of rigid control and lockstep discipline, prisoners took advantage of the imperfect seams in the disciplinary fabric of the institution-and they often relied on official complicity to do so. Like slaves and wage workers, prisoners occasionally resorted to outright rebellion, but they frequently found subtler and more durable means of easing their working conditions, acquiring various perquisites, and otherwise softening their circumstances.

Focuses on the working lives of the rural middle class in 18th century Massachusetts. Characteristics of farm-life; Idea of market economy; Economic liberalism; Civic politics and government; Grain growing and livestock-raising; Needs of surplus-producing; Occupational groups.

The article presents information about the Museum of American Textile History (MATH) in Andover, Massachusetts, which was established in 1960 by Caroline Stevens Rogers, a descendent of Nathaniel Stevens who founded in 1813 what was to become one of New England's largest woolen companies. The Stevens woolen and worsted mills were finally closed in 1972 and the original site in North Andover was razed in 1974. The records of the company, scattered by vandals, were removed from a building on the company's premises and now form the core of the museum's manuscript collection. The museum's policy is to collect and preserve objects and information that promote an understanding of the history of textile production in this country and to encourage the study of its technological, social, labor, decorative arts, and business history. MATH staff has conscientiously collected labor-related material and has been encouraged to present labor's role in exhibits and publications. Consequently, the scope of the Museum's collecting encompasses the industry's management and labor history, decisions, and strategies.

The aim of this essay is to chart the emergence and assess implications of the law's conflation during the first half of the 19th century of the language of employment and the language of service in one doctrinal discourse. During this period, courts in Massachusetts, like courts elsewhere in the Anglo-American common law world, adopted master/servant reasoning as a paradigmatic response to contemporary social and economic changes transforming employment from a highly varied social relation encompassing many different species of interpersonal transactions into the much more uniform and impersonal institution of wage labor. The result was the contract of employment, a doctrinal innovation which combined the contradictory features of a transaction between juridical equals and the exercise of power by a legally-denominated superior over a subordinate. American labor historians have generally confined their interest in 19th century legal history to the impact of the conspiracy doctrine on workers' collective behavior, and have not paid much heed to contemporaneous changes in employment law.

The Hawaiian natives noticed in 1835 the arrival of William Hooper of Boston, Massachusetts. He was sent to Koloa by Ladd and Company of Honolulu to establish the first plantation in Sandwich Islands and to cultivate sugar cane as a cash crop, he was there to remake Hawaii in his own image, to advance American capitalism and civilization to a new Pacific frontier, undermining in the process the feudal society of Hawaii and the people's traditional relationship with their land. During the next century, the Hawaiian sugar industry, which Hooper had initiated, transformed both the ethnicity of the people and the economy of the islands. Within one year, the young man from Boston had transformed both the land and native society in Koloa. On September 12, 1836, he proudly listed his accomplishments. He had 25 acres of cane under cultivation, in addition, he had erected twenty houses for the natives, a house for the superintendant, a carpenter's shop, a blacksmith's shop, a mill dam, a sugar house, a boiling house, and a sugar mill.

This article focuses on the oppressive measures of the early textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts and mentions protests made by women labors against those measures. In the years before 1850 the textile mills of Lowell were a celebrated economic and cultural attraction. Foreign visitors invariably included them on their American tours. Interest was prompted by the massive scale of these mills, the astonishing productivity of the power-driven machinery, and the fact that women comprised most of the workforce. As Lowell expanded, and became the nation's largest textile manufacturing center, the experiences of women operatives changed as well. The increasing number of firms in Lowell and in the other mill towns brought the pressure of competition. Wages were declined and so, too, did conditions for the mill operatives. Wages were reduced and the pace of work within the mills was stepped up. Women operatives did not accept these changes without protest. The major factor in the rise of a new consciousness among operatives in Lowell was the development of a close-knit community among women working in the mills.

The article focuses on the cultural and social aspects of the industrial revolution in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1826 to 1860. For Lynn's inhabitants, most of them shoemakers and their families, industrialization meant inner discipline and a tightening up of the moral code through either the abolition or drastic alteration of those customs, traditions and practices that interfered with productive labor. More than ever before, life became oriented toward work. Citizens were self-reliant, hard-working and sober, obedient to their superiors, attentive to their labors, and self-disciplined in all their pursuits. A new morality based on the paramount importance of work was taking shape, an industrial morality that was the cultural expression of the industrial revolution. Industrial morality was not, as some have suggested, a product of the factory alone. The application of the work ethic in Lynn began long before the 1860s, when machinery and factories first appeared. The shoemakers were handworkers then, not factory operatives. The workplace was the shop or manufactory, not the factory. A cultural apparatus of ideas and institutions outside the work place was chiefly responsible for inculcating the new values.

American Labor historians have until recently written labor history as a history of trade unions. Within the last few years, however, scholars have begun to look beyond the activities of particular unions and biographies of particular union leaders into the social, cultural and ethnic environments of American workers. This attempt is frustrated by the lack of written documents left behind by the ordinary worker. The trade-union newspapers and manuscripts, especially of the industrial workers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, although filling gaps in knowledge of union history, tell practically nothing about lives and informal activities of workers, either organized or unorganized. One knows little about their marriage habits, relationships with their parents, what they did during lay-offs, or how long they lived at home. Much of the material that historians have about the lives of the ordinary worker comes from the pens of middle-class investigators. Unfortunately, this material often tends to be sensational and of questionable reliability.