Manufacturing the mill girl: working-class white women’s bodies in New England factory literature, 1830-1860

When farmers’ daughters packed their bags to find work in New England’s booming textile centers during the first US industrial revolution, they sparked furious debates about the health of the nation. The figure of the New England “mill girl,” as they came to be known, began to emerge in the texts of novelists, journalists, medical men and politicians who had an interest in shaping public opinion at a time of rapid urbanization and capitalist expansion. The mill girls who populated this print media landscape became objects of social surveillance, and symbols of their respective authors’ social anxieties. Defenders of the mills wanted to promote them as a positive and beneficial space, while those with concerns about the negative health and social effects of female mill work produced their own narratives of sensational death and decline in response. At the same time, however, female operatives started to publish their own writing. Operatives found themselves in a tricky rhetorical position, navigating between defending the mill and their own reputations, or critiquing the mill and opening themselves up to the same criticism. Navigating between extremes, operatives articulate their own stories and forms of embodied selfhood, both within and against the surrounding ideological field. This dissertation examines the development of and response to competing mill girl life-stories—generated by writers inside and outside the mill’s walls—while exploring how these narratives intersected with nation building and contemporary social and racial conflict outside the mill. Finally, I demonstrate that significant, popular 21st-century novels continue to perpetuate the ideologically charged figure of the 19th-century New England mill girl.