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In her first attempt to represent female factory workers to a critical public. Harriet Farley, future editor of the Lowell Offering. attacked Orestes Brownson. transcendentalist reformer and 18-10 presidential, candidate, for his "slander" of working-class women. In a lengthy piece entitled "The Laboring Classes." part of a series of controversial articles articulating his electoral platform, Brownson equated independence with an individual's ownership of the means of production, a cornerstone of American republicanism in the early nineteenth century. He contested the characterization of wage laborers as "free" workers on route to becoming sell-employed farmers, craftsmen or professionals. Challenging those who would view with equanimity the shift from artisan to industrial capitalism in the United States, he asked. "[I]s there a reasonable chance that any considerable portion of the present generation of laborers, shall ever become owners of a sufficient portion of the funds of production, to be able to sustain themselves by laboring on their own capital, that is as independent laborers? [E]verybody knows there is not (371) Without this form of independence. Brownson went on to argue, American workers faced a degradation worse than African American slavery.
Harriet Farley might have been expected to agree with Brownson. By 1840, she had worked in the Lowell mills for eight years, during which time the mills had reduced wages, imposed work speed-ups, increased rents at the company-owned boarding houses where most of the female operatives lived, and defeated two strikes by the women. Farley's rebuttal to Brownson -- and many of her future editorials -- expressed concern over deteriorating pay and work conditions for women at the mills. At the same time. Farley and most of the other writers for the Lowell Offering resisted representations of the mills that conflated the mill's harsh environment with the degradation of women workers.(1) To defend women's decisions to work in the mills, Farley developed an alternative to Brownson's masculinist definition of independence, one informed by both her experience as a mill operative and as the daughter of a farmer. She repeatedly claimed that wage-labor in the mills offered greater independence than did women's lives on family-owned farms.
Taking a page from the anti-slavery feminists, the first sustained women's movement in the country, mill women used the tropes of the anti-slavery...