Farm to Factory: Women's Letters 1830-1860

by Thomas Dublin

Book Overview

Between 1820 and 1860, tens of thousands of single women streamed from rural New England to find work in the burgeoning factory towns of the region. In "Farm to Factory" Thomas Dublin has selected... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0231051190
• Release Date: January 1982
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr
• Length: 191 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Letters Tell the Story

Farm to Factory is a collection of letters written between young girls and their family and friends while they lived at factory run mills. The letters are insightful and give a new meaning to the place of young women in the early workforce of America. The girls selected talk of how they spend the little extra money they have, what their living conditions are like, what they do with their little free time, if they help support their family, how they help other family members find work, how they mother younger siblings when they come to work, and many other aspects of their daily life. This book is excellent.

Good, but it can be boring at times

Dublin's Farm to Factory contains real, unedited letters about 19th century factory girls in Massachusets and New Hampshire. The book provides great insight on the daily lives of these women, and how many were torn on becoming independent and working for themselves and staying home with their families. Lowell, Mass. becaming a largely industraial city because of these women. The book also shows how women were just one source of cheap labor at the time and how they were not always treated fairly by the mill owners, and how their lives were sometimes dictated by these people. The book is a very good historical source, as it provides quite a few letters, some from the same women (this helps the reader identify with the worker as a person and not just a historical figure), and some pictures of the town are included throughout the book. My only complaint is the lenght of the book, it can become rather tiring towards the end. My suggestion would be to read it in small doses so you can absorb everything and come out with a better understanding of it at the end.