Review: Lori Merish, Archives of Labor: Working-Class Women and Literary Culture in the Antebellum United States

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:

Lori Merish, in Archives of Labor, examines the robust literary culture of working-class women in the antebellum United States and succeeds in uncovering the complexities of the female experience that defined the various occupations in which women participated. Merish examines popular fiction, factory pamphlets, and dime novels in order to unpack the public perception of the female worker and in doing so, ascribes agency to working-class women employed as mill girls, seamstresses, missionary workers, and domestic servants. Merish also refracts the working class occupations through the lens of race by exploring the shifting public perception regarding the domestic servant as conveyed through popular contemporary novels. Historiographical trends tend to highlight gender roles and social expectations by evaluating the means in which working-class women push the boundaries of a traditionally patriarchal society in order to be economically or socially independent. Consequently, scholarship often collapses a variety of occupations into one seamless ‘working class’ experience. Merish’s work, on the other hand, addresses the complex composition of the working class and conveys the plurality of female occupations by analyzing them in separate chapters with distinct literary tracts. She succeeds in weaving together literary and historical analysis and produces a thorough and engaging text on antebellum working-class women.