Entangled Lives

Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts
Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4214-3274-8
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 384 Seiten, Format (B × H): 142 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 590 g

Reihe: Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia

An enlightening look at American women's work in the late eighteenth century.

What was women's work truly like in late eighteenth-century America, and what does it tell us about the gendered social relations of labor in the early republic? In Entangled Lives, Marla R. Miller examines the lives of Anglo-, African, and Native American women in one rural New England community—Hadley, Massachusetts—during the town's slow transformation following the Revolutionary War. Peering into the homes, taverns, and farmyards of Hadley, Miller offers readers an intimate history of the working lives of these women and their vital role in the local economy.

Miller, a longtime resident of Hadley, follows a handful of eighteenth-century women working in a variety of occupations: domestic service, cloth making, health and healing, and hospitality. She asks about the social openings and opportunities this work created—and the limitations it placed on ordinary lives. Her compelling stories about women's everyday work, grounded in the material culture, built environment, and landscapes of rural western Massachusetts, reveal the larger economic networks in which Hadley operated and the subtle shifts that accompanied the emergence of the middle class in that rural community. Ultimately, this book shows how work differentiated not only men and woman but also race and class as Miller follows young, mostly white women working in domestic service, African American women negotiating labor in enslavement and freedom, and women of the rural gentry acting as both producers and employers.

Engagingly written and featuring fascinating characters, the book deftly takes us inside a society and shows us how it functions. Offering an intervention into larger conversations about local history, microhistory, and historical scholarship, Entangled Lives is a revealing journey through early America.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Miller, Marla

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Figures
Foreword, by Cathy Matson
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Placings
Part I: Women, Work, and Community
Chapter 1: From Nolwotogg to Hadley
Chapter 2: Women, Work, and the Business of Gentility: The View from Forty Acres
Chapter 3: Women, Work, and "Economies of Makeshifts": The View from the Back Street
Part II: Livelihoods  
Chapter 4: Domestic Service
Chapter 5: Making Cloth
Chapter 6: Hospitality Work
Chapter 7: Healing and Caregiving
Part III: Topographies of Change
Chapter 8: Working Women and the Domestic Landscapes of Forty Acres
Chapter 9: New Labor, New Landscapes
Coda: Remembering Women and Work
Abbreviations
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Miller, Marla
Marla R. Miller is the director of the Public History Program and a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of The Needle's Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution and Betsy Ross and the Making of America.