Thursday, April 30, 2009

Final Draft

Circumventing the Gatekeepers: the Path to Female Agency in The Factory Girl

Despite being hailed as “the first novel of factory life in America,” (Davidson 88) and granted the probable title of the “first Sunday school novel in America” (Moore 247), there is scant scholarship devoted to Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl, published in 1814. Margaret B. Moore’s “Sarah Savage of Salem: A Forgotten Writer” offers biographical information regarding Savage, whereas Thomas B. Lovell’s “Separate Spheres and Extensive Circles: Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl and the Celebration of Industry in Early Nineteenth-Century America” finds the connections between “labor, virtue, and womanhood” (1). Approaching the novel from a feminist perspective reveals the relationship between educational access, female agency, and virtue in The Factory Girl. Access to education, which leads to an increase in female agency, is guarded by male gatekeepers: Mary’s deceased father, Dr. Mandeville, and Mr. Seymore. The decision to allow or disallow a woman access to education hinges upon her fulfillment of the four virtues of true womanhood, “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (Welter 152). These virtues simultaneously confirm Mary as a true woman and challenge the theory of separate spheres because Mary’s increased agency allows her to broaden her sphere of influence, i.e. to both maintain and produce (Lovell 4)[1]. Savage circumvents the male gatekeepers in the novel, allowing Mary a clear path to power and authority while retaining the title of true woman.

The novel supports two generational comparisons of the connection between education and female agency through the characters of Mary and Mrs. Burnam, Mary’s grandmother. Noticeably absent are Mary’s parents - her father died when she was young and before he had the opportunity to see to her education, and the only reference to her mother is that she never had one. Instead, the grandmother is charged by her son to see that Mary is educated: “[t]hough you will have to work hard, mother, to get along, I know you will contrive to spare time to teach Mary (as you did me) to read the Bible, and talk to her about what it contains” (5-6). Mrs. Burnam is able to carry out her son’s instructions because, as the narrator informs the reader, “though her humble station has precluded her from the advantages of a refined education, [she] had an inquisitive mind, and by much observation had in some measure supplied the want of instruction” (14). Mrs. Burnam is granted agency, though not to the same degree as Mary, because her son’s only guidelines are “as you did me” in regards to method. This statement implies that Mrs. Burnam is already a capable teacher. Since Mary is the heroine of the story, the reader can safely assume that Mrs. Burnam exceeded her son’s expectations in regards to Mary’s schooling.

Mrs. Burnam is aware of the changes in women’s education since her own schooling: “I did not know how to express it; for I never had much schooling; when I was a young woman, we did not have the advantages they do now” (33). Though these advantages are never spelled out specifically, historical scholarship reveals that female academies were established as early as the 1780s (Kelley 276) in addition to pre-existing mixed gendered schools and Sunday schools. Whereas Mrs. Burnam probably never had an opportunity for schooling outside the home, her grand-daughter does not face the same roadblock. Despite Mrs. Burnam’s lack of formal education, even Mr. Seymore, after listening to her describe the type of education she gave Mary, praises her: “Your method...was in my opinion perfectly correct” (36).

Mrs. Burnam’s method of teaching connects God to occurrences in nature, as the reader is told “[t]he term natural history she could not have defined; but was practically acquainted with some of the most useful branches, for she knew every tree of the forest, and every medicinal herb and root that grew within several miles around her; hardly a bird warbled within her hearing, of which she could not describe some peculiarity” (Savage 14-5). While Mrs. Burnam might not be “book smart” she is “street smart” as her teaching method employs practical utilization and stems from her domestic duties (performed as a wife, mother, daughter, and sister). For example, one of Mary’s childhood lessons occurs in the kitchen, the domain of true womanhood:

I used to try to make God known to her by shewing her his wonderful works. I have often called her to look at a joint I have been separating, when cooking, to see how curiously one bone was set into another...And when I found she took delight in looking at them, I have given her a psalm, or verse to read, in which God was declared to be the maker of all things. (35-6) 

Unlike other parents, Mrs. Burnam found no difficulty in exciting in Mary “a fondness for reading the Bible” (30), without which a good education and future is impossible, according to Mr. Seymore, the town’s clergyman.

Mary’s role in The Factory Girl is that of both educated and educator. Taught under the guidance of her grandmother, the church, and her own “uncommon industry” (40), Mary is equipped with the most important knowledge there is: the Bible. Her father’s dying wish confirms the importance of the Bible in a child’s education: “[w]hen Mary is grown up, she will, I am sure, want to return some of your goodness, (for the knowledge of the Bible, that you will give her, will make her dutiful;)” (6). Mary’s piety is her strongest virtue, and as Barbara Welter has stated, “[r]eligion or piety was the core of woman’s virtue, the source of her strength” (152). The Factory Girl upholds a strong connection between religion and education, with women as its enforcers, mimicking the historical fact that “[e]ducation and religion were so closely allied in those days that each was necessary to the other” (Moore 243).

The first gatekeeper Mary encounters is her father. Her father is in a position to control her access to the Bible and to dictate whether or not she will have an education beyond the Bible or beyond the home. Savage circumvents the father as gatekeeper by killing him off when Mary is young and delegating the task of Mary’s education to his mother, Mrs. Burnam. Because Mary’s father never dictates the style or method of the education, it becomes the sole responsibility of Mrs. Burnam to educate Mary in not just reading and writing, but also religion, morals and manners.

Mrs. Burnam also teaches Mary how to fulfill the four virtues of true womanhood, and her success is referred to throughout the story via Mary’s character traits. Mary is industrious, dutiful, cheerful, naturally timid, modest, obliging, good-tempered, and has a pleasing manner and good-humored smile. She is pious, going to church every Sunday and memorizing the sermon so she can tell it to her grandmother, who cannot make the trip. Mary’s purity is demonstrated via her courtship by William Raymond because she is focused on his character traits rather than his physical appearance and the ways in which she can help improve him: “she would look forward with delight to the period when she might use the influence of a wife to lead the mind of William to clearer notions of the true spirit of Christianity, and more uniform consistency of conduct” (46-7). Even when Mary does marry Mr. Danforth, a widower, she becomes a mother without the ordeal of actual childbirth. Obviously the reader can infer that one day Mary might have children of her own with Mr. Danforth, however, the book ends before the fruit of marital labor is explicitly spelled out.

In addition to the excellent education Mary receives at the hand of her grandmother, she takes it upon herself to rise early each morning in order to read from the Bible. The payoff for her self-motivation is tenfold, according to Mrs. Burnam:

You would not have been able to teach this little school, if you had not, by early rising and uncommon industry, have saved time to study your books. We don’t know how much good may come of one right action. Your attention to your books may be, in the end, the means of carrying some souls to heaven; for by teaching them to read the bible, you will give them the best guide to that better world. (40)

Mary’s “uncommon industry” can be attributed to the feminized education she received from her grandmother, and because of it, Mary has the opportunity to guide children to eternal salvation, a responsibility she will share with Mr. Seymore. Her gender, which should prevent Mary from holding a position of power outside the home, is cloaked by her piety. Not only that, but the idealized republican standards dictated that “[r]eligion belonged to woman by divine right, a gift of God and nature” (Welter 152), which further clears Mary’s path to agency and authority.

The second gatekeeper is Dr. Mandeville, the town’s physician and part owner of the town’s new factory. Dr. Mandeville controls Mary’s access to the factory children via the Sunday Charity school. While superficially this might seem straightforward, the future of the factory children has religious, moral, and economic implications. In regards to all children, “[t]he grace of God can alone sow the seed, or bring to maturity this happy temper; but, it is our duty to prepare the soil” (32). It is the duty of the parents to educate their children, but in the case of the factory children, the parents are guilty of neglect:

In these establishments [cotton factory] the labours of children are so useful, as to render their wages a temptation to parents to deprive their offspring of the advantages of education; and, for an immediate supply of pressing wants, to rob them of their just rights – the benefit of those publick schools, which were founded peculiarly for the advantage of the poor. (37)

The implication that public schools are a “just right” of children, not just boys, reflects two historical trends. One, that “after the attainment of American independence, educational plans intended to service American nationalism and republicanism provided for the primary education of girls as well as boys” (Cott 103). Schools that were previously the sole domain of male students began offering classes to females, even though they were still taught separately and all female academies offered girls a more substantial education than one received at home.


Secondly, the advantages of education reflected the changing economy as parents, “[o]nce able to provide sons with farms and daughters with dowries…found it increasingly difficult to sustain these traditions. Those who looked to education as an alternative endowment...contribut[ed] their economic, social and cultural capital to the education of children” (Kelley 4). The novel reflects how education became a form of economic capital:

These thoughtless parents do not consider that they are taking from their children an essential good, for which money cannot compensate. Ignorance will necessarily lessen their future respectability in society, and check the stimulating hope of rising into eminence, which, in a free country like ours, may and ought to be cherished, for next to religion it is the best security for honest industry and laudable exertion. (37-8)

Education is a gateway for these children, and access to it can make or break a child’s economic and social future. In order for these factory children to have an education, they need a school teacher. The school teacher becomes like a surrogate parent, and has the authority to mold the child’s future.

Mary, as a school teacher, will have the responsibility to teach the poor factory children moral lessons as well. Judith Fetterley, in her “Introduction” to Provisions, states that women writers of the time period commended certain virtues, “[b]ut it may be worth noting that the virtues they extol - kindness, courtesy, generosity, honesty, sympathy, integrity - however middle-class they may be in their origins, are presented as standard for human behavior and are observed to occur in persons of all classes” (10). Mary’s ability to affect these moral changes in the “poor” children is demonstrated by their willingness to work hard for the simple reward of a flower, or the chance to be her assistant during a lesson.

Mary circumvents Dr. Mandeville as the gatekeeper to authority over the factory children because he has to wait until Mary volunteers to be the school teacher, rather than ask her directly: “Dr. Mandeville gladly accepted the proposal, which he had been prevented from making himself, from a tender regard to the health of Mary, whose gentle, unassuming manner, and faithful discharge of relative duties, had excited an interest in his benevolent heart” (39-40). Even after Mary volunteers, “I wish I were capable of performing such a delightful task” (38), Dr. Mandeville does not feel comfortable accepting until Mrs. Burnman insists, supplying the reader with another instance of female agency. It is clear from the text that only Mary and no other person, male or female, was ever considered for the job.

The choice of Mary, a woman, for the role of school teacher fits with historical ideals as Nancy F. Cott explains in her book, The Bonds of Womanhood, “[i]n Joseph Emerson’s estimation, the schoolroom ranked next to the home as a sphere of women’s work. He ‘suspected’ that nature had designed the teaching profession to be women’s, since the law, medicine, religion, and politics were exclusively (and appropriately) men’s” (121). The positioning of Mary as school teacher gives her the opportunity to expand her sphere of influence from the home (private) to the public (schoolroom) under the protection of true womanhood. However, Mary does not violate the rule that woman “was to work only for pure affection, without thought of money or ambition” (Welter 168). In taking care of her grandmother, her aunt, and her nephews while working at the factory and teaching Sunday school, Mary is a study of domestic perfection. Her home is never neglected in favor of her physical labor (the factory) or her intellectual pursuits (teaching Sunday school).

Lovell also sees the scene when Mary accepts the job of teacher as an opportunity to maintain and produce:

the instruction of children figures as yet another extension of Mary’s duty, and the duty here refers both to her obligation as a representative of religious virtues and her place as a member of the industrial working class...As is the case throughout the novel, wage labor, when performed properly, brings about the same result as virtuous activity in the domestic sphere: the extension of virtue and a positive influence in the moral character of others. (15)

Her newly expanded agency and authority is not a threat to the male-dominated public sphere because it is couched in terms of duty and virtue, specifically her piety and domesticity. The poor factory children become her children and she loves them. The idea that “[t]he average woman is to be ‘the presiding genius of love’ in the home” (Welter 168) expands to the schoolroom, and Mary “found little difficulty in governing, for she ruled her scholars by love” (Savage 53).

The recognition of Mary’s potential to be an educator, fostered by her nineteenth-century education and fulfillment of the four virtues of true womanhood, and the transition to actual educator gives Mary the type of authority her grandmother could never acquire. Mary Kelley, author of Learning to Stand & Speak, affirms the power female educators had in American society: “[i]n educational improvement and social reform, as in writing and editing, women played an influential role in the making of public opinion before the Civil War” (246). Dr. Mandeville tells Mary, “[y]our ability, my good girl...is fully equal to the duty [of instruction]” (39) and the narrator assures the reader that “[a] humble station could not obscure from the discerning eye of Dr. Mandeville good sense and virtue, and wherever he found those qualities, he honoured and esteemed the possessor” (40). Even though Mary was able to circumvent Dr. Mandeville as a gatekeeper, his willingness to see “good sense and virtue” in a person without regard to their gender would have prompted him to allow her access to the schoolchildren, and therefore to agency and authority.

The narrator likens Mary to “a general, directing an immense army” (52), an emperor, a king, and military hero while describing her work as a Sunday schoolmistress. All of these positions are held by males, rather than females but Mary’s position of power allows her to transcend these gendered limitations. The difference between Mary and the king/military rulers is motivation, “for it was unsullied by the recollection of cruelty, and unalloyed by a thirst of fame. Her love of glory was satisfied with the sound of one still small voice, that whispered she was doing service acceptable for heaven” (Savage 52). Even Mary’s motivation is couched in terms of self-sacrifice and service for others that female advocates of the nineteenth-century frequently deployed. Kelley explains, “[c]laims to deference such as Beecher’s masked women’s newly acquired agency with the rhetoric of subordination. Behind this rhetoric existed a larger social reality in which thousands of women were steadily enlarging upon the power they wielded in civil society” (227). Mary’s ever expanding circle of influence is non-threatening to the male town leaders because her actions are disguised by the four virtues of true womanhood.


The last gatekeeper that Mary encounters is Mr. Seymore, who acts as a clergyman for their town. He is new to the town and despite his young age, wins the approval of Mrs. Burnam for his clear instructions to parents on how to educate their children using the Bible. Mr. Seymore controls Mary’s access to the Bible, the factory children, and the future of her nephews after she has taken them in, following their mother’s death. At the beginning of the novel, Mr. Seymore is not circumvented completely but it is foreshadowed when he agrees that Mrs. Burnman’s education of Mary is perfect. While Mrs. Burnam heaps praise upon Mr. Seymore “because you not only teach us that we ought we to do our duty, but you tell us exactly how we ought to do it” (27), it becomes clear that she has no need for these explicit instructions (her neighbors are in need, as per her example). Indeed, unlike other parents, such as Dr. Mandeville, Mrs. Burnam had no problem exciting “a fondness for reading the Bible” (30) within Mary as a child. Mary’s fondness for the Bible, combined with her unique self-motivation, gives her a head start in on her path to agency.

Mary’s interactions with Mr. Seymore after her trials and tribulations[2] show a marked contrast to their meetings at the beginning of the novel. Early in the novel, there is little to no direct dialogue between them, and Mary passively receives his advice. When Mary is teaching at the Sunday Charity school, their interaction is brief and mentioned only as the lessons were “closed by a short appropriate prayer, which Mr. Seymore had written and given to Mary to read on that occasion” (53). The descriptions of Mary’s method of teaching make it clear that her contributions to the lesson plan and success of the school outweigh the contributions of Mr. Seymore. The strength with which she emerges from the trials allow her to circumvent Mr. Seymore’s role as a gatekeeper as her status as a true woman has been steadily bolstered and reinforced. A conversation with Nancy Raymond, her friend from the factory, reveals Mary’s virtue: “’Ah,…it is you who keep that same beautiful circle of Mr. Seymore’s as round and bright as the sun’” (81). This circle references Mr. Seymore’s idea that “the duties of a christian form an extensive circle, and that every virtue which composed the ample round required our attention, or the beautiful symmetry of the figure would be broken and injured” (80). It is Mary who is the beautiful circle, not Mr. Seymore or any other of the gatekeepers.

Mary exceeds Mr. Seymore’s capacity as a gatekeeper when after realizing she cannot afford the expenses of her aunt and four nephews, she seeks the advice of Mr. Seymore. They come up with a plan to apprentice the children to families until they are able to apprentice to a true trade, but Mrs. Holden objects strenuously. The next time she encounters Mr. Seymore, he attempts to place blame on her aunt for acting unreasonable. Mary dares to argue back, and states if she only had a school “that difficulty would be partly removed; they would then (a considerable portion of the time) be obliged to submit to rules. I might instruct them also, while I should be enabling myself to maintain the family” (98). Her plan of action allows for both maintenance and production but is sufficiently submersed in piety, submissiveness and domesticity so as not to cause alarm to the male authority figures. Mr. Seymore can find no fault and acknowledges her circumvention:

’To a design so praise-worthy…I am not disposed to make any more objections. I trust your benevolent exertions will be blessed. My narrow means will not allow me to give you pecuniary aid, but my utmost endeavours shall be used to obtain scholars for you. Whenever my advice or assistance can serve you, call upon me without hesitation.’ (98)

Their positions of authority are reversed, and Mr. Seymore is now at Mary’s service not the other way around.

Despite the fact that the newly formed republic “denied women access to participation in the public sphere of organized politics, it left civil society fully open as a public sphere in which first white and then black women were able to flourish as never before” (Kelley 7)[3]. In The Factory Girl, Mary’s access to education hinges upon three male gatekeepers and their decisions on whether or not to allow her the opportunity is subject to her commitment to piety, purity, submission and domesticity. Although Mary does fulfill her true womanhood obligations, there are sections of the novel that challenge the limited sphere of influence a woman was supposed to inhabit. Her agency empowered actions allow her to maintain and produce rather than just maintain, challenging the theory of separate spheres and gendered roles. Mary’s ability to maintain and produce allows her to both circumvent her gatekeepers and broadens her sphere of influence beyond the home, leaving a clear path to agency and authority in her town. Women such as Mary, and Sarah Savage as an author, contributed to the educational revolution of the 1830s by wearing the mask of the four virtues while steadily expanding their sphere of influence and forcing their way into positions of power within civil society, all with the blessing of the patriarchal authority they sought to abscond.


Works Cited

Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “woman’s sphere” in New England, 1780 1835. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997.

Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The rise of the novel in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.

Fetterley, Judith. “Introduction.” Provisions: a reader from 19th-Century American women. Ed. Judith Fetterley. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 1-40.

Kelley, Mary. Learning to Stand & Speak: women, education, and public life in America’s republic. Williamsburg, Virginia: U of North Carolina P, 2006.


Lovell, Thomas B. “Separate Spheres and Extensive Circles: Sarah Savage’s ‘The Factory Girl’ and the Celebration of Industry in Early Nineteenth-Century America.” Early American Literature 31.1 (1996): 1-24. America: History & Life. 7 February 2009.


Moore, Margaret B. “Sarah Savage of Salem: A Forgotten Writer.” Essex Institute Historical Collections 127.3 (1991): 240-259. America: History & Life. 7 February 2009.


Savage, Sarah. The factory girl. By a lady. Boston: Munroe, Francis & Parker, 1814.


Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood.” American Quarterly 18.2 (1966): 151-174. JSTOR. 7 February 2009. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2711179.


Footnotes:
[1] “But Savage’s conception of labor is different because it does not acknowledge any necessary distinction between these two kinds of work [wage labor and domestic labor]. The work of Mary Burnham, and so the work that Savage advocates for her readership, both produces and maintains” (4). The Factory Girl thus challenges the theory of separate spheres because both genders are given the opportunity to produce and maintain. Lovell, Thomas B. “Separate Spheres and Extensive Circles: Sarah Savage’s ‘The Factory Girl’ and the Celebration of Industry in Early Nineteenth-Century America.” Early American Literature 31.1 (1996): 1-24. America: History & Life. 7 February 2009.


[2] Following the tradition of women’s fiction, Mary is subjected to much suffering: first, Mrs. Danforth dies despite Mary’s nursing. Then, she falls sick and is bedridden for four months. When she recovers, Mary discovers that her beau, William Raymond, has left her for another woman. Her grandmother dies; she becomes the sole source of income for herself, her aunt Mrs. Holden and her four nephews after their mother dies in her home. She has to sell the family cottage to deal with rising debt, but the money isn’t enough and she ends up having to work at the factory full time and teach school to try to make ends meet.

[3] It is important to note, as Kelley and other scholars have, that the white women mentioned belonged to the middle class like Mary, not the lower class, i.e. the factory workers and their children.

Conference Presentation

Thesis:

I argue that Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl illustrates the relationship between education, female agency and virtue by circumventing the traditional male gatekeepers; this allows Savage to confirm Mary Burnam’s status as a true woman while challenging the theory of separate spheres because her increasing agency allows Mary to both produce and maintain, actions normally reserved for men only.



How my thesis differs from / adds to / intervenes in scholarship:

There is very little scholarship that focuses solely on Savage’s The Factory Girl. The scholarship that does exist, such as Thomas B. Lovell’s article “Separate Spheres and Extensive Circles,” examines labor, virtue, and womanhood but not education. Because Mary is a school teacher to so many different audiences in the novel, I wanted to focus on the connections between education, female agency and virtue and the ways in which Mary’s actions undermine the idea of separate spheres. Much research about the educational revolution in America has been done by scholars such as Cott, Kelley, Ryan, Fetterely, Davidson, Byam, etc., but it tends to focus on the later years, 1830-1860. By examining Savage’s novel, published almost fifteen years earlier, I hope to re-include it in the canon from which it has been excluded.



One example of how my argument works:

The strongest example from my paper is the way in which Mary’s circumvention of Dr. Mandeville offers the biggest increase in her agency, and therefore the largest broadening of her sphere of influence. Dr. Mandeville is the gatekeeper to her access to the factory children and the opportunity to shape their economical and social futures. Despite his authority as a doctor and part owner of the factory in town, he is constrained by Mary’s virtue and has to wait until she volunteers for the job of school teacher. The shifting economy of the time period is what enables education to become a valuable currency, providing the opportunity for future self-sufficiency. Mary’s role as a school teacher is perhaps her most powerful one, and this bolstering of her agency gives her power over traditional authority roles such as parents, doctors and clergymen.



One area of my project that I am thinking through, dissatisfied with, or interested in pursuing further:

Anyone familiar with the novel will notice that I did not include all the male figures or gatekeepers that Mary encounters: specifically, I left out her beau William Raymond, the factory agent Mr. Crawford, and her future husband, the widower Mr. Danforth. I made these decisions based on time and page constraints, but the addition of these men would be necessary to provide complete picture of how education, agency, and virtue are working together in the novel. Because I am not very strong on Marxist and economy theory, I tended to shy away from making bold statements regarding class and economy, but further research into that area would be illuminating. Any recommendations beyond Marx would be welcome.

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Session 1. 7:15-7:45 The American Novel in Context.

CHAIR: Jessica Workman

Robert Miyares. Physiognomy: Success and Failures of Physical Interpretation in Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond.

Amanda Ewoldt. True Womanhood and Anti-Catholicism in Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent.

Serge Desir. Man About Town: The Male Voice in Fall River.

Discussants: Jay Jay, Ed, Rich


Stroup Index Card 1:
Two of these papers deal with a fictionalized version of a true event (the murder of Sarah Maria Cornell and the burning of the Ursuline Convent). If you were able to track down non-fiction accounts of these events, what insight did you gain by comparing it to your text? Did you find evidence of American myth-making, or other tensions between the “historic realties” of the situation and the fictionalized representations of the characters and towns?

Two of the texts involve sexual violence against women, while the other associates Catholics with sexual deviance. Do you think the decision to make explicit or implied references to these sexual exploits and attacks are connected to the victim’s agency status (no agency, plenty of agency, or the attack served as a catalyst for gaining agency)?

All three papers make reference to the virtue, or lack of virtue, of its female characters. According to Welter’s barometer of true womanhood, do any of these women achieve the status of true woman? If not, why? Do culture, class, education, religion play a factor?


Annotated Bibliography

Annotated Bibliography: The Factory Girl

Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: “woman’s sphere” in New England, 1780 - 1835. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997.

Cott’s book approaches domesticity and the “woman’s sphere” with an emphasis on women’s consciousness and consciousness-raising; the edition I used was the second, but the original edition came out in 1977. Cott states her aim is “to see how middle-class women’s experience and concomitant outlook in the decades leading toward the 1820s and 1830s matched or confronted (or possibly produced) the prescriptive ‘canon’ of domesticity” (xiii). This attention to the middle-class was a perfect match because Mary Burnam is also middle-class. I primarily focused on her introduction, chapter three (“Education”) and the conclusion. This book was an excellent source for background research, and provided great historical background about education in post-Revolutionary America. I learned a great deal about the tension between the idealized cult of domesticity and the demands from supporters of female enlightenment.


Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The rise of the novel in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.

Davidson’s ground breaking work focuses on “coemergence of the new U.S. nation and the new literary genre of the novel” (vii). The book utilizes many different sources, ranging from primary sources, to archival documents, and private writings (diaries, letters). Davidson varies her approach as well, applying a history of the text to the more standardized “reception studies, social history, historical materialism and poststructuralist critical theory” (vii). This book was helpful in that Davidson mentions The Factory Girl specifically twice, though in reference to its industrial connotations, which I did not necessarily explore in my paper.


Fetterley, Judith. “Introduction.” Provisions: a reader from 19th-Century American women. Ed. Judith Fetterley. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 1-40.

Fetterley’s “Introduction” to the anthology is decidedly personal as she recounts her own experiences with early American women writers and their texts. Her decision to include the journey that brought her to edit and produce the anthology reminds readers how different the field of feminine studies was twenty years ago: “the attempt to integrate the work of nineteenth-century American women into the definition of American literature would provide a good testing ground for the relationship between sexual politics and literary judgment” (2). Though Fetterley does not make specific reference to Sarah Savage or The Factory Girl, her “Introduction” provided a strong argument concerning women writer’s decision to focus on the lives of women, which is what Savage’s text does. If time and paper length constraints weren’t an issue, I would have included more of Fetterley’s research in my paper.


Kelley, Mary. Learning to Stand & Speak: women, education, and public life in America’s republic. Williamsburg, Virginia: U of North Carolina P, 2006.

Kelley’s book focuses on “the movement of women into public life” (1) by measuring the transformation “in individual and social identities” (1). Specifically, the book looks at female academies/seminaries, and what role they played in “mediating this process” (1). The source material covers a wide range, from personal letters, diaries, school newspapers, newsletters, etc. The anecdotal approach lets the reader feel a connection to these women who lived over a hundred years ago. My research concentrated on the introduction, chapters two and seven (“The Need of Their Genius: The Rights and Obligations of Schooling” and “The Mind Is, in a Sense, Its Own Home: Gendered Republicanism as Lived Experience”), and the conclusion. Despite the fact that Savage is never mentioned specifically, I still read through all the material because it was so incredibly fascinating. It provided excellent historical reference for my paper regarding the evolution of female education during the 1830s - 1860s.


Lovell, Thomas B. “Separate Spheres and Extensive Circles: Sarah Savage’s ‘The Factory Girl’ and the Celebration of Industry in Early Nineteenth-Century America.” Early American Literature 31.1 (1996): 1-24. America: History & Life. 7 February 2009.

Lovell’s article explores the connections between “labor, virtue and womanhood” (1) in The Factory Girl and suggests that the lack of scholarship on the novel stems from the fact that “it challenges the dominant conceptual framework of separate spheres” (5) by welcoming “the domain of the factory as a new opportunity” (5) instead of labeling it (industrialization) as a threat to the home. Lovell’s approach is firmly grounded in economic theory and he views Mary, like many post-Revolutionary women, as economically constituting herself in response to the shifting economy of the time. This article was extremely helpful in my research because it included many non-fictional historical documents about the introduction of factories into American economy, and provided support for the connections between agency and expansion of Mary’s sphere of influence I found in the text.


Moore, Margaret B. “Sarah Savage of Salem: A Forgotten Writer.” Essex Institute Historical Collections 127.3 (1991): 240-259. America: History & Life. 7 February 2009.

Moore’s article methodically tracks down biographical and historical information about Sarah Savage, author of at least twelve books (all published anonymously). Moore argues that Savage was “a pioneer teacher and writer in this transition” (240), the transition referring to the shift from “stern Calvinism to the milder tenets of Unitarianism” (240). Although scholars are supposed to shy away from authorial intent or indulging in psychobiography, there are clear cut similarities between Savage and Mary Burnam, the heroine of The Factory Girl. I wish I had been able to include more of the background information regarding schools, Sunday schools and the role of religion in my paper, but I ran out of space.


Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood.” American Quarterly 18.2 (1966): 151-174. JSTOR. 7 February 2009. .

Welter’s article is the culmination of reading through, categorizing and synthesizing material from women’s magazines, gift books, religious tracts and sermons, and cookbooks from 1820 to 1860 in addition to the materials that collaborated but were not cited in her article. At the time of publication, Welter’s work is considered groundbreaking and her definition of true womanhood, “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (152) provokes an avalanche of critical response. Though some scholars disagree with Welter’s conclusions, it must be remembered there is always a gap between an idealized notion of true womanhood and the realities of post-Revolutionary America. It is the tension between these two standpoints that I attempt to explore in my paper on The Factory Girl, which is indebted to Welter’s research.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Revisions and Notes

If you read through the extremely helpful suggestions made by Serge and Amanda that I posted earlier today, you’ll see why I felt the need to re-write over two thirds of my paper. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I found out we would be submitting a rough draft to our peers for evaluation, and that we would be responsible for evaluating two papers in return. I knew I was excited to read what other people in the class had been working on, because normally, we don’t read each other’s papers – we just “kvetch” about the writing process. It was actually really relaxing to be able to go through and read someone else’s paper – I find that much more enjoyable than writing one of my own!

So, it turns out that without this evaluation process, I think my original paper would have tanked. My thesis didn’t match the rest of my paper and it wasn’t a very clearly stated thesis either. I didn’t feel comfortable stating that I was adding to the body of scholarship that already existed on The Factory Girl, and if I asked myself, “what is at stake here?” the answer was, “eh, not much.” I knew there was something to be said about The Factory Girl, but it kept evading me. Luckily, my evaluators saw in my paper what I did not – the connections between agency, education and male authority. And just like that, I was able to re-write my thesis, find those connections and (hopefully) make clear the examples provided by the text.

Since I’m still tweaking my final draft, I thought I would post some behind the scenes work, so to speak. When I write a paper, I like to find all the quotes I have found relevant to my theme, type them up and categorize them. Below are the quotes I found from both secondary sources and a few from the primary source (most of the primary source examples were already incorporated in my initial draft, so I just copied and pasted those). Unfortunately, there are some quotes listed below that I haven’t been able to fit into my final draft, which is a shame, but with the blog, I’m able to show them off so they won’t go to waste.



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Virtues and true womanhood:
“Religion belonged to woman by divine right, a gift of God and nature” (Welter 152).

“Men were supposed to be religious, although they rarely had time for it, and supposed to be pure, although it came awfully hard to them, but men were the movers, the doers, the actors. Women were the passive, submissive responders” (Welter 158-9).

“She was to work only for pure affection, without thought of money or ambition” (Welter 160).

“The average woman is to be ‘the presiding genius of love’ in the home” (Welter 168).

“A true woman naturally loved her children; to suggest otherwise was monstrous” (Welter 171).

On the role of love: “she wrote to edify children and young adults with diction that reflected the rationalism of the eighteenth century and the moral didacticism of the nineteenth century. This was a time of transition from stern Calvinism to the milder tenets of Unitarianism” (Moore 240).

“Education and religion were so closely allied in those days that each was necessary to the other” (Moore 243).

“The mothering that Nancy and Mary will perform in their married life is not the result of some natural maternal affection, but instead comes about because they enter a socially constructed environment” (Lovell 17).


Access to Education:
“But it may be worth noting that the virtues they extol - kindness, courtesy, generosity, honesty, sympathy, integrity - however middle-class they may be in their origins, are presented as standard for human behavior and are observed to occur in persons of all classes” (Fetterley 10). [education access, this is how the poor factory children are supposed to act]

“In writing as Christians, nineteenth-century American women writers aligned themselves with a different kind of power, one that they saw as essentially female. They wrote, not on the side of the devil, who was most definitely male, but on the side of Christ who stood for women” (Fetterley 28).

“after the attainment of American independence, educational plans intended to service American nationalism and republicanism provided for the primary education of girls as well as boys” (Cott 103). [this links to the increase in American literacy]

Access to women’s education was based on social utility: “Clearly, [Benjamin] Rush argued neither for justice with regard to women’s opportunities for learning nor for women’s participation in the advancement of knowledge. His reasoning was utilitarian; his plan for female education was functional” (Cott 105).

“In Joseph Emerson’s estimation, the schoolroom ranked next to the home as a sphere of women’s work. He ‘suspected’ that nature had designed the teaching profession to be women’s, since the law, medicine, religion, and politics were exclusively (and appropriately) men’s” (Cott 121).

“By intending education to fit women better for wifehood and motherhood, such a rationale allayed fears about the conflict between learning and domestic duties” (Cott 119).

On the term economic capital: “Once able to provide sons with farms and daughters with dowries, parents found it increasingly difficult to sustain these traditions. Those who looked to education as an alternative endowment...contribut[ed] their economic, social and cultural capital to the education of children” (Kelley 4).

“an advanced education opened the door to economic self-support” (Kelley 5)

“Insisting that learning was both an individual right and a social necessity, they [who called for an end to the long-standing tradition of ‘educational disadvantaging’] participated in the design of a female ideal, who displayed a variety of faces” such as the “sensible and industrious ‘good wife’” or a “variation on the ‘gentleman’s companion’” (Kelley 43).


Agency of Mary:
“Mary is a model of behavior and her introduction into the factory extends the range of her influence, allowing a larger set of people to follow in her example” (Lovell 14).

“But Savage’s conception of labor is different because it does not acknowledge any necessary distinction between these two kinds of work [wage labor and domestic labor]. The work of Mary Burnham, and so the work that Savage advocates for her readership, both produces and maintains” (Lovell 4).

“I want to suggest, rather, that the novel has not reached the status of rediscovered masterpiece precisely because it challenges the dominant conceptual framework of separate spheres...Unlike many texts that fall under the heading of ‘women’s fiction,’ The Factory Girl welcomes the domain of the factory as a new opportunity for the practice of what might be called religious or moral principles” (Lovell 5).

[Dr. Mandeville gives Mary the school teacher job] “In this scene, the instruction of children figures as yet another extension of Mary’s duty, and the duty here refers both to her obligation as a representative of religious virtues and her place as a member of the industrial working class...As is the case throughout the novel, wage labor, when performed properly, brings about the same result as virtuous activity in the domestic sphere: the extension of virtue and a positive influence in the moral character of others” (Lovell 15).

“For women, hope lay more in a future that their texts were intended to effect than in a XXX, either historic or mythic” (Fetterley 25).

“Claims to deference such as Beecher’s masked women’s newly acquired agency with the rhetoric of subordination. Behind this rhetoric existed a larger social reality in which thousands of women were steadily enlarging upon the power they wielded in civil society” (Kelley, 227).

“an advanced education opened the door to economic self-support” (Kelley 5)

“The women who embarked on careers as teachers were largely responsible for the rapid increase in literacy between the American Revolution and the Civil War” (Kelley 10).

“In educational improvement and social reform, as in writing and editing, women played an influential role in the making of public opinion before the Civil War” (Kelley 246).

“The republican wife might also wear the face of an equally influential mother. Taking on the additional responsibility for schooling sons and daughters in the tenets of virtue, she committed herself to preparing them for adult lives as informed and engaged citizens” (Kelley 44).



The gatekeepers:
“Unable, as Baym argues, to ‘imagine the concept of self apart from society,’ American women writers early concentrated on describing the social context that shapes the individual self, and thus they created a literature concerned with the connection between manners, morals, social class, and social value” (Fetterley 9).

On “middle-class women” and maintaining + producing: “These women worked. While unmarried, they engaged in schoolteaching, domestic work, handicraft and industrial labor. When married they kept house, reared children, manufactured household goods, supplied boarders” (Cott 9).

“By intending education to fit women better for wifehood and motherhood, such a rationale allayed fears about the conflict between learning and domestic duties” (Cott 119).

“If the post-Revolutionary compromise denied women access to participation in the public sphere of organized politics, it left civil society fully open as a public sphere in which first white and then black women were able to flourish as never before. Instead of restricting them to the household, the Republic’s establishment facilitated the entry of women into this rapidly expanding social space” (Kelley 7).

“Dr. Mandeville gladly accepted the proposal, which he had been prevented from making himself, from a tender regard to the health of Mary, whose gentle, unassuming manner, and faithful discharge of relative duties, had excited an interest in his benevolent heart” (Savage 39-40).
Mary’s interactions with Mr. Seymore: “and all was closed by a short appropriate prayer, which Mr. Seymore had written and given to Mary to read on that occasion” (Savage 53).

“Mr. Seymore, knowing the character of Dr. Mandeville, whose benevolence exceeded his means of gratifying it, relived him from the expense of supplying the children with books, &c. by using his exertions in forming a society in Hampton for that purpose” (Savage 54).

Pg 80-81, Mr. Seymore’s beautiful circle is kept round and bright as the sun by Mary, not him.

“’To a design so praise-worthy,’ said Mr. Seymore, ‘I am not disposed to make any more objections. I trust your benevolent exertions will be blessed. My narrow means will not allow me to give you pecuniary aid, but my utmost endeavours shall be used to obtain scholars for you. Whenever my advice or assistance can serve you, call upon me without hesitation.” (Savage 98).

Mary circumvents Mr. Seymore, their clergyman, in that while his other parishioners “because you not only teach us that we ought we to do our duty, but you tell us exactly how we ought to do it” (Savage 27). Mary already knows the how from her education (her grandmother had no problem exciting “a fondness for reading the Bible” (Savage 30) that Mr. Seymore laments other improper method of the instructor has ruined in other children.


Education of Mrs. Burnam:
“Mrs. Burnam, though her humble station has precluded her from the advantages of a refined education, had an inquisitive mind, and by much observation had in some measure supplied the want of instruction” (Savage 14) (description of Mary’s grandmother)

“I did not know how to express it; for I never had much schooling; when I was a young woman, we did not have the advantages they do now” (Savage 33). (Mrs. Burnam to Mr. Seymore)

“She did not know the meaning of the word philosophy; but yet, no one was more pleased to examine and observe the effects of the machines and instruments, that were used in the country business to which she was accustomed; particularly if they were new inventions, or old ones improved. The term natural history she could not have defined; but was practically acquainted with some of the most useful branches, for she knew every tree of the forest, and every medicinal herb and root that grew within several miles around her; hardly a bird warbled within her hearing, of which she could not describe some peculiarity” (Savage 14-5).


Education of Nancy with Mary as teacher:
“’I wish…that I knew as much about those holy men as you do; for I believe you try to be like them, and that makes you so much better than other people. But I hope to be acquainted with their characters before long, for I have begun, as you advised me, to read a portion in the Bible every morning, when I first get up” (Savage 20).


Education of Mary:
“Though she was too humble to believe her influence extensive, she thought it right to act as if it were so” (Savage 22). (Mary’s influence on Nancy)


Education of children:
“I listened, sir,…with the deep interest, and anxious feelings of a father, while you explained, and inculcated, the duties which we owe our children; and particularly the obligation we are under to give them an early and intimate knowledge of the scriptures. I have always considered it a very important part of their education; for if it should fail of yielding immediate good consequences, it may, in the course of life, be the means of producing the best effects” (Savage 28). (Dr. Mandeville to Mr. Seymore)

“for I have always considered the disinclination of the child, as arising from the inattention, or improper method of the instructor” (Savage 30) (Mr. Seymore to Dr. Mandeville)

“The grace of God can alone sow the seed, or bring to maturity this happy temper; but, it is our duty to prepare the soil” (Savage 32) (Mr. Seymore to Dr. Mandeville)


Education of the poor factory children:
“In these establishments [cotton factory] the labours of children are so useful, as to render their wages a temptation to parents to deprive their offspring of the advantages of education; and, for an immediate supply of pressing wants, to rob them of their just rights – the benefit of those publick schools, which were founded peculiarly for the advantage of the poor. These thoughtless parents do not consider that they are taking from their children an essential good, for which money cannot compensate. Ignorance will necessarily lessen their future respectability in society, and check the stimulating hope of rising into eminence, which, in a free country like ours, may and ought to be cherished, for next to religion it is the best security for honest industry and laudable exertion” (Savage 37-8). (Dr. Mandeville to Dr. Seymore and group) [Sunday Charity Schools]



Reviewer Evaluation Form: Amanda

LIT 6009: American Novel, Nation, Romanticism, and Imperialism

Reviewer Evaluation Form

This conference will explore the theme, American Novel, Nation, Romanticism, and Imperialism, from a broad perspective, including the emergence of the novel and its different forms (epistolary, gothic, historical fiction, etc.); the novel as a tool for education and/or nationalism; cultural constructions of gender, race, class, citizenship, aliens or the “other”; definitions of national history and/or consciousness; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sociopolitical contexts and conflicts; romanticism and imperialism, etc.

Organizers seek papers that develop arguments in response to the conference theme, that position new research in relation to ongoing scholarly discussions about the period and individual works in it, and that represent the best expression of new and emerging scholars.

Papers should be 8-10 pp. double-spaced using 12-pt. font. (excluding bibliography/Works Cited).

Manuscript Title: Ruling by Love: A True Womanhood Approach to Education

Recommendation:
Accept _____
Revise and resubmit __x___
Reject _____

Evaluation: Please consider the overall effectiveness of the essay and how well it suits the conference forum (described above). Here you will highlight the specific strengths of the argument and areas for revision.

Jay-Jay Stroup’s paper definitely fits the criteria of the conference paper in relation to the roles of women in nineteenth century America. She details the amount and type of power given to such women—power that was gained by Mary working within the strictures that were imposed on her to overcome them. Stroup is very concise and uses the primary text often to make and back up her points. Overall, the paper looks good.

Specific Suggestions for Revision: Please describe specific points in the essay that will benefit from revision and make suggestions about how to undertake that activity. Pay particular attention to the clarity, specificity, and strength with which the argument is advanced; the demonstrated knowledge of the text and period; the distinction between the writer’s views and those of other scholars; the development of each point of argument with textual evidence; areas in which the argument lacks cohesiveness, evidence, or precision; and the contribution of this argument to the field. Please note broad areas in which the niceties of grammar, syntax, style of written expression, or MLA citation style need attention.

Overall, I haven’t too many criticisms. I am a little concerned that she only used three sources—granted, three sources used well (and they are) are better than six or seven used badly. As for mechanical errors, if I found them I marked them in the text.There are just a couple questions that I had that might be useful to consider in the final draft:What exactly is Mrs. Burnam’s education herself, and how did she teach Mary? Do these teaching methods parallel each other in any way?

Date sent to Reader: ________________
Date Returned: 4/20/09
Reader's Signature Amanda Ewoldt

Reviewer Evaluation Form: Serge

LIT 6009: American Novel, Nation, Romanticism, and Imperialism

Reviewer Evaluation Form

This conference will explore the theme, American Novel, Nation, Romanticism, and Imperialism, from a broad perspective, including the emergence of the novel and its different forms (epistolary, gothic, historical fiction, etc.); the novel as a tool for education and/or nationalism; cultural constructions of gender, race, class, citizenship, aliens or the “other”; definitions of national history and/or consciousness; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sociopolitical contexts and conflicts; romanticism and imperialism, etc.

Organizers seek papers that develop arguments in response to the conference theme, that position new research in relation to ongoing scholarly discussions about the period and individual works in it, and that represent the best expression of new and emerging scholars.

Papers should be 8-10 pp. double-spaced using 12-pt. font. (excluding bibliography/Works Cited).

Manuscript Title: Ruling by Love: A True Womanhood Approach to Education

Recommendation:
Accept _____
Revise and resubmit __X___
Reject _____

Evaluation: Please consider the overall effectiveness of the essay and how well it suits the conference forum (described above). Here you will highlight the specific strengths of the argument and areas for revision.

I am satisfied that Stroup’s essay fulfills the conference theme in that it considers how Savage’s novel, The Factory Girl, explores how educational opportunities provided agency to early nineteenth century women. Stroup provides a concise argument that the novel’s protagonist, Mary Burnam, has been granted agency and authority as a result of her education. Simultaneously, Stroup’s examination of how Burnam’s education and power still manage to conform to nineteenth century standards of “true womanhood.” In short, Burnam’s power is granted to her as a result of her fulfilling societal ideals of the time, and in this way she is able to find her proper place within her community.

It strikes me that the tension between access to education and fulfillment of the “four virtues” that grant Burnam power is the true argument here, although I’m not certain that Stroup makes this explicitly clear. I was most interested in seeing how these two arena seem to conflict with modern sensibilities but, due to expectations at the time Savage was writing, seem to work within the novel. In particular, I find that the tension exists as a result of who grants access to agency. According to Stroup, Mary Burnam’s father explicitly asks his mother – the woman who raises Mary upon his death – to educate his daughter. Likewise, Stroup takes time to point out that one of the novel’s men of authority – Dr. Mandeville – notes Burnam’s virtue and good sense. Who are the ones declaring the importance of women’s education and defining what virtue and good sense are?

Specific Suggestions for Revision: Please describe specific points in the essay that will benefit from revision and make suggestions about how to undertake that activity. Pay particular attention to the clarity, specificity, and strength with which the argument is advanced; the demonstrated knowledge of the text and period; the distinction between the writer’s views and those of other scholars; the development of each point of argument with textual evidence; areas in which the argument lacks cohesiveness, evidence, or precision; and the contribution of this argument to the field. Please note broad areas in which the niceties of grammar, syntax, style of written expression, or MLA citation style need attention.

My recommendation is that Stroup grants more emphasis on those that grant access and meaning. I have marked up my returned copy with three specific areas upon which to focus. First, the thesis needs to be reinforced. While it seems that thesis is the representation of how education has impacted three generations of women, very little of the essay actually focuses on this; rather, the essay focuses on how early nineteenth-century ideas of female power were influenced by education (or lack thereof), in particular how that education-driven power not only upholds ideal societal expectations, but allows women to achieve the ideal values of domesticity.

The next two areas are along the same lines: the men who grant access to education and power. Or perhaps they do not. Regardless, the fact that there are two prominent paragraphs that deal directly with male intercession on Mary Burnam’s behalf specifically related to her education and the power granted through it seems to scream for more development.

As a side note, given the power that Stroup suggests Burnam achieves, it strikes me as odd that many of the sentences regarding the notion are written in passively. I have marked some of these throughout.


Date sent to Reader: April 17, 2009
Date Returned: April 19, 2009
Reader's Signature: Serge W. Desir, Jr.



Initial Rought Draft

Jay Jay Stroup
LIT6009 / Dr. Logan
17 April 2009

Ruling by Love: A True Womanhood Approach to Education


Mary Burnam, the heroine of Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl, is the most powerful character of the story, eventually imbuing more authority than the male town leaders and minister, Mr. Seymore. In The Factory Girl, it is women who provide the children of the town with the economic capital necessary to succeed, not men. The currency of this economic capital is education. The women of the text, especially Mary, are shaping the economic, social, educational and religious future of the town and in doing so, are placed in positions of power despite the supposed barring from participation in civic affairs. Mary takes on this position of power by adhering to Barbara Welter’s four virtues of true womanhood: “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (Welter 152). The novel also provides its readers with a glimpse of the brief window of opportunity and independence allowed a woman after she came of age, but before she married. The publication date of The Factory Girl, 1814, situates the text almost fifteen years ahead of the educational revolution of the 1830s. By examining this early example of the evolution of education, as represented in three generations, scholars can place The Factory Girl back into the early American cannon from which it has been excluded.


There are three distinct generations represented in The Factory Girl by the characters of Mrs. Burnam, the grandmother of Mary, Mary Burnam and her factory co-worker Nancy Raymond, and the poor factory children, her nephews and her two step-children. Noticeably absent are Mary’s parents - her father apparently died when she was young and before he had the opportunity to see to her education, but there is never any mention of her mother. Instead, the grandmother is charged by her son to see that Mary is educated: “Though you will have to work hard, mother, to get along, I know you will contrive to spare time to teach Mary (as you did me) to read the Bible, and talk to her about what it contains” (Savage 5-6). Mrs. Burnam is able to carry out her son’s instructions because, as the narrator informs the reader, “though her humble station has precluded her from the advantages of a refined education, [she] had an inquisitive mind, and by much observation had in some measure supplied the want of instruction” (Savage 14). Since Mary is the heroine of the story, the reader can safely assume that Mrs. Burnam exceeded her son’s expectations in regards to Mary’s schooling.

Mrs. Burnam is aware of the changes in women’s education since her own schooling: “I did not know how to express it; for I never had much schooling; when I was a young woman, we did not have the advantages they do now” (Savage 33). Though these advantages are never spelled out specifically, scholarship reveals that female academies were established as early as the 1780s (Kelley 276) in addition to already established mixed gendered schools and Sunday schools. Whereas Mrs. Burnam probably never had an opportunity for schooling outside the home, her grand-daughter did not face the same roadblock. Despite Mrs. Burnam’s lack of formal education, even Mr. Seymore, after listening to her describe the type of education she gave Mary, praises her: “Your method...was in my opinion perfectly correct” (Savage 36).

Mary’s role in The Factory Girl is that of one both educated and an educator. Taught under the guidance of her grandmother, the church and her own “uncommon industry” (Savage 40), Mary is equipped with the most important knowledge there is: that of the Bible. Her father’s dying wish confirms the importance of the Bible in a child’s education: “When Mary is grown up, she will, I am sure, want to return some of your goodness, (for the knowledge of the Bible, that you will give her, will make her dutiful;)” (Savage 6). Mary’s piety is her strongest virtue, and as Welter has stated, “[r]eligion or piety was the core of woman’s virtue, the source of her strength” (Welter 152). The Factory Girl upholds a strong connection between religion and education, with women as its enforcers.

Mary exhibits all the characteristics of a “true woman,” as defined by republican standards. Welter has narrowed these characteristics to four virtues: “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (Welter 152). Mary is pious, going to church every Sunday and memorizing the sermon so she can tell it to her grandmother, who cannot make the trip. She is also pure in that even while being courted by William Raymond, she is focused on his character traits rather than his physical appearance and the ways in which she can help improve him: “she would look forward with delight to the period when she might use the influence of a wife to lead the mind of William to clearer notions of the true spirit of Christianity, and more uniform consistency of conduct” (Savage 46-7). Even when Mary does marry Mr. Danforth, a widower, she becomes a mother without the ordeal of actual childbirth. Obviously the reader can infer that one day Mary might have children of her own with Mr. Danforth, however, the book ends before the fruit of marital labor is explicitly spelled out.

Mary’s submissiveness is never called into question as she obeys her grandmother, never giving her a reason to be disappointed. Mary suppresses her submissiveness, or as the narrator terms it, her “usual timidity” only to tell Dr. Mandeville, “I wish I were capable of performing such a delightful task” (Savage 38) when he’s lamenting the lack of applications for a Sunday school teacher. However, even this breach of submissiveness, if it can be called that, only occurs so that Mary can be of service to others. In taking care of her grandmother, her aunt, her nieces and nephews while also working at the factory and teaching Sunday school, Mary is a study of domesticity perfection. Her home is never neglected in favor of her physical labor (the factory) or her intellectual pursuits (teaching Sunday school).

Mary’s status as a true woman is recognized by the male authority figures in her town. This recognition of her potential to be an educator and the transition to actual educator gives Mary the type of authority her grandmother could never have for herself. Mary Kelley affirms the power that female educators had over American society: “[i]n educational improvement and social reform, as in writing and editing, women played an influential role in the making of public opinion before the Civil War” (Kelley 246). Dr. Mandeville tells Mary, “[y]our ability, my good girl...is fully equal to the duty [of instruction]” (Savage 39) and the narrator assures the reader that “[a] humble station could not obscure from the discerning eye of Dr. Mandeville good sense and virtue, and wherever he found those qualities, he honoured and esteemed the possessor” (Savage 40). What is of importance in Dr. Mandeville’s beliefs is the lack of assigned gender roles to “good sense and virtue” - both men and women can be assigned these character traits and be rewarded with respect, and possibly authority.

However, even without the townsmen’s validation, Mary is an educator of those in her own generation, specifically her fellow factory workers. She shares with Nancy Raymond her habit of rising early in the morning in order to read the Bible before leaving for work, and Nancy having tried it out, tells Mary of the benefits: “I have found the advantage of it already, for I have got so used to my work in the factory, that it don’t take up my attention, and foolish thoughts would come into my mind; but now I can drive them out, by reflecting on what I have read” (Savage 21). Mary also teaches William, Nancy’s brother, about the virtue of charitable giving to the poor.

Mary’s true authority comes to the fore when she is asked to teach the poor factory children at Sunday school. This authority is twofold: Mary will have the influence to shape their love for God, and to give them the skills to further their own education. The latter is particularly important because as Mary Kelley claims “an advanced education opened the door to economic self-support” (Kelley 5). The economy of post-Revolutionary America forced parents to get creative: “Once able to provide sons with farms and daughters with dowries, parents found it increasingly difficult to sustain these traditions. Those who looked to education as an alternative endowment...contribut[ed] their economic, social and cultural capital to the education of children” (Kelley 4). The family history of Mary in The Factory Girl supports the historical accuracies of the time period: her dying father, unable to leave his mother and Mary with cold hard cash begs for only one thing, that Mary be educated. That Mary, not the factory children’s parents, becomes a giver of economic capital is a vital contribution to her authority in the township and showcases the value of education in the early nineteenth-century. In becoming a teacher, a woman “committed herself to preparing [children] for adult lives as informed and engaged citizens” (Kelley 44). Quite literally, the future of America is in Mary’s capable hands.

The narrator likens Mary to “a general, directing an immense army” (Savage 52), an emperor, a king, and military hero while describing her work as a Sunday schoolmistress. All of these positions are held by males, rather than females but Mary’s position of power allows her to transcend these gendered limitations. The difference between Mary and the king/military rulers is motivation: “for it was unsullied by the recollection of cruelty, and unalloyed by a thirst of fame. Her love of glory was satisfied with the sound of one still small voice, that whispered she was doing service acceptable for heaven” (Savage 52). Even Mary’s motivation is couched in terms of self-sacrifice and service for others that female advocates of the nineteenth-century frequently deployed. Kelley explains, “Claims to deference such as Beecher’s masked women’s newly acquired agency with the rhetoric of subordination. Behind this rhetoric existed a larger social reality in which thousands of women were steadily enlarging upon the power they wielded in civil society” (Kelley, 227). Mary’s ever expanding circle of influence is non-threatening to the male town leaders because her actions are cloaked by the four virtues of true womanhood.

The method Mary employs in her teaching is distinctly feminine: “[s]he found little difficulty in governing, for she ruled her scholars by love” (Savage 53). She motivates her students, all XX of them, to work hard with simple rewards, such as a flower or the position of assistant during the lessons. There is no mention of physical beatings or yelling at the children for their mistakes. Mary continues to teach Sunday school despite the fact that “though the profits of it were beyond her expectations, they did not meet her expenses” (Savage 99) and “she was often obliged to deny herself the common necessities of life” (Savage 99) after selling the family cottage did not relieve enough of their debt. Her dedication to teaching and to others is far beyond the hardships of others in the text.

Mary takes responsibility for the religious and educational upbringing of her four nephews after their mother dies (their father is a sailor, currently at sea). When George Holden reappears almost a year later, he is astonished to find his sons so happy and healthy. The eldest informs his father, “Cousin Mary has taken care of us...and learnt us to read and to spell; and next month I am going to learn to write, if I am good, cousin Mary says, and don’t tease grandmother” (Savage 103). Despite George’s attempts to thank Mary, she refuses to his gratitude and states that instead, “God is the proper object of your gratitude, my dear cousin, you owe me nothing” (Savage 103). When George marries Nancy Raymond, Mary’s teaching skills are not allowed to rust as she soon marries Mr. Danforth, a widower with two young children. Despite knowing that the duties of “a second mother are not always easiest, or the most pleasant to perform” (Savage 109), Mary “made it her constant endeavour to overcome these little selfish feelings...and considering herself always happiest, when most useful” (Savage 109) takes on the challenge of becoming a stepmother. Her commitment to domesticity pays off, as she approaches motherhood “knowing she could not reasonably expect their love, unless she gave them her own” (Savage 110). This approach parallel’s Mary’s teaching style of ruling her scholars by love, and her reward is the children’s gratitude, love and a surprise present of a portable writing-desk, handsome Bible and a rose attached to the passage “Her children rise up and call her blessed” (Savage 112). Even if Mary has retired from Sunday school teaching after marrying Mr. Danforth, her circle of influence still includes her children, husband and friends.

Despite the fact that the newly formed republic “denied women access to participation in the public sphere of organized politics, it left civil society fully open as a public sphere in which first white and then black women were able to flourish as never before” (Kelley 7). It is important to note, as Kelley and other scholars have, that the white women mentioned belonged to the middle class, such as Mary, but not the lower class, such as the parents of the factory children. The Factory Girl contributes to the evidence that “[i]nstead of restricting them to the household, the Republic’s establishment facilitated the entry of women into this rapidly expanding social space” (Kelley 7), often in the form of school teachers. Women such as Mary, and Sarah Savage as an author, contributed to the educational revolution of the 1830s by wearing the mask of the four virtues while steadily forcing their way into positions of power within civil society, all with the blessing of the patriarchal authority they sought to abscond.


Works Cited

Kelley, Mary. Learning to Stand & Speak: women, education, and public life in America’s republic. Williamsburg, Virginia: U of North Carolina P, 2006.

Savage, Sarah. The factory girl. By a lady. Boston: Munroe, Francis & Parker, 1814.

Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood.” American Quarterly 18.2 (1966): 151-174. JSTOR. 7 February 2009. .