Proposal for Conference Paper

The Proper Method of the Instructor as presented in Sarah Savage’s The Factory Girl

While scholarship on the education revolution of women in Post-Revolutionary America exists, it concentrates on the role of women as student and/or teacher and how these roles relate to the myth of public and private spheres during the time period of 1820 — 1860. Mary Kelley explores the transformative power of female academies and seminaries on a cultural scale in Learning to Stand and Speak, whereas Thomas B. Lovell looks to the connections between labor, virtue and womanhood through an economic lens and states that factories were the site of transformation and moral incubation. While some scholarship attempts to position distinctive shifts in education transformation in a linear fashion, the novel The Factory Girl includes the past, the present and the future of education in Post-Revolutionary America. My conference paper will concern the evolution of education as portrayed in The Factory Girl through the characters of Mrs. Burnam, Mary Burnam, Mary’s co-workers, the poor factory children, and Mary’s nephews and step-sons that mimic the real changes in education occurring in Post-Revolutionary America. These three different generations each approach education, specifically education of children, in different manners and Savage’s text provides the reader with the promise of new and improved education and instructions of implementation.

The most important evidence for my argument comes from the novel itself. Savage contrasts the learning of Mrs. Burnam, Mary’s grandmother, with the education of Mary: “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). While Mrs. Burnam did a wonderful job in raising and teaching Mary, her methods are not the future of education in America and she literally dies in the novel, leaving her teaching methods to die out as well. The novel establishes Mary as the ideal teacher of both her own generation and the younger generations, “rul[ing] her scholars by love" (Savage 53). However, even as Mary is the ideal teacher, there is a younger generation, the factory children and her own nephews and step-sons that will experience education in a manner unfamiliar to Mary: learning in the newly established Sunday Charity School. The methods of instruction and motivation for schooling this younger generation is also different from Mary’s childhood experience, because now education has become the “best security for honest industry and laudable exertion” (Savage 38). Other evidence must come from historical records that chart the transformation of education in Post-Revolutionary America. Scholars such as Mary Kelley, Nancy Cott, Mary P. Ryan, and Barbra Welter have looked to private writings of women, in various forms, to provide a more complex and diverse record of Post-Revolutionary America. The works of these scholars, thanks to their interdisciplinary and New Historicism approach, will compliment the textual evidence provided in The Factory Girl.

The Factory Girl was published on the cusp of the educational revolution. There were Sunday Charity schools in existence in 1814, and Sarah Savage herself was educated and an educator. The novel provides a unique expression of the education continuum, rather than presenting the transformation as immediate, sudden and complete. Cathy N. Davidson describes the novel as the nation’s first industrial novel, and Margaret B. Moore calls it the first Sunday school novel. While the novel can function in both of these capacities, the most compelling aspect for me is the concern with education, specifically children’s education, and the way in which Savage presents the future of method and instruction just present on the horizon.