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.
