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]