Forgotten Breadwinners: Changes in Gendered Consumption, Labor, and Power in New England's Straw Textile Communities, 1798-1830

Abstract

This thesis challenges the prevailing view that New England rural outwork was merely a supplemental form of income—particularly within male-led families—during the early nineteenth century, namely by examining how the straw bonnet industry effected change in the household economy, resulting in a degree of women’s financial and social independence overlooked by traditional historiography. These dynamics arose during the early national period because of the sustainable, at times comfortable, standard of living provided by the domestic manufacturing of straw braids and bonnets. Consequently, this thesis reframes the historical understanding of New England outwork by reconsidering its causal relationship to documented increases in women’s power, both within the private and public spheres. In analyzing the straw bonnet industry’s market, legal, and financial structures, the separate spheres are shown to be more malleable and synergistic than developed in traditional historiography. These structural elements intensified women’s purchasing power, provided unmediated access to the cash economy and market revolution, and created methods of violating coverture—including purchasing and owning real property. Straw bonnets were also used to transform the social identity and economic status of women, thereby threatening to democratize the economic hierarchy of the church’s seating order. In summary, this thesis ultimately explores how New England straw textile outwork, and its role in the market revolution, intersects significant changes to economic, social, and women’s history in relation to early nineteenth-century domestic life and the public sphere.