Fallows, Chinese Peasants, Lowell Girls, and FSA Clerks

Sometimes I go off the deep end. Did that the other night, listening to James Fallows (renowned draft dodger [tongue in cheek] from the Nam era and now writer for the Atlantic) talk about his travels in China. (Here's a link to the Atlantic, but subscription is required.) He was describing a common practice: peasant girls from the country come to the city in their late teens, go to work in factories working long hours, living in factory dormitories, eating factory food. They end up saving enough money to go back home and move to a higher social class. (In the old days, they'd be earning a dowry--I'm not sure that's a Chinese concept though.)

As he talked, I remembered the "Lowell girls". The early New England spinning and weaving industry was typified by Lowell, MA, a factory town where country girls came to live under the eye of the management, working long hours, etc., etc. As we would say in Vietnam, "same, same". (The Wikipedia article is a little more anti than one recent scholarly article might suggest.)

Of course, the choice is between marrying young, which assumes you have available young men with available land, or delaying marriage and childbearing. In 1815 Massachusetts the land was taken, single men were moving west and leaving women behind. (Men being more mobile than women in general.) Women could go into teaching (as the public school system was taking off), or into the newly developed factories.

The issue of what do to with women (sounds more chauvinistic than I mean to) is common in rural societies. Some kill them (either in the womb or in the cradle) or, as the Chinese, prohibit them from being born at all (1 child per couple). In America, we've hired them as teachers, nurses, telephone operators, secretaries, and servants. In a minor way, the New Deal helped in rural America by opening up offices to run the farm programs. The paperwork needed women to handle it, so I'd expect you'd find a majority of women in the clerical ranks of the AAA/PMA/CSS/ASCS/FSA over the years. Just one way to keep them, if not on the farm, at least in the rural towns.