The illusion of masculine independence in the Carolina Piedmont: Women, work and wages through the transition from farm to factory, 1880-1930

Abstract

This thesis draws on oral histories to explore the lives of the Carolina Piedmont's farm to factory families from the 1880s through 1930s. Utilizing gender and race as analytical tools, it examines how women lived everyday life on the farm and in the mill, how the blurring of the sexual division of labor by women challenged southern farming masculinity that was protected by gendered language and public silence, and how social and economic changes in the mill undermined the language and silence of the farm. In so doing, this thesis provides an understanding of the farm to factory adjustment within the context of an examination of masculinity as an historical, ideological process. As cultural conceptions of masculinity changed with economic shifts from subsistence farming to commercial agriculture to millwork, women's cash-producing work, which had been hidden on the farm, was made visible by a daily wage in the mill.