The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 17 (2006)

Between Factory and School:
Women School Teachersin Early Nineteenth-Century New England

Yukako HISADA*

INTRODUCTION
In the 1881 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Lucy Larcom, a poet, recalled her experience as a cotton factory worker in Lowell, Massachusettsin the 1830s:
Many [of the girls] taught in their native districts during the summer months,
and came to the mills to work only in the winter. The ranks of the primaryand grammar school teachers in Lowell were frequently replenished fromamong the mill-girls. A leading clergyman of the place, one not giving tojesting or exaggeration, was at one time asked, by a person interested in theestablishment of good common schools in the Western States, how many
competent teachers he thought could be furnished from the young women
employed in the mills. He replied without hesitation, “Probably about ﬁve
hundred.”1

Although her recollection as a factory worker seems to have been idealized, one estimate for antebellum Massachusetts shows that one out offour American-born white women had taught school at some time in theirlives.2 In this regard, it could be said that Lowell factory workers were
Copyright © 2006 Yukako Hisada. All rights reserved. This work may be used,with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work
may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
*Associate Professor, Nagano Prefectural College

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not exceptions. In fact, the Superintendent of Merrimack Mills in Lowell,
John Clark, wrote in answer to the Circular Letter of Horace Mann, theSecretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts since 1837, thatabout 150 women workers at the mills had been engaged in teaching
schools at some time.3
In the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, the New England states experienced an overall increase in the number of female primary school teachers. In Massachusetts, while women comprised 56.3% of the teaching
force in 1834, their percentage increased to 77.8% by 1860, and other
New England states followed Massachusetts. As Jo Anne Preston indicates, measured according to a feminization index of 80%, the feminization of teaching occurred in Massachusetts in 1861, in 1864 in New
Hampshire, 1865 in Connecticut, and 1866 in Rhode Island.4
While school teaching became respectable women’s work, factory
working became less respectable in nineteenth-century New England. In
this article I shall deal with school teaching as women’s work and focus
on rural women teachers who left behind diaries and letters.
DAME SCHOOLS AND THE EARLY EDUCATION OF GIRLS
Where and how were rural women educated in the early republic?
Walter H. Small, Superintendent of Public Schools in Providence, Rhode
Island, noted in his book, which was published after his death in 1914,
that to what extent girls had been admitted to the early schools in New
England was a debatable issue, because there were insufﬁcient records
and the available documents were contradictory. The conditions of theeducation of girls varied from town to town, but girls were likely to be
admitted to schools after the late eighteenth century.5
Although the extent of literacy varies from the basic ability to write
one’s name and read simple sentences to the ability to read sophisticatedprose, it has been used as an index of the popularization of education.
Several studies of the literacy of New England women show that theirliteracy rate rose after the mid-eighteenth century. Kenneth Lockridge,
for example, indicates in his pioneering work that the literacy rate among
New England women was 48% between 1787 and 1795 while it was 31%
between 1650 and 1670. These ﬁgures were rather moderate comparedto succeeding statistical research.6

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Linda Kerber assumed that major improvements in women’s education occurred between 1790 and 1830, and that the trend was related bothto the political revolution and to the industrial revolution. With recent
scholarship we might add to these the consumer revolution and the market revolution. As for the political revolution, the ideology of Republican
Motherhood supported this trend. Both Kerber and Mary Beth Nortonsuggest that the importance of female education came to be emphasizedin the early republic in spite of the traditional notion that excessive learning would “unsex” women. They argue that the education of girls had
become a duty both for their parents and for themselves. A woman had
to be a learned and virtuous citizen to become a mother to instruct her
children as well as a responsible keeper of the household economy.7
Prior to the American Revolution, girls were actually though not legally excluded from public education, and they were likely to be instructed at home or went to “dame schools.” Originally the word “dameschool” referred to a private school where a mother taught her children
as well as her neighbors’ children, or a widow taught her neighbors’ children to support herself, as in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century
England. Later this word meant a semi-public school mainly dependent
on the tuition of the pupils but with a small budget from the town treasury, and further came to refer to a real public school with a woman
teacher.8
The change in the meaning of this word was noted in the history ofDanvers, Massachusetts. Danvers was formerly known as Salem Village,
where the witch-hunting incident occurred in 1692, and the townshipwas established in 1752 when it became independent from Salem town.
Although the residents of Salem Village had petitioned Salem town toestablish their own public school in the village, it was not until 1712 thatthe public school was established, so their children had to go to theschools in Salem town for many years. Rev. Joseph Green, the pastor of
the village, determined to have a teacher who was to instruct children in
the three R’s, and with support from the residents—one of them donated
his land for the school—Green paid for the expenses of a school building from his own salary. Then he employed Widow Katherine Daland(or Deland) as the teacher, paying all the expenses by himself. The school
was supported privately until 1713 when Salem town began to pay her
wages, ﬁve pounds a year.9

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DISTRICT SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS
In the nineteenth century the most widespread method of organizing
state systems of education was the school district system. It evolved in
the late eighteenth century when people started living far from the centers of the towns because of the increasing population. Even in the seventeenth century, when some towns voted to establish a school in thecenter of the town, people living in the outer parts dissented because theirchildren could not attend the school conveniently. People living far fromthe schools started requesting the establishment of schools in their neighborhood, so many towns voted to divide the town into several districts
and to provide schools for each district. The Massachusetts Law of 1789
legally authorized towns to establish boundaries for school support andattendance.10
These early schools opened not all year round but often only in summer and winter, and the duration of each session varied from six weeks
to six months. While the attendance of boys eight or nine years old orolder was high in winter, girls and younger boys tended to go to school
in summer. It is often said that this tendency was related to the farmers’
busy and leisure seasons. In summer, older boys were expected to workon the farms while younger children needed somebody’s care because
their family members were busy. This also reﬂected the character ofteachers. Male teachers were needed more in winter sessions when older
boys attended schools because they were expected to keep order in theclassroom. Female teachers, on the other hand, were expected to act as
mothers who took care of the younger children. Women teachers, however, came to be employed in winter, too, when the ofﬁcials of the
Massachusetts Board of Education realized their lower wages would
allow for a budget cut.11
Teaching was a temporary job for most men and women, and in general teachers were young—between the late teens and early 30s—andunmarried. It was a “stepping stone” for men to start a new job and “alimbo between their parents’ home and marriage” for women. The teachers’ living conditions almost required them to be single, because of thecustom of “boarding around” in their pupils’ homes that supplemented
their wages.12
A diary of a Vermont schoolteacher, Pamela Brown, born in 1816,
indicates this custom. She taught school between 1836 and 1838, and in1836 she taught three terms: from January 18th to March 12th, from June

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4th to August 20th, and from December 5th to February 25th, 1837.
During these terms she boarded in pupils’ houses on weekdays. She
moved from one to another every two weeks, and went back to her own
home every weekend.13
Moving from one pupil’s home to another was very stressful for teachers. Another Vermont teacher wrote in her diary as late as 1865: “Tonight
I am at Mr. Allen’s. Am to board here two weeks. Well it will be hardfor me, but I can still endure it.”14
Not many teachers wrote in their diaries about how hard boarding
around was, but Preston pointed out that many aggressively negotiatedfor more suitable living quarters.15
DISTRICT SCHOOLS IN DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS
Teachers, however, did not always board around in their pupils’
houses. As early as the 1830s, the districts of Danvers, Massachusetts
tended to pay for teachers’ board in addition to their wages, althoughfemale teachers generally received less than male teachers, and manyfemale teachers seemed to commute from their homes to schools.16 The
Danvers school records and teachers’ diaries are well preserved, so they
shed light on the teachers in this town.
In Danvers the district system was introduced in 1793. It was in 1809that the town was divided into nine districts. It was in 1846 that theydecided to establish the fourteenth district.17 Although some of the school
district records from 1821 and 1825 have survived, they list only pupils’
names and ages—both boys and girls from 5 to 17 years old. One of thelimited number of teachers’ documents from the 1820s was a school
record book kept by a teacher named Rebecca Preston, who taught inDistrict No.10 in 1824 and 1825, in No.5 in 1827, and in a neighboring
town, Lynnﬁeld, in 1830. She started “keeping school” in District No.10
on May 3rd, 1824 at $1.25 per week for 6 weeks, and on the day after
she closed the “free” (district) school on June 16th, she commenced
teaching at a “private school.” In the next year she started teaching at the
district school of No.10 again on May 7th at $1.00 per week, closed it
on August 12th, and started teaching at a private school for 8 cents perscholar per week. In 1827 she mentioned her board for the ﬁrst time,
writing “continue boarding . . . at Mrs[.] Cs 75 cts[cents] per week.”18
There is no data from the 1820s to compare the wages of female andmale teachers, but women might have been paid less than men,

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considering later ﬁgures. For example, the District No.2 school recordof 1835 shows that women were paid only one-third of men’s compensation. The difference between men’s and women’s wages also reﬂecteddifferences between the schools and subjects that men and womentaught. Men were likely to teach at grammar schools while womentended to teach at primary schools.19
According to the Report of the School Committee of the Town ofDanvers, 1848–9, while Orthography and Reading were taught at all district schools in Danvers, most schools also taught Writing, Geography,
English Grammar, and Arithmetic. At the principal schools, or theschools for pupils over ten years old, some combination of History,
Bookkeeping, Astronomy, Algebra, Latin, Philosophy, Composition,
Geometry, Physiology, Surveying, and Botany were taught in addition
to the above-mentioned subjects. While almost all the students at any
school attended classes in Orthography and Reading, some classes like
Writing, Geography, and Arithmetic were less well-attended. At someschools less than half of the students attended these classes.20
When the Report of the School Committee was published in 1849,
there were 35 schoolteachers in total, 13 men and 22 women, and here
we can see the feminization of teaching in progress in Danvers. Althoughsome women teachers taught rather difﬁcult subjects to older children,
like Mary P. Preston in District No.13, who taught Writing, Geography,
English Grammar, Arithmetic, and History as well as Orthography andReading, some women teachers were regarded as unqualiﬁed to teacholder children, and so were replaced by male teachers.21“The Head School [sic]” in District No.1, where the pupils’ average
age was 11 and the average attendance was 70, was “peculiarly situated,”
and three teachers were replaced within the year 1848. The ﬁrst teacher,
H. P. Andrews, was an accomplished teacher, but he had to leave schoolfor some reason and was succeeded by Amelia Upton. She also was tobe replaced by a male teacher with only some two weeks left in the term.
The report explained the reason why she had to be replaced: “[T]headvanced age of many of the boys, and the size of the school, as might
have been expected, prevented the possibility of a female hand maintaining the necessary discipline. . . .”22
Both schoolteachers and school reformers faced the question of thepreservation of order, and the question often appeared in the reports ofthe school committee of Danvers. A teacher there mentioned it in her
diary in 1848. Louisa Ann Chapman started “keeping” the primary school

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in District No. 14 with about 30 small children on December 4th, 1848,
and wrote on the next day, “in school. very noisy[.] punished numbers.”23
Sarah J. Putnam, who succeeded Chapman in 1849, also appeared in
the report of the school committee in this matter:At ﬁrst we expected this would be a failure, the order was so poor. But there
must have been gradual improvement in this matter; for at its close there wasvery good order indeed. And the scholars had made all the progress that could
be expected. We think the school did very well, and we think the teacher musthave done well, or her school would not have appeared as it did.24

As Edward P. Thompson, Herbert Gutman and other labor historians
have pointed out, people who ﬁrst experienced industrialization felt
some conﬂict between their familiar rural work rhythms and industrial
time discipline.25 Therefore, to preserve work discipline was one of theimportant questions in school education. As early as 1840 Horace Mannreferred to this question several times: “The preservation of order . . .
required a mean between the too much and the too little, in all the evolutions of the school, which it is difﬁcult to hit.”26 He also argued that aschool “should be governed by a steady hand, not only during the same
season, but from year to year” because “the same extent of indulgence”
should be allowed and “the same restriction imposed.”27
People believed that a woman schoolteacher was suitable to instructchildren because she was destined to be a mother and that she could love
them as their mother did. Many women schoolteachers, however, tended
to punish children rather than show their affection toward them. To maintain the discipline of the schools, many women teachers resorted to punishing their pupils.28
For school reformers, one of the solutions to this issue was the establishment of Union Schools. Although Horace Mann did not refer to thedeﬁnition of the schools in his fourth report for 1840, the idea seems tohave been to put a number of school districts together into one larger district, where “scholars” in one class would all be similar ages, so that they
could sustain schools a few months longer and could pay more to teachers.29 He also wrote, “If it were possible to measure or gauge the quantity and quality of instruction of which the teacher could give under theunion system, compared with that which he can give in a school composed of scholars of all ages, and in all stages of advancement, no further
proof in favor of a classiﬁcation of the children into divisions of older
and younger would be needed.”30

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YUKAKO HISADAGENDER AND SCHOOLTEACHERS
In District No. 14 of Danvers, three teachers were employed between
1848 and 1849—Mary Adeline Nevins, Louisa Chapman, and Roswell
Foster. According to the records of the district, Nevins was paid $98.00
for 28 weeks teaching in the summer term of the principal school (29weeks in the report of the school committee), Foster received $122.50
for 14 weeks in the winter term of the school, and Chapman earned$26.00 for 13 weeks (15 weeks in the report of the school committee)
teaching at the primary school. On a weekly basis, this amounted to $3.50
for Navins, $8.75 for Foster, and $2.00 for Chapman.31
As a male teacher, Foster enjoyed the highest wages among the three,
and the wage difference between Nevins and Chapman seemed to reﬂect
the difference of their experience as teachers and/or the subjects theytaught. Chapman was a dressmaker in Lawrence, Massachusetts before
she started teaching, and moved into her mother’s house in Danvers in
December of 1848. As were many of the residents in the town, her two
younger brothers were “shoe manufacturers,” and she and her younger
sister often helped in their brothers’ business—shoe-binding.32
Nevins and Foster both taught Orthography, Reading, Geography,
Arithmetic, Writing, and English Grammar, and in both their classes theaverage age of their pupils was seven. For both schools, the largest class
was Orthography, and Nevins had 86 pupils while Foster had 74. Although Nevins’s school was a little larger than Foster’s, there seemed nosigniﬁcant difference between the two schools. Unlike the other twoteachers, Chapman did not teach Writing and English Grammar. The
total number of her pupils was 39 though the average attendance was 24,
and the average age of her pupils was ﬁve.33
From the description of the school records, it appears that their schools
had been divided into “primary” and “principal” from the beginning, butaccording to Chapman’s diary, this started only in the middle of the year.
On December 27th, 1848, she wrote, “Mr[.] Foster took 14 scholars frommy school” and on January 3d, 1849, she noted, “School Meeting[.]
District voted [to] divide children by age. I shall have then those under.”34
The district records and the reports of the school committee do not referto this change, but back in 1840, the Secretary of the Board of Educationof Massachusetts had suggested the establishment of Union Schools, andthe town of Danvers seemed to follow this suggestion. In 1856, District
No. 14 was ﬁnally abolished and consolidated into District No.6. This

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consolidation was not welcomed by the residents of the district. The residents of both the northern and southern sections of the district petitioned
to preserve this district.35
In the eyes of school reformers, the establishment of Union Schools
also meant a budget cut, especially because they employed women teachers. When Horace Mann mentioned the establishment of Union Schools,
he also suggested employing women as teachers for their low wages:[I]s it not an unpardonable waste of means, where it can possibly be avoided,
to employ a man, at $25 or $30 a month, to teach the alphabet, where it canbe done much better, at half-price, by a female teacher?36

Whether it was a reality or not, a woman was regarded as superior in
moral power at this time, and in this respect a woman was expected to
become an ideal teacher.37 In 1844 Mann noted the increase of womenteachers between 1837 and 1844, and encouraged employing more
female teachers: “The more extensive employment of female teachersfor educating the young, will be the addition of a new and mighty power
to the forces of civilization.”38
In the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century, however, the turnover ofteachers continued to be very high. In District No.14 of Danvers, for example, teachers who taught between 1848 and 1849, including Chapman,seemed to leave school and probably did not come back, for their names
did not appear in the reports of the School Committee after that. As for
Chapman, 15 days after she closed her school, her sick mother, whom
she had nursed while teaching, passed away. Although she and her siblings seemed to continue to live in Danvers after their mother’s death,they sold their house. We cannot trace Chapman’s footsteps after she
stopped keeping her diary until her marriage, although she appeared in
the US Census Schedule of Danvers of 1850. Otherwise, no records ofher are left except the record of her marriage to an innkeeper in Lynn,
Massachusetts in 1853. Still, we could guess that she might not havegone back to teaching, considering teachers’ high turnover rates.39
SCHOOL TEACHING AS WOMEN’S WORKWhen the district schools were not open all year round, once schools
were closed, schoolteachers were likely to ﬁnd other jobs either at private schools or in some kind of manufacturing. Rebecca Preston andLouisa Ann Chapman were among them. In her school record book,

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Preston noted that she taught at a private school after the district school
was closed, and Chapman worked either at making her neighbors’
dresses or binding shoes to help her brothers’ business.40
As industrialization progressed in early nineteenth-century New
England, textile household production declined, and more households
came to purchase textile products. People came to depend more on a market economy than the traditional local barter economy. Many farmers’
and artisans’ households needed cash to purchase goods from distantmarkets, and wives and daughters, liberated from household production,
were likely to work for wages.41
Whether a family could get a cash income or not seemed to affect therelationships among the family members. In 1839 Sally Rice, an 18 yearold domestic servant in upstate New York, wrote a letter to her parents
in Vermont, saying that she would not be happy if she lived with her parents at their self-sufﬁcient farm and that she needed to earn money forher future. She was the fourth child of ﬁve, and could not expect her parents to provide her with a marriage portion because they had no means
to get cash. Later she started working at a textile mill in Connecticut
against her father’s will, because she could earn more there.42
Rural young women who had to seek jobs, as Sally Rice did, had limited options: teaching schools, factory work, domestic service, or outwork such as shoe-binding and palm-leaf hat making.43 Although factory
workers in Lowell struck against a wage cut in the 1830s, they enjoyedrelatively high wages compared to schoolteachers. In 1836, average
women factory workers’ wages per day were 60 cents while a woman
schoolteacher in Rochester, New Hampshire earned 10 1/2 shillings orabout $1.75 per week.44
In the 1840s and later, however, schoolteachers’ wages became higher
than those of factory workers. Moreover, the working conditions in
Lowell factories worsened as time passed. The more intensive the labor
became, the less rural young women were drawn to Lowell, and instead
the numbers of immigrant workers increased. At Hamilton Company inLowell, for example, foreign-born workers were 3.7% of the total in1830, 38.6% in 1850, and 61.8% in 1860.45
The transformation of factory work changed the views of Americans
toward such labor, and it became less respectable. In 1845, for example,
sisters in New Hampshire wrote the following letter to Harriet Hanson
Robinson, factory worker in Lowell and later suffragist:

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123. . . I do want to go to Lowell this winter, but I do not expect to, for father
and mother are not willing that we shall go to the factory to work, and when
I go to make a visit, I had rather go when it is warmer. . . .46

Their parents opposed their working in Lowell in 1845. One of the sisters started to teach at a private school in 1846, however, so their parents might not have been so opposed to their becoming schoolteachers.47
The nature of domestic service was also transformed in the ﬁrst halfof the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries “hired help,” as a domestic servant was called, was a “reciprocal”
or traditional communal workforce in New England local communities.
It had a character similar to the traditional custom of “life-cycle servants”
in Northern and Western Europe. Later, however, especially after the
l840s, domestic servants were increasingly hired on a labor market, andservice became a low-paid painful job.48
Unlike Louisa Chapman, more and more women suffered from “thebastardization of craft” in the ﬁrst half of the nineteenth century.
Chapman’s diary started in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where she worked
as a dressmaker, and even after she started teaching, she often “cut dress”
for her neighbors.49 Cutting was a skilled trade, and many women could
not learn the whole trade of dressmaking in the era of industrialization.
As we see from a letter written by a New Hampshire woman of almost
the same generation as Chapman, often a woman apprentice could not“learn the whole of the trade.” A merchant tailor employed her as an
unskilled worker as early as the 1830s.50
Sean Wilentz has explained this trend as “the bastardization of craft.”
In the traditional world of male craft workers, an apprentice could haveexpected to become a master craftsman someday after completing his
training as journeyman. This artisan system, however, started to decline
in the late eighteenth century in the New England countryside and theestablished northern coastal cities, and especially in ﬁnished consumer
crafts for national markets, such as clothing, shoes and so on. Mastercraftsmen and merchants relied on an intensiﬁed division of labor to
reduce their costs and increase output, and the combination of centralshop and outwork systems was established.51
Many rural New England women, both married and unmarried,entered into the outwork system, and did piecework like binding shoes,
palm-leaf hat making, button making and so on. These outworkers, however, were unskilled and often paid in goods like coffee, spice or textile

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products, which were not available in local markets. This work was seasonal, and they could contribute only a small portion to the household
economy.52
CONCLUSION
As we saw before, among the options for rural young women seeking
a means to earn money, only school teaching remained a respectable job
through the nineteenth century, while other occupations became degraded. Although female schoolteachers were lower-paid than malecounterparts, many young women became teachers. As Thomas Dublin
noted, school teaching remained “the leading professional occupation
for women in 1900.”53
In the second half of the nineteenth century, with the growth of public normal schools, private academies and so on, women teachers became
better trained than before, but it was still not a life-long occupation forthem. According to Dublin’s research on New Hampshire schoolteachers, they came from relatively propertied families.54 This aspect reminds
us of the earlier Lowell mill workers.
As the century progressed, an increasing feminization of school teaching was in progress in the New England states. “Yankee schoolmarms”
eventually found their way into the West and the South during
Reconstruction. They have left other stories to be explored.
NOTES
Lucy Larcom, “Among Lowell Mill-Girls,” Atlantic Monthly Vol. 48, No. 289(1881), 603.
2
Richard M. Bernard, and Maris A. Vinovskis, “The Female School Teacher in AnteBellum Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History 10(1977), 333.
3
Horace Mann, “Report for 1841,” Annual Reports of the Secretary of the Board of
Education of Massachusetts for the Years 1839–1844 (Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1891), 107.
4
Ibid., 332; Jo Anne Preston, “Domestic Ideology, School Reformers, and Female
Teachers: School Teaching Becomes Women’s Work in Nineteenth-Century New
England,” New England Quarterly 66(1993), 531; Nancy Hoffman, Woman’s “True”
Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press,
2003), 24–25.
5Walter Herbert Small, Early New England Schools (Boston: Ginn and Company,
1914; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1969), 275–89.
6Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Inquiry into the Social
Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: Norton, 1974), 38–39; Joel
1

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Perlmann, and Dennis Shirley, “When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?”
William and Mary Quarterly 48 (1991); Gloria L. Main, “An Inquiry into When and
Why Women Learned to Write in Colonial New England,” Journal of Social History
24(1991), 579–89; Joel Perlmann, Silvana R. Siddali, and Keith Whitescarver, “Literacy,
Schooling, and Teaching among New England Women, 1730–1820,” History of Education Quarterly 37(1997); Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Schooling of Girls and Changing
Community Values in Massachusetts Towns, 1750–1820,” History of Education Quarterly 33 (1993), 511–14.
7
Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1980; repr. New York: Norton,
1986), 189–288; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 256–94. Gloria
L. Main suggested that the rise of the literacy rate was related to the consumer revolution and the market revolution. Main, “An Inquiry into When and Why Women Learned
to Write in Colonial New England,” 583–84.
8
Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, 140–41, 259; Small, 162–86; Perlmann, et. al, “Literacy, Schooling, and Teaching among New England Women, 1730–1820,” 117–39;
Shunzo Matsuzuka, Rekishi no naka no kyoushi: Kindai Igirisu kokka to minshu-bunka[Dame Schools, Popular Culture and Liberal State in Modern Britain] (Tokyo:
Yamakawa-shuppan-sha, 2001), 28.
9Harriet S. Tapley, Chronicles of Danvers (Old Salem Village), Massachusetts,
1632–1923 (Danvers: Danvers Historical Society, 1923), 33–35; J.W. Hanson, Historyof the Town of Danvers, from Its Early Settlement to the Year 1848 (Danvers: The Courier
Ofﬁce, 1848), 144–45.
10
Small, The Early New England Schools, 58–86; Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the
Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill andWang, 1983), 13–29; Joel Spring, The American Schools, 1642–1990: Varieties ofHistorical Interpretation of the Foundations and Development of American Education(New York: Longman, 1990), 141; Shigeo Fujimoto, Amerika-shi no nakano kodomo[Children in American History](Tokyo: Sairyu-sha, 2002), 123–48.
11
Joseph F. Kett, “Growing Up in Rural New England, 1800–1840,” Growing Up in
America: Historical Experiences, ed. Harvey J.Graff (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1987), 176–77; Bernard, and Vinovskis, “The Female School Teacher in AnteBellum Massachusetts,” 336; Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s
Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (1977; 2d ed. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1997), 30–31.
12
Bernard and Vinovskis, “The Female School Teacher in Ante-Bellum Massachusetts,”
336–38; Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic, 20; Spring, The American Schools, 1642–1990,
125; William A. Mowry, Recollections of a New England Educator (New York: Sliver,
Burdett and Co., 1908; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1969), 38; David Jaffee, “TheVillage Enlightenment in New England, 1760–1820,” William and Mary Quarterly
47(1990), 340–44.
13
The Diaries of Sally and Pamela Brown, 1832–1838, [and] Hyde Leslie, 1887, eds.
Branche Brown Bryant, and Gertrude Elaine Baker (Springﬁeld, Vt.: William L. Bryant
Foundation, 1970), 28–93.
14
Margaret Tait, Diary, 9 January 1865, Vermont Historical Society, quoted in
Preston, “Domestic Ideology, School Reformers, and Female Teachers,” 546–47.
15
Preston, “Domestic Ideology, School Reformers, and Female Teachers,” 547.
16
Danvers School Department, Return of Scholars, 1821, 1825, 1834–1856 (Manuscript), Danvers Archival Center (DAC), Danvers, Mass.

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Hanson, History of the Town of Danvers, 146–47; Report of the School Committeeof the Town of Danvers, 1839 (Salem: William Ives & Co., 1839); Danvers School
District 14 Records, 1848–1852 (Manuscript), DAC.
18
Rebecca Preston, School Record Book (Manuscript), 3 May 1824, 2 May 1825, 7
May 1827, DAC.
19
Return of School District No.2 for the Year 1835(Manuscript), DAC.
20
“Statistical Table from April 1, 1848, to April 1, 1849,” Report of the School Committee of the Town of Danvers, 1848–9 (Danvers: G. R.Carlton-Courier Press, 1849),
24. Although school reformers like Horace Mann cautioned of irregularity in the attendance of the pupils as early as 1840, the differences in irregularity among the classes
seems to show what subjects common people regarded as important, and that they utilized schools positively according to their own theory. Horace Mann, “Report for 1840,”
Annual Reports of the Secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts for theYears 1839–1844 (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1891), 71–83.
21
Report of the School Committee of the Town of Danvers, 1848–9, 24.
22
Ibid., 923Louisa Ann Chapman, Diary (Manuscript), 5 December 1849, Phillips Library,
Peobody Essex Museum (PEM), Salem, Mass.
24
Report of the School Committee of the Town of Danvers, 1849–1850 (Boston: Pressof George R. Carlton, 1850), 33.
25
Edward P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past
and Present 38(1967); Herbert G. Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” American Historical Review 78 (1973).
26
Mann, “Report for 1840,” 64.
27
Ibid., 67
28
Preston, “Domestic Ideology, School Reformers, and Female Teachers,” 549–50.
29
Mann, “Report for 1840,” 53–57.
30
Ibid., 57.
31“Report of Prudential Committee Commencing March 6, 1848 and Ending March
12, 1849,” Danvers School District 14 Records, 1848–1852 (Manuscript), DAC; Reportof the School Committee of the Town of Danvers, 1848–9, 23–24.
32
According to the vital record of Boxford, Massachusetts, she was born on January
7th, 1814, but the card catalog of the diary at Philips Library of Peobody Essex Museum
indicates that she was born in 1815. The vital record of Danvers recorded her and her
younger sister’s baptism at the First Congregational Church of Danvers in December
4th, 1831. According to the United States Census Schedule of 1850, Louisa Chapman
was 32 years old, and lived with her brothers, who were shoe manufacturers with property amounting to $600, 28 and 25 years old respectively, and her sister who was 30
years old. All these Chapmans were 4 years younger than those found in the Boxford
records, but I concluded they were the same people. Chapman, Diary, 4 December, 1848;
United States Census Schedule, Danvers, Essex County, Massachusetts, 1850; Vital
Records of Boxford, Massachusetts to the End of the Year 1849 (Topsﬁeld, Mass.:
Topsﬁeld Historical Society, 1905), 22; Vital Records of Danvers, Massachusetts to the
End of the Year 1849, vol.1: Births (Salem: The Essex Institute, 1909), 68; Jeremiah
Chapman, Account Book, 1839–1849 (Manuscript), PEM.
33
Report of the School Committee of the Town of Danvers, 1848–9, 24.
34
Chapman, Diary, 27 December 1848, 3 January 1849.
35
Danvers School District No.14 Records, 1846–1856, DAC.
36
Mann, “Report for 1840,” 57.
17

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127

Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” American Quarterly 18(1966);
Spring, The American Schools, 1642–1990, 121.
38
Mann, “Report for 1844,” Annual Reports of the Secretary of the Board of Educationof Massachusetts for the Years 1839–1844, 426–28.
39
Chapman, Diary, 20 March 1849, 18 October, 1849; Marriage Records, Essex
County, Massachusetts, 1853, Vol.69, p.180, Massachusetts Archives.
40
Preston, School Record Book; Chapman, Diary,
41
Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts,
1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 129–55; The Diaries of Sally andPamela Brown, 1832–1838; Pearl Family, Account Books,1792–1845 (Manuscript),
Massachusetts Historical Society(MHS), Boston.
42“Sally Rice Letters,” The New England Mill Village, 1790–1860, eds. Gary Kulik,
et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1982), 387–90; Nell W. Kull, “ ‘I Can Never
Be Happy There in Among So Many Mountains’: The Letters of Sally Rice,” Vermont
History 38(1970), 50.
43Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in
Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979),
34–35; idem., “Rural Putting-Out Work in Early Nineteenth-Century New England:
Women and the Transition to Capitalism in the Countryside,” New England Quarterly
64(1991); idem., Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial
Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
44
Dublin, Women at Work, 62–69; Sanborn Family Papers (Manuscript), Folder 1840,
MHS.
45
Vinovskis, and Bernard, “The Female School Teacher in Ante-Bellum Massachusetts,”
338; Dublin, Women at Work, 138–39; Brian C. Mitchell, The Paddy Camp: The Irish
of Lowell, 1821–1861 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 20–32, 89–90.
46
Lura Currier to Harriet Hanson, 14 December 1845, Harriet Hanson Robinson
Papers, Schlesinger Library(SL), Radcriffe College, Cambridge, Mass., quoted in Allis
Rosenberg Wolfe, ed., “Letters of a Lowell Mill Girl and Friends: 1845–1846,” LaborHistory 17(1976), 100.
47
Marie Currier to Harriet Hanson, 4 April 1846, Robinson Papers, SL, quoted in
Wolfe, ed., “Letters of a Lowell Mill Girl and Friends,” 100–01.
48
Carol S. Lasser, “Mistress, Maid, and Market: The Transformation of Domestic
Service in New England, 1790–1870,” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1982), 1–122;
Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America(Middleton, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 12–71. As for “lifecycle servants” in Europe, see Yuji Wakao, Doitsu houkou-nin no shakai-shi [Social History ofServants in Germany] (Kyoto: Minerva-shobou, 1986) and Minoru Kawakita, Minshu
no Daieiteikoku: Kinsei-Igirisu shakai to Amerika-imin [People’s British Empire: Early
Modern British Society and Migration to America] (Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten, 1990).
49
Chapman, Diary, 1 June 1848, 9 December 1848, 6 January 1849, 17–19, 27 January
1849, 3 February 1849.
50
Jo Anne Preston, “ ‘To Learn Me the Whole of the Trade’: Conﬂict between a Female
Apprentice and a Merchant Tailor in Ante-bellum New England,” Labor History
24(1983), 259–73; idem, “Learning a Trade in Industrializing New England: The
Expedition of Hannah and Mary Adams to Nashua, New Hampshire, 1833–1834,”
Historical New Hampshire 39(1984), 24–44.
51
Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American
Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 4–142.
37

128
52

YUKAKO HISADASamuel Bacheller, Account Book, 1795–1845 (Manuscript), Old Sturbridge Village
Research Library, Sturbridge, Mass.; Pearl Family, Account Books, MHS; Dublin,
Transforming Women’s Work, 29–75, 117–51; Mary H. Blewett, Men, Women, andWork: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780–1910 (1988;
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 3–96; Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism,
160–91.
53
Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work, 208.
54
Ibid., 215–227.