Aside from Hawthorne's weary letters from Brook Farm to his fiancee, and Thoreau's accounts of hoeing beans in the mornings by Walden Pond, so far this semester we have not read literature from people who worked. Since, as Joyce Warren has written, our encounter with The Lowell Offering consitutes a break from the traditional canon of the American Renaissance, what should we do differently with this text?

In her introduction to The Lowell Offering, Benita Eisler characterizes the factory women as the only WASP working class, a fund of short-term New England laborers, succeeded after the 1840s by more permanent Irish labor. In another historian's account, Lowell workers were

farmers' daughters from the outlying parts of northern New England. ... Bumpkins all, with queer sounding names like Samantha, Kezia, Leafy, and Florilla, they arrived dressed in `the plainest of homespuns, cut in such an old-fashioned style that each young girl looked as if she had borrowed her grandmother's gown.'[1]

The impermanent status of most Lowell workers aided the paternalism of the Lowell Corporation. From the beginning of Lowell, "the shared class and religious origins of labor and management" created the opportunity for the Boston Associates, inspired perhaps by the reformist sentiment of Channing's `self-culture,' to create a factory town and a "labor force that would be a shining example of those ultimate Yankee ideas: profit and virtue, doing good and doing well."[2]

These accounts suggest that Lowell women were not the urban-industrial proletariat of European style. The testimony of the Lowell Offering backs supports this point, but it does so in ways that, at times, make a modern critic uncomfortable. Encountering paternalism in labor history and the literature of a "laboring class" is problematic, because it's hard to differentiate the beliefs of the dominating class from the insurrectionary efforts of the dominated. The Lowell women, with a greater degree of status mobility than other workers throughout history, are an excellent example of this difficulty: contrary to .

So if we are to accept the collection of writings constituting The Lowell Offering into the canon beside Emerson and Thoreau, we must acknowledge a series of antinomies. Workers described the conditions as both awful and excellent, work as alternately a trial and tolerable. This arises not only out of the differing points of view of authors; it is present in the minds of all Lowell women, who, in one worker's words, "would scorn to say they were contented, if asked the question; for it would compromise their Yankee spirit -- their pride, penetration, independence, and love of `freedom and equality'.... Yet withal, they are cheerful." (Lowell Offering, 53). And as Josephine L. Baker wrote, "every situation in life, has its trials which must be borne, and factory life has no more than any other." (81).The female workers who wrote -- or were they female writers who worked? -- explained these antinomies by universalizing them.