Guest Speaker: Dr. DeWolfe – Recovering Women’s Lives through Handcrafts

Elizabeth DeWolfe is Professor of History at the University of New England where she teaches courses in women’s history, archival research, and American culture. Dr. DeWolfe is a historical detective: she hunts archives for the traces of ordinary women, piecing together their all-but-forgotten lives from disparate clues. Dr. DeWolfe’s book on the short life and tragic death of a textile mill girl, The Murder of Mary Bean, was named the Outstanding Book of 2008 by the New England Historical Association. She has also written on anti-Shaker activists, on textile factory workers, and on an 1890s political scandal involving a US congressman, his mistress, and a spy (https://mainehumanities.org/world-in-your-library-speakers/elizabeth-dewolfe/) http://elizabeth-dewolfe.squarespace.com/

  • Maine women’s History – first labor strike in downtown Biddeford, this day today (I forget the date she said) 180 years ago? → 1841
  • 180 women would be working in textile factories if you wanted to make money and not in a college classroom 
    • This is not a career, but this is something to pass the time until you are married and have children 

The Great Turn-Out of 1841 

  • Lawrence, Mass, Textile Strike, 1912 
  • Best paying job before the civil war? Textile mills 
  • Between girlhood and womanhood, you have young women with idle hands
    • Predominantly young women workforce  
    • Standard set of regulations for the mills so there was no competition between the mills 
    • At least 14, not use liquor, and smallpox vaccination or proof that you already had it 
    • Lived in boarding houses with rules, charged room and board from paycheck – remaining wages were yours to keep
      • Wages belong to husband if married or to father if you were single 
  • No electric in the mills, they tried to use as much natural light as possible

From her website the book is described as, “When the winter ice melted in April 1850, residents of Saco, Maine, made a gruesome discovery: the body of a young woman tied to a board and submerged in a stream. Evidence pointed to a local physician who was arrested and tried for the death of Mary Bean, the name by which this young woman had been known during her brief residency in Saco. Garnering extensive newspaper coverage, the murder trial revealed many secrets: a questionably trained doctor, connections to an unsolved murder in New Hampshire, and the true identity of “Mary Bean”—a young mill worker named Berengera Caswell, missing since the previous winter.” (http://elizabeth-dewolfe.squarespace.com/the-murder-of-mary-bean-and-other-stories-1).