Book Review

Canada and the United States

This tome by the leading modern scholar of the first Industrial Revolution in New England charts the course of organized labor and capital in the region's storied textile industry from the 1850s through the century. The industry's male workers, as reflected in skilled mule spinners impressed with the notion of the family wage, inexorably retreated from a form of confrontational and inclusive unionism that had reached across craft, gender, and nationality for the cautious, male-dominated craft unionism that became the hallmark of the American Federation of Labor. Their employers pursued a strategy of market domination in cheaper goods by resorting to overproduction in order to discourage new entrants, and by relentlessly imposing wage cuts in order to keep down production costs. The resultant class conflict, which was the "constant turmoil" that gives this book its name, produced stilted unions for male operatives best described as the working poor. Despite such poverty, these workmen clung tenaciously to the idea that their manhood hinged on the family wage, on their ability to support wives and children in comfort on their earnings alone. They remained hostile to gainful employment for women (even though female and male children had to work to keep families afloat) and more resistant still to including them in their unions. Thus, working men who lost the class war won a sort of pyrrhic battle in the gender war.

. . .