| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Wendy M. Gordon. Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1850–1881. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2002. Pp. x, 234. Cloth $68.50, paper $22.95.

This book compares the experiences of independent women migrants in three textile cities in the period from 1850 to 1881. Wendy M. Gordon uses Preston, England; Paisley, Scotland; and Lowell, Massachusetts as exemplars of the textile industries in each country, although the women she studies worked in a variety of jobs. An independent female migrant, in her definition, is one who lives without (easily identifiable) family in a city other than her birthplace, but without crossing international borders. This category represented a more or less sizeable proportion of the workforce in each of the cities but a minority of single women in all three. For Lowell, where independent migrant women were emblematic of early industrialization, this segment of the population was shrinking in the face of international migration by mid-century. In Preston, independent migrant women were largely invisible because most went into domestic service. Paisley fell somewhere in between. Gordon, following the suggestion of Marc Bloch, uses the qualitative data from one city to flesh out a lack of comparable data in the others. Thus she uses the bank records of Preston, the letters of Lowell, and the poor law cases of Paisley to illuminate patterns she suggests were more widespread. In general, Gordon places more emphasis on the commonality of experience of work for independent migrant women than on the differences between the three communities.

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