Women's Work: A Century of
Maine Experience
Women's Work |
Women Working for Wages |
Women Owning Businesses |
Women Working with their Husbands
Women Work for Wages
Women's Work is Not Just Inside the Home...
Women worked for
wages. In Maine they have worked as sardine packers, herring
smokers, machine operators, potato pickers, blueberry rakers,
broccoli harvesters, telephone operators, shoe makers, clothing
and textile workers, secretaries and store clerks and paper
makers. They also worked in war industries during WWII, and took
part in the time-honored traditional roles of nurses and teachers.
What else do women do? Little research has been conducted on
female rural workers in Maine. How is Maine's story different form
other regions of the country? We'd like to find out.
Listen
in Real Audio
"I worked in
the Old Town Mills, starting when I was 14. We went over
to visit Mr. Gessner and Jessie (his daughter) had just
come home from the woolen mill. She was 14 and she said,
"Maggie, you want a job?"
And I said
"What doing?"
She said, "spooling, up at the woolen mill."
And I said, "young as you are?"
She said "yes, they wanted a spooler. You want to come
up and try?"
And I said, "Why, yes, I'll go!"
I was tickled to
death, I got my dinner pail all ready and I was out on the bank at
5 o'clock in the morning because I was afraid that the Gessners
would go by without picking me up. So when we got to the mill,
course I'd never been anywhere like that she didn't tell me
anything about how to spool."
Click
on Photo for Details
P-5252 |
P-5377 |
P-8211 |
P-8192 |
P-8193 |
P-6529 |
Additional reading:
Blewett, Mary, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest
in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910, (Urbana: University
of Illinois, 1988).
Kessler-Harris, Alice, Out to Work, (New York:Oxford University
Press, 1982).
Smuts, Robert W., Women and Work in America, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1959)
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