*** Note: The work below is solely that of Elizabeth Jordan.  Any attempt to copy it without permission of the author is plagiarism and not worth it since you will be caught.***

"Divided Passions" in the Lives of New York City’s Working-Class Women
Written for Gender and Sexuality in U.S. History
Sophomore Year - Fall 1998

In City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789-1860, Christine Stansell gives an account of the lives of working-class women in New York City. She examines many aspects of these women’s lives from their home life to their experiences at work to their leisure activities. Stansell shows how the bourgeois doctrine of "divided passions" as explained in Intimate Matters, Born for Liberty, and Manhood in America plays out and adapts to life for members of the working-class.

During the late eighteenth century, America experienced the emergence of a new philosophy governing gender roles and relations. John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman in Intimate Matters call this new system "Divided Passions." At its most basic level, it refers to the phenomenon of associating women with private life and men with public life. With the emergence of a capitalist economy, men were moving out of the domestic sphere into "the public sphere of paid labor" (D’Emilio 57). Women, on the other hand, remained tied to the home and the domestic duties of child-rearing and housekeeping.

However, this ideal family situation of male breadwinner and female housekeeper and mother was unattainable for those in the working-class. "As the livelihoods of many men became less dependable, families increasing needed women’s cash earnings to get by" (Stansell 11). Employment in the new market economy was unstable for men. Thus, families were forced to find ways to supplement the male earnings. In order for families to survive, women entered the work market. However, as Stansell describes, the entrance of women into the labor market did not automatically create a working-class ideal which opposed the middle-class ideal of "separate spheres" (Kimmel 52) or "divided passions." Although many aspects of the middle-class doctrine were not compatible with life in the working-class, a large amount of adaptation of "divided passions" did take place in the working-class.

Working-class women in New York City began working at many different trades. Primarily, women’s wage work was "concentrated in a few ‘female’ employments" (Stansell 105) such as sewing, domestic service, and laundressing. In New York City, during the 1850s, a system known as "outwork" was a popular way for women to earn cash. Shop owners would send garment-construction and sewing work "out" of the shops to primarily working-class women. Women would do the work in their private homes and bring the finished products back to the shop owners who would then sell the garments. This system allowed women to earn cash while still emphasizing the fact that women belonged in the home. Outwork was one way in which the middle-class doctrine of "divided passions" adapted itself to working-class realities (Stansell 119).

After the 1850s, some factories began hiring women. Even this line of work resulted in patterns that repeated the middle-class doctrine of separate spheres and female dependency. The factories were set up to be larger familial hierarchies. Foremen served as the patriarchs of the factories controlling both the women and men below him much the same way that a husband would control his wife and children. Children workers were largely placed under the supervision of women in the factory so that a family dynamic quickly developed (Stansell 120-123). This served to enforce the ideal of female subservience and dependency which was largely derived from the notions of separate spheres. If women were to remain in the homes, then they were necessarily dependent on males to provide for them economically (Kimmel 52).

Other working-class women in New York City were domestic servants for middle-class families. These women served the mistresses of their households and were responsible for the housekeeping tasks that were deemed not suitable for "a lady" to perform (Stansell 159). Such tasks included: scrubbing floors, making fires, emptying slop buckets, washing and dressing children, or making clothing (Stansell 159).

Servants were directly under the order of their mistresses which ultimately led to great conflict between the two. The servants and their mistresses represented "two modes of womanhood" (Stansell 155). The mistresses followed the middle-class ideal of separate spheres whereas the servants necessarily challenged that ideal by the mere fact that they were part of the labor force. Ironically, women of the middle-class seemed to use their domestic servants as a mode to challenge or escape the ideology of "divided passions." By making domestic servants perform household tasks such as the ones listed above, women of the middle-class found they had more time to venture outside of the private realm (Stansell 159). Middle-class women became increasingly involved in "voluntary associations" that focused on improving society’s moral standards (Evans 74). Women used the free time they gained by employing domestic servants and the moral supremacy they had been granted by the ideology of separate spheres to support movements for abolition and temperance (Evans 75). Later, middle-class women began to cross into the public sphere in the fight against prostitution.

Working-class women in New York City did not have the same opportunities to form
"associations" like those of the middle-class. There were, however, a few attempts at the formation of labor organizations among the working-class. In 1831, tailoresses in New York went on strike demanding a "price list" in order to get equal pay for the work they performed (Stansell 133). The strike began as an act of self-advocacy on the part of the tailoresses. However, soon the movement was subsumed by a male-led labor organization. This happened with most female labor movements. Women began movements that were taken in under the wing of male-dominated labor organizations such as the National Trades’ Union (NTU) (Stansell 137). Usually these male labor organizations ended up promoting the belief that women should be excluded from the labor force altogether (Stansell 137). In other words, instead of trying to improve the conditions of working-class women, organizations such as NTU called for the return of working-class women to the home. To accomplish this, men demanded wages that would allow them to support a wife and children at home. This subsuming of female labor movements under patriarchal male labor organizations shows how pervasive the ideology of separate spheres had become. Even working-class men could not accept women in the public world despite economic realities that made the ideology of separate spheres impractical for working-class families.

During this time period, the public world was increasingly seen as one ridden by vice while the private realm was considered a haven of virtue (Kimmel 54). This led to the idea of the "cult of domesticity" in which women were deemed to be "not only. . . as virtuous as men. . . [but] more virtuous" (Stansell 22) since women were associated with the home. This increase in woman’s moral standing was due largely to a female appropriation and interpretation of the ideology of separate spheres; especially during the American Revolution. During the revolution, women were able to find a place for themselves within the new republic by producing the ideal of "republican motherhood"; thus, "endowing domesticity itself with public meaning" (Evans 57). Women became responsible for the moral upbringing of the citizens of the republic; namely, their sons. Republican motherhood gave women "a civic role and identity distinct from men" even though it remained within the realm of the private sphere (Evans 57).

However, the virtuosity that developed from the ideology of separate spheres did not apply to all women. Working-class women were seen as having a lower moral standing because of their presence in the public world not only in the labor force but also in their leisure activities. In the middle-class, courtship between young people took place primarily within the privacy of the home in parlors and sitting rooms (D’Emilio 75). However, in the working-class courtship was still largely public as it had been in colonial times. Young women and men met in areas such as the Bowery in New York City; away from parental supervision. This practice for courtship allowed for more privacy for young couples and more independence from familial surveillance for young women. Unfortunately, this lack of surveillance often served to place women in a more vulnerable position to rape or sexual assault by male acquaintances or strangers (Stansell 99).

During the nineteenth century, middle-class marriages began to be formed on the basis of love or attraction (D’Emilio 75). However, in the working-class, despite the opportunities for public courtship, marriage remained "a practical household arrangement based on reciprocal obligations" (Stansell 77). In other words, women needed male financial support and men needed female domestic work. Within the institution of marriage, with the development of the ideology of separate spheres, the middle-class developed the idea of familial privacy. Family disputes or quarrels were deemed private affairs; something that should be contained within the "home" (Stansell 41). In the working-class, on the other hand, the crowded atmosphere of tenement housing led to the use of the neighborhood as an alternative to the middle-class "home." Neighbors watched out for each other and held "structured expectations of reciprocal help" (Stansell 57). Quarrels within families were not private affairs in working-class neighborhoods. In fact, neighbors (mostly women) would often intervene in the domestic affairs of their neighbors much the same way that neighbors did in colonial times; thus, dragging what the middle-class would call the "private" into the public realm.

During the nineteenth century, the development of the market economy resulted in more mobility of men as they searched for work. For women, this meant the possibility that their husbands or fathers or other male economic supports could suddenly leave (Stansell 12). For men, this meant the opportunity to live in the city with little parental control or surveillance. Thus, a sex industry sprang up around this group of young mobile men (D’Emilio 111).

In the 1850s in New York City, the commercialization of sex was highly visible with the increased numbers of prostitutes on the city streets. Stansell argues that this increase in the number of prostitutes occurred "simply because there were more people" in the city and was not indicative of a moral degeneracy in city life (Stansell 173). However, prostitution became highly visible in this time period as it "moved out of the bawdy houses of the poor into cosmopolitan public spaces like Broadway" (Stansell 173). Prostitution showed the movement of the private act of sex into the public world.

Prostitutes in New York City were working-class women who had turned to their current trade for a number of different reasons. Some working-class women became prostitutes as a last resort when they found themselves without male support. Others chose to become prostitutes because they found it to be a better alternative than their former occupations. The latter group was formed mostly by women who had worked as domestic servants (Stansell 167). Domestic servants frequently found their liberties limited in respect to their leisure activities. Some preferred the independence that a life of prostitution offered. Others just "longed for a change" (Stansell 178).

In the 1830s, prostitution came to be seen as a "social problem" (D’Emilio 141) that called for reform. At the time, controls over sexuality were transferring from the church to the medical community (D’Emilio 142). Middle-class women emerged as society’s moral police during the liminal phase. In New York City, middle-class women emphasized the connection between prostitution and the "female labor market" (Stansell 176). Most reformers saw prostitution as public world’s corruption of innocent young girls and used it as an excuse to further indoctrinate the working-class into the ideology of separate spheres. Women of the middle-class would attempt to "reform" prostitutes by teaching them middle-class values of domesticity and purity. The nineteenth century panacea for prostitutes and other female moral deviants was marriage and life in the private sphere (D’Emilio 143). Ironically, the very women who "reformed" these prostitutes and encouraged them to follow the doctrine of domesticity themselves denied it in one way or another. Middle-class women preached the importance of having women stay in the homes by participating in voluntary associations; a part of the public world.

Stansell draws a different sort of connection between prostitution and women’s wage labor. Women’s wages were largely below subsistence levels. Thus, some working-class women could not afford to eat, let alone spend an evening on the town. Some participated in "casual prostitution" in which they traded sexual favors for a night of leisure activities with a male acquaintance (Stansell 176). Men still possessed a license to women’s bodies during the nineteenth century. Working-class women were aware of this license and of their sexual vulnerability. Thus, some women used types of prostitution in order to make "a unilateral relationship into a reciprocal one" (Stansell 185). In other words, some working-class women realized that men were going to use their bodies anyway and used that knowledge to gain "treats" such as a night of dancing or an evening in the theater in exchange for sexual favors. Prostitution was just another way for working-class women to survive in the public world in which they had no choice but to exist. The rise in prostitution in New York City was not indicative of a corruption of women by the public realm but of an adaptation of working-class women to the reality of their inability to depend on a stable male economic support.

The ideology of "separate spheres" was obviously created by and for the middle-class in the nineteenth century. For the working-class, it was an unattainable ideal. Basic economic situations did not allow women to stay home. However, despite this contradictory nature between middle-class ideals and working-class realties, many aspects of the ideology of separate spheres adapted to life in the working-class. Many times this adaptation was enforced by entities outside the working-class as in the example of outwork in which shop owners helped tie working-class women to the domestic realm. However, it was sometimes promoted by members of the working-class like when working-class men demanded family subsistence wages instead of better wages for women. The fact that the working-class did adapt to the ideology of "divided passions" in some instances proves how pervasive it was in nineteenth century America. Ultimately, however, the ideology of separate spheres was incompatible with the reality of life for working-class families and undesirable for most working-class women.

Works Cited

D’Emilio, John and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1997.

Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women In America. Free Press Paperbacks: New York, 1997.

Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. The Free Press: New York, 1997.

Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789-1860. University of Illinois Press: Chicago, 1986.