Christine Stansell City Of Women Summary

Through Christine Stansell's work “City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789-1860, we are introduced to women of the manufacturing industry.The period explained in this chapter is the early industrial revolution era. With the growth of cities in the North, and the lack of space for farming, factories became the basis of the economy. Through an excerpt from her publication,we look at labor systems and conditions and how they impacted women during this era. Women were given work focused in industries that produced products such as garments and shoes, or other products that seemed to need a woman's “female hands” to accomplish (Stansell 116). The system of work they toiled under was called the outside system but later seemed to include the inside work system.
Women were overworked, considered “lowest antebellum worker” and segregated based on gender(Stansell 105). Not only did this work segregate and exploit these women, the outside work system, in particular, reinforced women's reliance on their family as a result of the low wages and forms of labor they did. The system of working individually in their homes made it hard to combat unfair treatment from employers, as they could not come together and unite(Stansell 116). Later when factory work became more popular, inside work, especially those that lacked heavy machinery, women began to experience some freedom(Stansell 120). In this piece, we see an economy run by mass production of textile related