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“A Devil in Petticoats” and Just Cause: Patterns of Punishment in Two New England Textile Factories*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Carl Gersuny
Carl Gersuny
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Rhode Island
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Abstract

Professor Gersuny examines discipline and punishment of the workforce in two New England textile mills separated in time by almost a century and a half. He finds that, despite dramatic changes in the technological, social, and cultural context, the constraints governing factory discipline have shown remarkable continuity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 1976 , pp. 131 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1976

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References

1 It was a condition of access to the contemporary data that the identity of the company and its employees be concealed through use of pseudonyms. No such constraint was indicated for the 1826–1838 records of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company.

2 Flinn, M. W., ed., The Law Book of the Crowley Iron Works, Surtees Society, vol. CLXVII (Durham, England, 1957), 7.Google Scholar

3 McKendrick, Neil, “Josiah Wedgwood and Factory Discipline,” Historical Journal, IV (April, 1961), 45.Google Scholar

4 Chapman, Stanley D., The Early Factory Masters (New York, 1967), 184–187Google Scholar; Wedderburn, K. W. and Davies, P. L., Employment Grievances and Disputes Procedures in Britain (Berkeley, Calif., 1969)Google Scholar; Stessin, Lawrence, Employee Discipline (Washington, 1960)Google Scholar; Baer, Walter E., Discipline and Discharge Under the Labor Agreement (New York, 1972)Google Scholar; Gersuny, Carl, Punishment and Redress in a Modern Factory, (Lexington, Mass., 1973)Google Scholar; Plumridge, M. D., “Disciplinary Practice” Personnel Management, XLVIII (September, 1966), 138–142.Google Scholar

5 Hamilton Manufacturing Company Collection (Baker Library, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, Boston) Factory Payroll, April 1826–April 1827, vol. 250; Register 1830, vol. 481; Register 1831–1832, vol. 482, alphabetized with entries from T through Z missing; Register 1835–1839, vol. 483; Factory Payrolls 1835–1837, vols. 274–279. See also Josephson, Hannah, The Golden Threads (New York, 1949)Google Scholar; Layer, Robert G., “Wages, Earnings and Output in Four Cotton Textile Companies in New England, 1825–1860” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1952)Google Scholar; Dublin, Thomas Louis, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860” (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1975).Google Scholar

6 Quoted in Hammond, J.L. and Barbara The Town Labourer (Garden City, N.Y., 1968), 19.Google Scholar See also Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963), 335.Google Scholar

7 Engels, Frederick, “On Authority,” in Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Selected Works, vol. 1, (Moscow, 1958), 636–639Google Scholar; Bendix, Reinhard, Work and Authority in Industry (New York, 1956).Google Scholar

8 Dahrendorf, Ralf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford, Calif., 1959), 176–177Google Scholar; Phelps, Orme W., Discipline and Discharge in the Unionized Plant (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959), 1 ff.Google Scholar

9 Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York, 1958), 13.Google Scholar

10 Pollard, Sidney, The Genesis of Modern Management (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 162.Google Scholar

11 See Blauner, Robert, Alienation and Freedom (Chicago, 1964)Google Scholar; Woodward, Joan, Industrial Organization: Theory and Practice (London, 1965)Google Scholar; Meissner, Martin, Technology and the Worker (San Francisco, 1969).Google Scholar

12 Gutman, Herbert, “Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” American Historical Review, vol. 78 (June, 1973), 540.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Simmel, Georg, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Wolff, Kurt (New York, 1964), 413.Google Scholar

14 Antoni, Carlo, From History to Sociology, trans. White, Hayden V., (Detroit, 1959), 131.Google Scholar For example, “the Christian submits most willingly to the rule of the sword, pays his taxes, honors those in authority, serves, helps and does all he can to assist governing authority, that it may continue to function and be held in honor and fear.” Luther, Martin, Luther's Works, vol. 45 (Philadelphia, 1962), 94.Google Scholar

15 Bendix, Work and Authority, 38.

16 Hobsbawm, E.J., Labouring Men (New York, 1964), 348, 351.Google Scholar

17 The large supernumerary force of 185 “sparehands” (21 per cent of the female labor force) that Dublin reports from the July 1836 payroll of the Hamilton Manufacturing Company is illustrative of this inefficiency. See Dublin, Women at Work, 63.

18 Barnard, Chester I., The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), 169.Google Scholar

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20 Weber, Max, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. Henderson, A. M. and Parsons, Talcott (New York, 1964), 153.Google Scholar

21 See Josephson, Golden Threads; Dublin, Women at Work.

22 Hamilton Manufacturing, vol. 250.

23 Dublin, Women at Work, 78.

24 A noteworthy twentieth-century survival of the moral police posture was the so-called sociology department of the Ford Motor Company; see Sward, Keith, The Legend of Henry Ford (New York, 1948), 59.Google Scholar

25 Dublin, Women at Work, 76.

26 In the period from 1865 to 1869, weavers at the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company were fined at a rate of five cents per inch for “picking out.” See Peace Dale Manufacturing collection, vol. 79, Baker Library.

27 Brookshire, Marjorie, Absenteeism (Berkeley, Calif., 1960), 2Google Scholar.

28 Defarge Knitting Mill-……………… Workers Union, Agreement.

29 Many workers were employed at the Hamilton mills during more than one term of employment.

30 These included the following: absenteeism, 2; spoiling cloth, 2; scuffling, stealing, “taking a bottle of the good stuff,” fraud, instigating a turn out, dancing in the room, religious frenzy, intemperate, and three cited as discharged without specific reason.