Striking for Wages, Not Marriage: How Middle-Class Ideologies of Gender and Whiteness Shaped the Plight of Tailoress Activists

Abstract

This paper focuses on The United Tailoresses Society movement in New York during the 1820’s-1830’s and the white working-class women who led them. White tailoress activists successfully organized unions and labor organizations in response to meager wages, inhumane work conditions, and labor exploitation. The middle-class benevolent society became sympathetic toward the struggles of the tailoress activists but rather than advocating for the demands of the labor movement, they reinforced white, middle-class ideals of femininity onto the working-class women activists. The discourse was centered around solutions that sought to place the labor activist back into the private sphere, such as finding a husband that could financially support them rather than becoming independent women earning fair wages. In this paper, I conduct a textual analysis on historical documents, such as U.S. based newspapers, to examine how the public reinforced middle-class ideologies of gender and whiteness around the plight and demands of the tailoress activists. I argue that the discourse regarding the tailoress activists reinforces white supremacy and evade any progress toward economic liberation across gender and racial lines. I conclude that middle-class ideologies of gender are usually centered around whiteness, which work to uphold white supremacy and capitalism.