John Potter. Saving the “Anxious and Aimlessâ”: The Debate Over State Subsidies for the Emigration of “Excess” Massachusetts Women to the Far West in 1865. Presented at the American Studies Association, Canadian Association for American Studies Third Joint Annual Meeting. October, 1997.
John Potter. Saving the “Anxious and Aimless” The Debate Over State Subsidies for the Emigration of “Excess” Massachusetts Women to the Far West in 1865. Presented at the Fifty-Ninth Meeting of the New England Historical Association. April, 1997.
Summary
On January 6, 1865, in his inaugural address to the Massachusetts Legislature, Governor John A. Andrew, drew the attention of the legislature to the large surplus of women in Massachusetts and charged that it was “weakening and demoralizing” society. Doomed by their numbers to remain unmarried, these women entered into economic competition with men which drove wages down, and in doing so aggravated the problem by preventing men from earning enough to support their families. To combat the problem he proposed that the state government should subsidize the emigration of women to the far West where they could easily find a man to marry. Although his proposal was swiftly rejected by the legislature, it is important, because it marks the beginning of a debate within Massachusetts on how the government should respond to the changing economic and social circumstances of the coming post-war era.
Throughout the Civil War, the Republican Party had pursued a labor policy centered around a high tariff, encouragement for emigration West, and support of education. Through these policies, the Party hoped to provide opportunity to rise for working men, without the government interfering directly in the workings of the capitalist economic system. By 1865, though, this policy was threatened by two developments. First, workers were increasingly calling for the direct intervention that the Republicans wished to avoid. Secondly, the growing number of working women appeared to be undermining a policy that was centered solely around working men. It was in an attempt to avoid the direct government intervention that organized labor wished for, and to deal with the threat posed to the policy by working women, that governor Andrew made his proposal.
The legislature that rejected Andrew’s proposal, though, disagreed with Andrew’s analysis of the situation. In particular, they denied that there was any surplus of women workers. Rather they argued, any apparent surplus was simply the result of the pride of native women. Instead of working in the cotton mills, the native women insisted on some genteel employment such as working as a teacher, and while waiting for such jobs complained about their unavailability. Indeed, in the committee’s view, it was probably their idle complaints that were at the root of the governor’s proposal. And, because native women refused to work as domestics or in the mills, employers were forced to turn to “an inferior class of foreign females,” or even men for workers. Thus, the solution to all problems, in the legislature’s eyes, was for the native women to get over their “false shame,” and to accept the available factory jobs. By doing so, they would no longer compete with men for more prestigious jobs. At the same time, the need for continued importation of foreign labor would be reduced.
Andrew’s plan was also rejected by both organized labor, who were more concerned with the eight-hour day, and by politically influential middle and upper-class women who considered his assessment that any women who was not married was wasting their life insulting. In the end, the only support for the plan came from poverty-stricken working women desperate to find some solution to their problems. Unfortunately for them, they had no political influence.