Work

Work. Apart from the occupations of a comparatively small proportion of the population who were ministers, teachers, lawyers, merchants, or shopkeepers, farm work was the chief occupation in early America. Tobacco growing, the main activity in the seventeenth‐century Chesapeake region, was labor intensive. Planting, hoeing, cutting, and drying was done by farmers and a larger indentured labor force. Indentured servants financed their passage to America by contracting to labor for four to seven years. Many eventually acquired their own farms.

Enslaved Africans began to replace indentured servants by the 1690s. Even though most tobacco farmers never owned slaves, slavery grew enormously in the eighteenth century. By 1770, 40 percent of the southern population, or 400,000 people, was enslaved. Eighty percent of these lived in the Chesapeake region and the rest in South Carolina, where they grew indigo and rice. Slave labor became even more important with the growth of the nineteenth century cotton industry. Of the four million slaves in 1860—one in three southerners—most worked in cotton fields, as far west as east Texas, while others worked on tobacco farms or on Louisiana sugar plantations. Once slavery ended in 1865, many former slaves became sharecroppers. Planters rented their land in parcels for usually half of the crop. As southern agriculture declined, many white farmers also became sharecroppers.

It was small yeoman farmers, however, who dominated American agriculture from the Colonial Era through the nineteenth century. Even in the antebellum South, 75 percent of white southern farmers had owned no slaves. Male farmers and their sons from Maine to Florida cleared land, plowed, planted, and cultivated primarily food crops such as corn and wheat. Wives and daughters contributed to the household economy by cooking, spinning, weaving, preserving foods, growing vegetable gardens, tending cows, chickens, and hogs, and working in the fields during harvest time. New England farmers also engaged in lumbering and raising livestock. Fishing, especially for cod, was another important activity. Farmers in the middle colonies led the way in developing commercial agriculture in wheat and other grains.

Wheat farming expanded into the Middle West after 1830. Farmers cultivated prairie lands with new steel plows, and harvested three‐quarters of an acre a day with hand‐held scythes. By the 1880s, however, steam‐powered harvesters reaped 20 acres a day, and a combine did the work of 20 men. Two men could cultivate 250 acres. Although the number of farms rose from 2 million in 1869 to over 5.7 million by 1900, mechanization freed many for work in industry and commerce. A surplus rural population, combined with increased immigration supplied the workforce for the factories and shops of what had been a labor‐starved industrial sector.

Industrialization, which would fundamentally change work habits, grew slowly in America, but by 1860 almost 20 percent of all laborers worked in factories. Among the earliest were the Massachusetts textile‐mill hands, farm girls and women aged sixteen to twenty‐three who after 1814 worked twelve hours a day, six days a week on mechanized carders, spinners, and looms. Women, mostly young and single, continued to work in textile mills through the early twentieth century; others found employment as domestics. Immigrant and poor married women worked at home in low‐paying industries like the needle trades, made more efficient by the sewing machine.

Immigrant Irish and Chinese men worked as day laborers building the transcontinental railroads. Immigrant and native‐born men also worked in mining, in the iron and steel industry, and in all kinds of manufacturing. By 1900, 48.3 percent of all male workers had industrial jobs. Factory discipline, which had begun with the time clock, intensified with the introduction of assembly‐line work. Time‐and‐motion studies, developed by the scientific‐management pioneer Frederick W. Taylor, threatened to rob workers of all autonomy in the workplace. Children, who had long worked at home and on the farm, now were also employed in coal mines, textile mills, and factories. By 1900, children aged ten to fifteen made up 18 percent (or 1.7 million operatives) of the entire labor force, and 7 percent of non‐agricultural workers.

Industrialization and the growth of retailing also produced many new white‐collar jobs, not only for managers, but also for secretaries and shop clerks; by the beginning of the twentieth century many of these positions were held by women. Along with corporate managers and specialists in business‐related fields such as accounting, banking, insurance, and advertising, the white‐collar workforce also included ministers and growing numbers of professionals in such fields as journalism, publishing, education, medicine, and the law.

Labor patterns changed again during the Depression of the 1930s and World War II. Child labor declined sharply during the 1930s. World War II brought many women into skilled factory jobs formerly reserved for men. By 1944, eighteen million women had jobs, 50 percent more than in 1939, many in well‐paid industries like ship‐, automobile‐, and machine manufacturing. After a decline in female employment in the immediate postwar period, women by 1960 again held more than one‐third of all jobs. More married women worked than ever before, and by the 1980s they were well represented in all the professions. Agricultural employment decreased dramatically in the same period (the farm population fell from thirty to thirteen million between 1940 and 1964) owing to increased mechanization and large‐scale commercial farming. The economy also shifted from production to services. By 1960, blue‐collar workers constituted just 40 percent of the total workforce, as more workers were employed in goods distribution and services. The dramatic decline of manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s furthered this trend, as the number of well‐paid factory jobs diminished while lower‐paying service jobs increased.

American attitudes toward work underwent changes as well. New England Puritans had seen work as a secular calling, with deep religious meaning. Although assembly‐line work could be deadening, as late as the mid‐twentieth century many blue‐collar workers still felt strong ties to the companies that employed them, while white‐collar company men felt a loyalty to their employers that was frequently reciprocated. By the 1980s, downsizing had changed these attitudes. Work had become for many simply a means of income, and early retirement a pervasive goal.
See also Banking and Finance; Depressions, Economic; Factory System; Fisheries; Immigrant Labor; Indentured Servitude; Labor Markets; Labor Movements; Legal Profession; Leisure; Mass Production; Professionalization; Sharecropping and Tenantry; Social Class; Strikes and Industrial Conflict; Tobacco Industry; Unemployment; Women in the Labor Force.

Bibliography

Paul W. Gates , The Farmer's Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860, 1960.
Daniel T. Rodgers , The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920, 1978.
David W. Galenson , White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis, 1981.
David A. Hounshell , From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932, 1984.
W.J. Rorabaugh , The Craft Apprentice: From Franklin to the Machine Age in America, 1986.
Peter Kolchin , American Slavery, 1619–1877, 1993.
Kathryn Marie Dudley , The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America, 1994.

David M. Gordon