Life in the Iron-Mills: A Woman in a Man’s World The year was 1848, a seemingly average year for most Americans, and Rebecca Harding Davis had just graduated from the Washington Female Seminary and moved back home to Wheeling, West Virginia to live with her family. Simultaneously, an unknown storm was brewing in Seneca Falls, New York, where Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were leading the first woman’s rights convention that would stamp history as the beginning of a long fight for gender equality (Tichi 28). Davis’s first published work, Life in the Iron-Mills, is a novella focused on the crippling social issues of the nineteenth century that plagued the working class. Most importantly, however, is Davis’s unveiling of the dull, exhausting, and abused existence of women belonging to such a caste. These girls were quite unlike the glamorous “ladies” of wealth of the nineteenth century, such as Dr. May’s
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Therefore, although she desperately needs food and rest, Deb gives Janey her dinner of potatoes and ventures into the night to deliver supper to Hugh. Her assumed duties as a woman leave her active for many more hours than the men, who after working their shifts can rest, for they do not perceive household chores to be any of their responsibility. For example, upon arriving home she saw Old Wolfe “asleep on a heap of straw, wrapped in a torn horse blanket” (Davis 43). While this may not sound luxurious, he is still getting the sleep Deb needs instead of assisting her. As the reader follows Deb to the iron-mill, the narrator provides a glance into her tired perspective:
It was far, and she was weak, aching from standing twelve hours at the spools. Yet it was her almost nightly walk to take this man [Hugh] his supper, though at every square she sat down to rest and she knew she should receive small words of thanks. (Davis
Therefore, although she desperately needs food and rest, Deb gives Janey her dinner of potatoes and ventures into the night to deliver supper to Hugh. Her assumed duties as a woman leave her active for many more hours than the men, who after working their shifts can rest, for they do not perceive household chores to be any of their responsibility. For example, upon arriving home she saw Old Wolfe “asleep on a heap of straw, wrapped in a torn horse blanket” (Davis 43). While this may not sound luxurious, he is still getting the sleep Deb needs instead of assisting her. As the reader follows Deb to the iron-mill, the narrator provides a glance into her tired perspective:
It was far, and she was weak, aching from standing twelve hours at the spools. Yet it was her almost nightly walk to take this man [Hugh] his supper, though at every square she sat down to rest and she knew she should receive small words of thanks. (Davis