REBECCA HARDING DAVIS
Life IN THE Iron Mills
and Other Stories
EDITED AND WITH A
BIOGRAPHICAL INTERPRETATION
BY TILLIE OLSEN
WITH A NEW FOREWORD BY KIM KELLY
Published in 2020 by the Feminist Press
at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
First Feminist Press edition 1972
Biographical interpretation and compilation copyright
© 1972, 1985 by Tillie Olsen
Foreword copyright © 2020 by Kim Kelly
All rights reserved.
| This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. |
No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First printing August 2020
Cover and text design by Drew Stevens
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Davis, Rebecca Harding, 1831-1910, author. | Olsen, Tillie, editor.
Title: Life in the iron mills : and other stories / by Rebecca Harding Davis ; edited and with a biographical interpretation by Tillie Olsen.
Description: First Feminist Press edition. | New York, NY : The Feminist Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020008177 (print) | LCCN 2020008178 (ebook) | ISBN 9781936932887 (paperback) | ISBN 9781936932894 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women iron and steel workers--Fiction. | United States--Social life and customs--19th century--Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS1517 .A6 2020 (print) | LCC PS1517 (ebook) | DDC 813/.4--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008177
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008178
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Foreword by Kim Kelly
LIFE IN THE IRON MILLS
A Biographical Interpretation by Tillie Olsen
THE WIFE’S STORY
ANNE
About the Authors
Also Available from the Feminist Press
More Classic Works from the Feminist Press
About the Feminist Press
FOREWORD
“A cloudy day; do you know what that is in a town of iron-works?” asks Rebecca Harding Davis in the very first line of her groundbreaking short story “Life in the Iron Mills.” Nearly two hundred years after she penned those words, one can still picture how that day must have looked and felt, with the black industrial smoke hanging heavily in the air, ash staining every surface it touches, gray lines carved into the haggard faces of passersby. It must have been hard to breathe, even in younger cities upon whose poisoned earth farmland and forests had once stood. There are places like that now too, cursed with the legacy of humanity’s ravenous thirst: vast manufacturing cities in China where everyone wears masks to breathe; polluted air creeping across heavy industry sites in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; deforestation fumes choking Cameroon; wildfires in Australia and on the US West Coast, strangling whole towns.
The white-hot wave of industrialization and urbanization that swept the globe in the eighteenth century revolutionized the way that human beings worked, lived, consumed, and died, permanently altered how society functioned, and unwittingly set the stage for the ravages of late capitalism as well as the current climate crisis. Before the Industrial Revolution, agriculture was the primary industry; pollution was minimal, and most people lived in rural areas and worked outdoors. After the great change, laborers flooded into cities in search of work. They found work, all right—but as Davis illustrates, these workers all too often ended up paying a heavy price for it.
In this time, class divisions were redrawn like battle lines, with wealthy capitalists and industrialists indulging their whims for gorgeous mansions while poor- and working-class people were squeezed into rickety boardinghouses, stinking tenements, and dank cellars. When new immigrants came in hopes of building better lives for themselves and their families, they were swept up into the labor pool by greedy bosses who saw a chance to extract as much value from their bodies as possible. It was a miserable time to be alive without the benefit of also being rich. Whether they were native-born or came from elsewhere, a nineteenth-century factory worker’s living conditions were utterly grim: diseases ran rampant, sewage pooled in the streets, and people of all ages starved—physically, intellectually, and spiritually. Wage slavery was a death sentence. Some workers paid the cost of urban living with their blood, sweat, and tears, and managed to carve out something resembling a decent existence; others struggled, living hand to mouth, their bodies and spirits broken as soon as they could walk. An unfathomable number paid with their lives.
And for a very long time, their stories were left untold. In a time before public school was both free and compulsory (a feat the United States did not achieve until the 1920s), most members of the laboring class were illiterate, and many immigrant workers were without a firm grasp on the English language. But more importantly—and shamefully—their day-to-day lives were left undocumented and unexamined because almost nobody in the middle and upper classes was listening to what the faceless masses had to say. Those who enjoyed higher social and economic privilege knew that those workers they saw trudging through the streets to and from the mills were doomed to lives that were poor, nasty, brutish, and short, but—then as now—didn’t necessarily see it as their problem. This is part of what makes “Life in the Iron Mills” and its smoke-smudged take on literary realism so extraordinary. Rebecca Harding Davis was born into a life of relative ease and had next to nothing in common with the workers in her story, and yet she writes about them and the proletarian struggle with such compassion and depth of insight that it’s hard to believe she was merely watching from the window.
Davis’s story was released more than four decades before another great documentarian of working-class exploitation, Upton Sinclair, ever set foot in a slaughterhouse, and well before the United States had any real labor laws to speak of. When the thirty-year-old Davis sat down to write this story,