Life In The Iron Mills And The Simplification Of Black Suffering

Rebecca Harding Davis wrote “Life in the Iron Mills” in the mid-nineteenth century in part to raise awareness about working conditions in industrial mills. With the goal of presenting the reality of the mills’ environment and the lives of the mill workers, Davis employs vivid and concrete descriptions of the mills, the workers’ homes, and the workers themselves. Yet her story’s realism is not objective; Davis has a reformer’s agenda, and her word-pictures are colored accordingly. One theme that receives a particularly negative shading in the story is big business and the money associated with it. Davis uses this negative portrayal of money to emphasize the damage that the single-minded pursuit of wealth works upon the humanity of those

The only way this novel should be used in curriculum is to teach about privilege and how it can have a positive impact on very few individuals, but an extremely negative impact on far more. Kerouac uses characterization, a specific style and tone, and structure to show how Sal lives his life as a privileged white male in the late 1940s. Each of these topics help to prove how his privilege becomes ignorance, and how he glorifies the unfair lives of the less fortunate and those of color. The story is very unique and helps to provide insight on these topics, but often does so in an unsuitable way. Overall, this novel portrays privilege in a way that exposes how it can cause the romanticization of the unfair and impoverished life of those who are oppressed or a

Slavery was a system of forced labor popular in the 17th and 18th century that exploited and oppressed blacks. Slavery was an issue in the US that brought on many complex responses. Slave labor introduced to the United States a multitude of issues that questioned political, economical, and social morals. As slave labor increased due to the booming of cottage industries with the market revolution, reactions to these issues differed between regions, creating a sectional split of the United States between industrial North and plantation South. Historiographers Kenneth Stampp, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, and Eugene Genovese, in their respective articles, attempt to interpret the attitudes of American slaves toward their experiences of work as well as the social and economic implications of slave labor.

He has endured the physical and mental pain that slaves go through everyday. Page 16 states “ I suffered much from hunger but much more from cold. “ The life of slave never became easy. The article Slavery is a positive social good states “ Any efforts toward class or racial equality ran counter to this theory and therefore ran counter to civilization itself. “ People who supported slavery thought that a certain group has to rely on the work of others to have a civilized way of living. Finally the reading Pro Slavery Arguments in the Antebellum South states “ People who were pro-slavery believed that killing the slavery system would also kill the south’s cotton reliant economy. “ The cotton industry relied on slaves because cotton farmers could not afford to pay the amount of workers needed, so they got workers that they could treat as

In the reading, Jones explores the relationship between class, race, and gender. She states that African Americans, in general, are oppressed, however, black women

Thus, slavery pulled white workers down in two ways: one, by direct competition with slave labor in the South, and two, by associating all the industrious efforts of workers with those of the degraded slaves.”

No matter where you go in the world, people are divided. They can be divided by their wealth or state of living these are social class. In the novel “The Outsiders” by S.E. Hinton social classes a very apparent the rich and the poor. In The Outsiders, social classes create a divide in the community. The isolation of these two groups leads to the tension and violence that is seen in the book.

Factory conditions were harsh. Workers in the Lowell Factory were under such harsh conditions that the women were not sure they could endure it. (Document A) They took women from their homes and relocated them closer to the factories. The women received almost no pay, the air was bad, and the factories were deafening loud. It was said that freedom for women was the most beneficial thing about working in these factories. In fact, Mary S Paul mentions that she has not been able to find enough time to even write a letter for about a week. If a whole week goes by, is there really freedom at all. (Document A) Catharine Beecher talks about how there was only half an hour allowed to eat before bed and right back to the mill in the morning. (Document J) Is it worse to be on a strict schedule with the lie of freedom, or is it worse to know the truth of slavery? On the greener side, slave owners could maximize cotton production and a cost-benefit

Here Douglass shows that slavery was not a constant source of pain and suffering: “I was not old enough to work in the fields, and there being little else than field work to do, I had a great deal of leisure time,” (Douglass 71.) This is effective in proving his point because it allows him to show the true horrors of slavery and not be lopsided in his views.

During the 1840s, America saw increasingly attractive settlements forming between the North and the South. The government tried to keep the industrial north and the agricultural south happy, but eventually the issue of slavery became too big to handle, no matter how many treaties or compromises were formed. Slavery was a huge issue that unraveled throughout many years of American history and was one of the biggest contributors leading up to the Civil War (notes, Fall 2015). Many books have been written over the years about slavery and the brutality of the life that many people endured. In “A Slave No More”, David Blight tells the story about two men, John M. Washington (1838-1918) and Wallace Turnage (1846-1916), struggling during American slavery. Their escape to freedom happened during America’s bloodiest war among many political conflicts, which had been splitting the country apart for many decades. As Blight (2007) describes, “Throughout the Civil War, in thousands of different circumstances, under changing policies and redefinitions of their status, and in the face of social chaos…four million slaves helped to decide what time it would be in American History” (p. 5). Whether it was freedom from a master or overseer, freedom from living as both property and the object of another person’s will, or even freedom to make their own decisions and control their own life, slaves wanted a sense of independence. According to Blight (2007), “The war and the presence of Union armies

Social Misconceptions Society misleads people to believe in social hierarchy: a wealthy man is perceived as better or more worthy than a bus driver. The poem, "Singapore," by Mary Oliver attempts to expose the problem of this misconception. The narrator is a traveler at an airport who encounters a woman cleaning the restrooms, and is repulsed by the woman's work. An incomplete analysis of the poem might lead readers to believe the main focus is the janitor and her work; however, in reality the message of the poem lies in the speaker's revelation of her need for humility because of the insignificance of social hierarchy. The image of social class division arises almost immediately in the poem.

Throughout Cultural Perspectives, many influential texts have been read, analyzed, and discussed. One text, Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis, integrates the thoughts of quite a few authors that have been discussed this semester. Through employing a Marxist view of history—there are always the “haves” and the “have-nots”—one can see that Life in the Iron Mills exemplifies the struggles that face many “have-not” citizens throughout history. One can then see the clear connections to various authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft, W.E.B. DuBois, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, and Adam Smith.

Minrose Gwin‘s book, Black and White Women of the Old South, argues that history has problems with objectiveness. Her book brings to life interesting interpretations on the view of the women of the old south and chattel slavery in historical American fiction and autobiography. Gwin’s main arguments discussed how the white women of the south in no way wanted to display any kind of compassion for a fellow woman of African descent. Gwin described the "sisterhood" between black and white women as a "violent connection"(pg 4). Not only that, Gwin’s book discusses the idea that for most of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, a black woman usually got subjected to displacement of sexual and mental

Life in the Iron Mills is a novella that is hard to classify as a specific genre. The genre that fits the most into this novella is realism, because of the separation of classes, the hard work that a person has to put into their every day life to try and make a difference, and the way society influences the actions of people and their relationships. However, no matter what genre is specifically chosen, there will be other genres present that contradict the genre of choice. While the novella shows romanticism, naturalism, and realism, this essay is specifically centered around realism. The ultimate theme in Rebecca Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills is the separation of classes and gender. It is the separation of classes when the people in the

Due to the social taboo of being an ex-slave (or of slave heritage), there are ex-slaves who are afraid to mention their backgrounds to Klein. This obviously leads to a limitation of evidence, which perhaps makes it difficult for the reader to form an idea on what slavery was fully like. Despite this, Klein shows admiration for those of slave backgrounds in portraying them as being spurred on by past oppressions, to achieve a better life than those with master backgrounds. To further his arguments, Klein uses secondary sources as a basis to criticize traditional arguments.