Labor as a System of Maturity: Using Youth to Rethink Nineteenth-Century Labor Narratives

During the early nineteenth century, youth were at the vanguard of the commercial economy in the Northern United States. As young men and women left the household economy, they experienced the shifting dynamics of paternalism in the workplace. Despite the power, demographically, ideologically, and economically, that youth had during the decades following the American Revolution, historians have only recently begun to use youth labor to understand the dominant labor narratives of the nineteenth century. Free labor ideology upheld men's individually-contracted wage labor as the highest form of democratic participation. The "Cult of Domesticity" uplifted middle-class women's domestic labor, but separated it from the early nineteenth-century market economy. Historians use these labor narratives to explain the distribution of social and political power based on assumptions about gender and independence. Incorporating the labor experience of young men and women shows that these ideologies created a narrative of maturity, adulthood, and citizenship.

Examining labor as a system of maturity shows how youth challenged traditional assumptions about the relationship between adulthood and citizenship. Democratization and commercialization in the early nineteenth century allowed youth laborers to claim their employment as paths to adulthood and foundations for citizenship. However, the economic decline of the mid-nineteenth century eroded the opportunities for social mobility, and recast labor as a class status. A reevaluation of nineteenth century labor history through the experiences of youth reveals the complex relationship between work and citizenship. Labor does not simply produce the means of subsistence, but also creates individual and group identities and the relationships that drive social hierarchy.