Letters from New York

Child, Lydia Maria

doi:10.5479/sil.332314.39088005572318

Cited by 35 publications

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“…There you will see nearly every form of human misery, every sign of human degradation." 31 A definition began to emerge of Five Points as an exotic and mysterious world, rife with erotic overtones and danger, was creating an area that was both domestic and exotic. As soon as 1843, therefore, both New Yorkers and outsiders came to the district to go "slumming," as Tyler Anbinder notes; a visit there became "a standard part of visiting tourists' itineraries."…”

Section: The Shadowsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear, Commercialism, Reform, and Antebellum Tourism to New York City

Gassan

2015

Journal of Urban History

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Tourism to New York grew after the 1820s, during a period of incredible growth in the size of the city and its attendant problems. As the contrast between the glittering commercialism of Broadway and the rapidly worsening Five Points neighborhood increased, tourists became both witnesses to and subjects of the city’s best and worst aspects. A key role was played by Charles Dickens, whose 1842 visit to the city helped create a national sense of both the best and worst it had, and as the 1850s turned, the popular literature began presenting tourists as the inevitable victims of the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhood. Tourism now became an engine fueling both the forces wanting to reform Five Points and as some of its best customers, and by the end of the decade, the nation’s image of New York had been set in the mind of Americans, creating preconceptions that continue to this day.

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Section: The Shadowsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear, Commercialism, Reform, and Antebellum Tourism to New York City

Gassan

2015

Journal of Urban History

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“…Elsewhere in the same discussion, Child compared the political sensibilities of African Americans to the Irish, noting that they were each "a people trampled on for generations and therefore ignorant and violent," making them unfit for equal status in the republic. 19 The racialization of domestic service in America took place within a context of fervent white republicanism. But it also took place within a society that condoned race-based chattel slavery.…”

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Race, Republicanism, and Domestic Service in the Antebellum United States

Cain¹

2007

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Current debates in the United States over illegal immigration and domestic labour are predicated on many assumptions, among them the notion that service work is degraded, degrading, and 'unfit' for white Americans. This assumption has roots deep in American history, so deep that it has come to be shared both by defenders of undocumented workers and by their adversaries, and so deep that its origins are rarely considered. Yet from the founding of the republic until the 1830s, domestic service was regarded in a very different light by white Americans of all social classes. Throughout the Northern states, where slavery had not taken firm hold and was being gradually abolished, domestic service was most commonly performed by young white women who found their work to be valued, respectable and good training for their own eventual marriage and motherhood. Under this so-called system of "helps," a Yankee woman might take in a niece or a neighbour's daughter and teach her the art and science of household management in return for assistance with performing household tasks. This relation resembled that of a master craftsman training an apprentice, with no money being exchanged. The "helps" were regarded not as employees, and not just as members of the household, but often as members of the family itself, sharing living quarters and dining with the others. This system of helps did not last long into the antebellum period, however. As scholars Faye Dudden and Carol Lasser have shown, the rise of industrialization and the emerging market in immigrant labour created a set of social conditions that drove native-born white American women from service and replaced the system of helps with a wage relationship. Dudden and Lasser have explored the impact of this new economy on American serving women, explaining that it opened the door both to more autonomy for and greater exploitation of servants. 1 But servants were not the only women whose conditions and identities were affected by the transition from "helps" to service: the women who employed them were also forced to contend with changes to the material circumstances of their households, as well as with a host of new ideological problems. These problems stemmed from the intrusion of the market economy into the domestic space, compounded by the fears associated with bringing strange hirelings into the home and trusting them with intimate family tasks. Together these developments threatened the sanctity of the home and thrust the household mistress into the traditionally unfeminine-and therefore, in the nineteenth century, uncomfortable-role of acting as a boss to dependent labour. The fact that her employees were most

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“…It will also accept the diversity of language and culture that emerged as its limitations were learned. Having lost the direct route to certainty that the Tower of Babel was to supply, Child wants Babylon to take advantage of its changed circumstances to find new ways to foster “true culture.” Of this vision she concludes, using the words of Swedish author Fredericka Bremer: “The human heart is like Heaven; the more angels, the more room” (quoted in Child 1998, 178). In American democracy a parallel principle is called for by Child's successors in the tradition.…”

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Rebuilding Babylon: The Pluralism of Lydia Maria Child

Pratt¹

2004

Hypatia

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One of the most influential brunches of nineteenth-century American feminism wus a resistance movement committed to the idea that the key to social reform was the recognition and maintenance of humun differences. This approach, which became central to American pragmatism, had its roots in a tradition of American women writers including Lydia Muria Child. This paper examines Child's work and focuses on her conception of pluralism and its role in sustaining diverse communities.In his well-known work, The Public and Its Problems (1984), John L3ewey provides a prescription for the ills of American democracy. Writing in 1926, during a time of unparalleled wealth and unparalleled poverty, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and labor struggle, Dewey insisted that "the cure for the ailments of democracy is more dernocracy" (1926, 327,325). Here, clemocracy is a way of life, a pervasive attitudc and range of practices that form and promote the growth of human communities. It is the means h y which individuals and communities find their voices, identify the ends that provide purpose, and take collective action. Yet, even a s the slogan inarks the central tenet of Dewey's conception of democracy, it also recalls a rich but little studied philosophical tradition that played a sig-

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Letters from New York

Cited by 35 publications

References 0 publications

Fear, Commercialism, Reform, and Antebellum Tourism to New York City

Fear, Commercialism, Reform, and Antebellum Tourism to New York City

Race, Republicanism, and Domestic Service in the Antebellum United States

Rebuilding Babylon: The Pluralism of Lydia Maria Child

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