32211

WiSe 13/14: Industry and Diligence: The Development of an American Work Ethic from the Colonies to the Gilded Age

Sophia Frese

Kommentar

This course traces American conceptions of work and the development of a work ethic from the Puritans to the sweatshops of the turn of the century. We will be reading a wide array of genres such as sermons, fiction, philosophical- and political tracts that played a key role in shaping the discourse of work in American culture and society of the 18th and 19th century. We will begin with Alexis du Tocqueville and Max Weber, two European writers who have attempted to map and explain the specific cultural characteristics of America's relationship to (waged) work and labor. From there, we will turn to Benjamin Franklin whose oeuvre testifies to the secularization of the Puritan work ethic. In much of his writing the ideal of the self-made man, as someone who rises from rags to riches through industry and hard work, takes center stage. To understand the ideological framing of women's work in the Early Republic, we will discuss their labor both within the domestic sphere and outside as agitators for their own cause. We will consider slavery, as an exploitative and racist labor regime, through select texts by Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and Karl Marx. Venturing into the Romantic era, we will explore how the writers of this period framed work through an individualist ethos exemplified in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his student Henry David Thoreau, for whom a certain meditative idleness became a key for the creative process. Reflecting darkly on these often utopian and lofty ideals of (intellectual) work and self-realization, Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener" dwelled on the drudgery of repetitive labor, envisioning refusal as the only way out. To critique the Transcendentalist writers' infatuation with the self-reliant man, we will study how their contemporaries Elizabeth Peabody and Caroline Healey Dall discussed the possibility and limits of female self-realization through work and education. Our seminar will end with the Gilded Age, an era characterized by labor struggles, sweatshop toil and the amassing of wealth by the few. Naturalist writers will take us into the depths of everyday toil and desperation, while Andrew Carnegie preaches "The Gospel of Wealth" and Mark Twain advises us to "give it all up." With the writer and sociologist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, we will return once more to the question of women's labor as it presented itself at the turn of the century. Schließen