Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-11, Section: A, page: 4796.

Director: Jon Butler.

Americans experiencing mechanization in the early nineteenth century formulated distinct working-class and middle-class identities in their shopfloor relations and in diverse social and cultural practices. But while labor leaders struggled to foster an oppositional class consciousness among workers, for the majority of Americans living between 1820 and 1860, class separation--as evinced in the social relations of mechanized production--did not necessarily mean class antagonism.

This study argues that the relative equanimity between workers and members of the middle class can be understood by considering how classes formed discursively at the same time they formed socially. Drawing on a wide range of printed materials, it finds that antebellum Americans constructed conceptions of class in a broad, popular discourse on mechanization that was national in scope. Participants saw that mechanization separated the mental labor of managing work from the manual labor of executing work. As they equated "headwork" with proprietors and managers, and "handwork" with wage earners, writers and lecturers figured class as the disintegration of formerly united labor functions. Because the unity of head and hand was central to notions of citizenship and autonomous selfhood, the divergence of manager and worker had implications far beyond the workplace. Perceiving their personal autonomy to be threatened, some workers challenged the new productive order, while members of the middle class tried to stem the dire consequences they believed would follow when workers were unable to govern themselves.

In the popular discourse on mechanization, members of the middle class articulated a conception of class that defused the potential for conflict. They did so by representing the vexed relation between manager and worker as analogous to the necessarily cooperative relations between human and machine, head and hand, and mind and body. In chapters examining steam boiler explosions, the mechanics' institute movement, and popular physiology reform, this study shows how members of the middle class articulated languages of class in discussions that appeared to be neutral on divisive questions about mechanization and work. Writing a contested social relation onto relations understood to stand outside the social realm enabled middle-class obsevers to figure the class relation as both harmonious and hierarchical, and to locate the relation in the natural order.