Gordon, Wendy M. 1967–

PERSONAL:

Born 1967. Education: Attended Utah State University, 1985-87; Hamline University, B.A., 1992; Central Michigan University/University of Strathclyde Joint Program, M.A., 1995, Ph.D., 2000.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, State University of New York—Plattsburgh, Champlain Valley Hall, Plattsburgh, NY 12901; fax: 518-564-2212. E-mail—gordonwm@plattsburgh.edu.

CAREER:

State University of New York—Plattsburgh, assistant professor of history and chair of department.

WRITINGS:

Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1850-1881, State University of New York Press (Albany, NY), 2002.

Contributor to the International Review of Social History.

SIDELIGHTS:

Wendy M. Gordon is an assistant professor of history and chair of the history department at the State University of New York—Plattsburgh. Her book Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1850-1881, was inspired, Gordon wrote on the State University of New York—Plattsburgh Web site, by her own experiences: "I came to study women's migration after living in four different states and two countries in five years. As far back as I can trace my family tree, just three individuals died in the same state in which they were born. From this personal experience I got curious about how migration fits into history, and found it everywhere."

Mill Girls and Strangers focuses on three towns—Preston, Paisley, and Lowell, Massachusetts—where the textile industry drew women from across the country and from overseas to work in their factories. A reviewer for the Journal of American History found: "Utilizing quantitative sources (largely census samples) and qualitative when possible, she argues that those migrants represented an important if declining contingent in the work forces of late-nineteenth-century industrial cities." According to a synopsis posted at the State University of New York Press Web site: "Using individual accounts, this innovative and comparative study examines the migrants' lives by addressing their reasons for migration, their relationship to their families, the roles they played in the cities to which they moved, and the dangers they met as a result of their youth, gender, and separation from family." Gordon particularly draws on "the bank records of Preston, the letters of Lowell, and the poor law cases of Paisley to illuminate patterns she suggests were more widespread," according to a critic for the American Historical Review. Gordon looks not only at the larger migration trends which brought thousands of women to Massachusetts, but also at the personal lives of the young women themselves. She looks at the motivations behind women leaving home to work in the textile factories. While financial incentives were a strong pull, some women wanted the independence that such employment offered. Many were on their own for the first time in their lives. Gordon found that few of them sent money back home to their families, preferring instead to spend their earnings on themselves. Gordon also documents the differences in how immigrant women and native women were treated by their employers. In her review for Albion, Margaret H. McFadden found that "the detail given and the descriptions of the three communities help to round out our knowledge of the lives of independent female migrants in Britain and America in the third quarter of the nineteenth century." "Gordon's book is a solid contribution to the literature on women, waged work, and migration during the Victorian period," Lisa Chilton concluded in Victorian Studies.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Albion, winter, 2004, Margaret H. McFadden, review of Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1850-1881, p. 685.

American Historical Review, December, 2003, review of Mill Girls and Strangers.

Journal of American History, December, 2003, review of Mill Girls and Strangers.

Victorian Studies, spring, 2004, Lisa Chilton, review of Mill Girls and Strangers, p. 512.

ONLINE

State University of New York—Plattsburgh Web site,http://web.plattsburgh.edu/ (May 2, 2008), brief biography of Gordon.

State University of New York Press Web site,http://www.sunypress.edu/ (June 14, 2008), synopsis of Mill Girls and Strangers.