The spinning wheel : poverty and gender in colonial Boston

This study is an examination of The Society for Encouraging Industry and Employing the Poor. It was a work-relief project established in 1748 by wealthy Bostonians to employ the town's growing number of impoverished inhabitants, particularly women and children, in a linen manufactory. Using Boston's newspapers and town poor-relief records, provincial and town legislative records, prescriptive literature, trade records, and the sermons and pamphlets promoting the manufactory the thesis examines three aspects of life in colonial Boston to explain why the SEIEP was established: Boston's position in the Atlantic economy, methods of poor relief, and the role and value of women in colonial America. It is hoped this thesis will illuminate the presence of poverty in colonial America, a social reality many historians continue to deny. It hopes to demonstrate how poverty affected the social, political, and economic lives and relationships of men and women in pre-Revolutionary America.