Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: The Mill Girl Died While Working and the Patrician Angel Came : High Culture and Class Aspects of a Gilded–Age Monument

Lowell Massachusetts was a starting place for the industrial Revolution—turning from artisan hand labor to machine production— and the young Yankee women crowding into the factories became as much the invention of modern times as the machinery itself.  Earning real wages in a leap of independence and with community support, the worker flourished, as well as the employer.  The picture changed when conditions in the mills worsened, and with the unequal class system surfacing, the Yankee women left.  The new crop of workers—immigrants desperate for work—took their place. The pay was poor, the hours were long and the speedup was life-threatening.  Factory workers, exploited but when pressed too hard were politically open to battle for better conditions. 

In this environment, a young woman sculptor, Evelyn Beatrice Longman, socialized into the Gilded Age hierarchy, was commissioned to envision a gravestone honoring a woman worker of the past.  Living in the present, she relied on the conservative nature of sculpture to project by aesthetic means, in a program of beauty and spiritual experience, a visual complex of ideas.

Francine Tyler, a researcher in the Wertheim Study, is an art historian and an adjunct at New York University teaching art history and at Long Island University in Brooklyn teaching visual culture and the Core Seminar.  Her work bridges a connection between social history and art history, and her topics include artists and society during the Great Depression, the influence of Daumier on American artists and images of women workers.  She is continuing research into the art and ideas of the 1930s.