Read from the Editor's Introduction to Nature's Aristocracy: A Plea for the Oppressed by Jennie Collins, edited and with an introduction by Judith A. Ranta:
"Jennie Collins wrote Nature’s Aristocracy; or, Battles and Wounds in Time of Peace: A Plea for the Oppressed at a time when questions about the meaning of work and about relations between labor and capital were being passionately debated. During the headlong postbellum expansion of American industry, people struggled to understand the changing workplace. One journalist wrote in 1869, “It is becoming more and more plain, and being more and more freely admitted, that this fundamental question of the rights of labor, and its just relations to capital, is crowding other issues aside, and, with the financial issue, promises very shortly to usurp the chief and most intense thought of the time” (“Labor Question”).
In response to her era’s tumultuous pressures, Collins created a varied text that can be difficult to categorize because it encompasses multiple genres. On the one hand, it is autobiographical, drawing upon her decades of employment in such working-class occupations as textile mill operative, domestic servant, and garment shop tailoress. Nature’s Aristocracy reflects as well Collins’s achievements as a labor rights orator and activist described by a contemporary as “the chosen champion and apostle of the Eastern Workingwomen” (“Visitors”). The text also includes fictionalized narratives of workers’ experiences, so it occupies a middle ground between fiction and nonfiction. While it is the first attempt by a U.S. author of any class background or gender to produce an extended overview of working-class life, Nature’s Aristocracy appears to have been modified and even distorted in places by its editor, Russell H. Conwell (1843–1925). Nonetheless, animated by a profound concern for the working poor, Collins produced a groundbreaking book on the perennially vexed problem of class in America."
Jennie Collins (1828–87) began working at age fourteen in New England textile mills, where she labored for some years before becoming a domestic servant and later a garment shop seamstress. In the 1860s she began to speak publicly and write about labor causes and women’s rights. In 1870 she left garment shop work and founded Boffin’s Bower, a Boston charity to aid poor and working women. Judith A. Ranta is an independent scholar whose published works include The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker and Women and Children of the Mills: An Annotated Guide to Nineteenth-Century American Textile Factory Literature.
To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Nature's Aristocracy, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Natures-Aristocracy,674196.aspx.
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