John Stuart Mill’s Liberal Political Economy in Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills”

This paper examines how Rebecca Harding Davis’s 1861 story “Life in the Iron Mills” directly engages with the writings of John Stuart Mill, the major political economist of her time. By applying Mill’s arguments about political economy to the cotton and iron manufactories of her hometown of Wheeling, West Virginia, Davis’s story attacks rational views of classical economics to show the danger of ignoring the social and emotional elements of human existence in the pursuit of monetary gain. Such limited vision, she demonstrates in the climactic nighttime visit of the mill owner and his cohorts to the mill, threatens to erase the humanity of both the entrepreneurial and the working classes. Daring to ask the “terrible question” of money, Davis both criticizes the destructive materialist focus of the American Dream and explores the capacities and limitations of women for ameliorating the dehumanizing effects of capitalist industrialism. As no studies have included an extensive critical evaluation of Davis’s realist portrayal of Appalachian industrialism as engagement with the theories of John Stuart Mill, my paper provides new avenues of exploring her fiction as participating in both regional and national economic debates of the time and as establishing the social reform impulse in American women’s writing. Interested in more than the concerns of the domestic space, the traditional subject of women’s writing, Davis questions nineteenth-century industry’s exploitation of natural resources, capitalism’s effects on the character of individuals, and society’s balancing of the necessity for money with the need to promote human sympathy