What is Brownson’s argument against women factory workers?

Hopefully this can answer your question...

In her first attempt to represent female factory workers to a critical public, Harriet Farley, future editor of the Lowell Offering, attacked Orestes Brownson for his “slander” of working-class women. Brownson, a transcendentalist reformer and 1840 presidential candidate, had published an article warning of the emergence of a debased and exploited working class in America. “The Laboring Classes” was part of a series of controversial articles articulating his electoral platform, and it was to become a well-known analysis of early American industrialism. In the article, Brownson equated independence with an individual’s ownership of the means of production, a cornerstone of American republicanism in the early nineteenth century. He contested the more recent characterization of wage laborers as “free” workers en route to becoming self-employed farmers, craftsmen, or professionals. Challenging this assumption of economic mobility for workers, he asked, “[I]s there a reasonable chance that any considerable portion of the present generation of laborers, shall ever become owners of a sufficient portion of the funds of production, to be able to sustain themselves by laboring on their own capital, that is, as independent laborers?… everybody knows there is not” (371). Without this form of independence, Brownson went on to argue, American workers faced a degradation worse than African American slavery.