Lowell mill girls

During the early period, women came to the mills for various reasons: to help a brother pay for college, for the educational opportunities offered in Lowell, or to earn supplemental income for the family.

Francis Cabot Lowell emphasized the importance of providing housing and a form of education to mirror the boarding schools that were emerging in the 19th century.

The girls created book clubs and published journals such as the Lowell Offering, which provided a literary outlet with stories about life in the mills.

[2] Additionally, the women at the mills faced challenges regarding their new economic independence, as the low wages and great temptations to spend their little money kept them under bondage.

[4] As the "factory system" matured, however, many women joined the broader American labor movement to protest increasingly harsh working conditions.

"[5] In 1845, after a number of protests and strikes, many operatives came together to form the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, the first union of working women in the United States.

[4] In 1821, Francis Cabot Lowell's business associates, looking to expand the Waltham textile operations, purchased land around the Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River in East Chelmsford.

In her autobiography, Harriet Hanson Robinson (who worked in the Lowell mills from 1834 to 1848) suggests that "It was to overcome this prejudice that such high wages had been offered to women that they might be induced to become mill girls, in spite of the opprobrium that still clung to this degrading occupation...."[9] However, in letters written by Mary A. Paul she states that "I expect to be paid about two dollars a week but it will be dearly earned .24" and spends a whole letter discussing the decrease in wages that happened in 1846.

The noise of the machines was described by one worker as "something frightful and infernal", and although the rooms were hot, windows were often kept closed during the summer so that conditions for thread work remained optimal.

"[14] English social theorist Harriet Martineau visited in 1844 with Ralph Waldo Emerson, and her reflection echoed these affirmative sentiments: "I saw no signs of weariness among any of them.

"[15] However, there was concern among many workers that foreign visitors were being presented with a sanitized view of the mills, by textile corporations who were trading on the image of the 'literary operative' to mask the grim realities of factory life.

"Very pretty picture," wrote an operative named Juliana in the Voice of Industry, responding to a rosy account of life and learning in the mills, "but we who work in the factory know the sober reality to be quite another thing altogether."

Defying factory rules, operatives would affix verses to their spinning frames, "to train their memories", and pin up mathematical problems in the rooms where they worked.

("Lectures and Learning", Voice of Industry)[citation needed] The corporations happily publicized the efforts of these "literary mill girls", boasting that they were the "most superior class of factory operative", impressing foreign visitors.

As one operative asked in the Voice, "who, after thirteen hours of steady application to monotonous work, can sit down and apply her mind to deep and long-continued thought?"

Another Lowell operative expressed a similar view: "I well remember the chagrin I often felt when attending lectures, to find myself unable to keep awake...I am sure few possessed a more ardent desire for knowledge than I did, but such was the effect of the long hour system, that my chief delight was, after the evening meal, to place my aching feet in an easy position, and read a novel.

As the magazine grew in popularity, women contributed poems, ballads, essays, and fiction – often using their characters to report on conditions and situations in their lives.

As the economic calamity continued in October 1836, the Directors proposed an additional rent hike to be paid by the textile workers living in the company boarding houses.

[citation needed] Harriet Hanson Robinson, an eleven-year-old doffer at the time of the strike, recalled in her memoirs: "One of the girls stood on a pump and gave vent to the feelings of her companions in a neat speech, declaring that it was their duty to resist all attempts at cutting down the wages.

[citation needed] The sense of community that arose from working and living together contributed directly to the energy and growth of the first union of women workers, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association.

The Association was run completely by the women themselves: they elected their own officers and held their own meetings; they helped organize the city's female workers and set up branches in other mill towns.

Unlike many middle-class women activists, the operatives found considerable support from working-class men who welcomed them into their reform organizations and advocated for their treatment as equals.

[citation needed] One of its first actions was to send petitions signed by thousands of textile workers to the Massachusetts General Court demanding a ten-hour workday.

In response, the Massachusetts Legislature established a committee chaired by William Schouler, Representative from Lowell, to investigate and hold public hearings, during which workers testified about conditions in the factories and the physical demands of their twelve-hour days.

Although the initial push for a ten-hour workday was unsuccessful, the LFLRA continued to grow, affiliating with the New England Workingmen's Association and publishing articles in that organization's Voice of Industry, a pro-labor newspaper.

Unable to recruit enough Yankee women to fill all the new jobs, to supplement the workforce textile managers turned to survivors of the Great Irish Famine who had recently immigrated to the United States in large numbers.

Although large numbers of Irish and French Canadian immigrants moved to Lowell to work in the textile mills, Yankee women still dominated the workforce until the mid-1880s.

Framing their struggle for shorter workdays and better pay as a matter of rights and personal dignity, they sought to place themselves in the larger context of the American Revolution.

In the first of these, subtitled "Factory Life As It Is", the author proclaims "that our rights cannot be trampled upon with impunity; that we WILL not longer submit to that arbitrary power which has for the last ten years been so abundantly exercised over us.

Those who work in the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism.