Waltham-Lowell system

The system used domestic labor, often referred to as mill girls, young women who came to the new textile centers from rural towns to earn more money than they could at home, and to live a cultured life in the city.

The precursor to the Waltham-Lowell system was used in Rhode Island, where British immigrant Samuel Slater set up his first spinning mills in 1793 under the sponsorship of Moses Brown.

Slater had tried to recruit women and children from other areas for the mill, but that fell through due to the close-knit framework of the New England family.

The Boston Associates tried to create a controlled system of labor, unlike the harsh conditions that they observed while in Lancashire, England.

The mill girls lived in company boarding houses and were subject to strict codes of conduct and supervised by older women.

Francis Cabot Lowell died prematurely in 1817, and soon his partners traveled north of Boston to East Chelmsford, Massachusetts, where the large Merrimack River could provide far more power.

It boasted ten textile corporations, all running on the Waltham System and each considerably larger than the Boston Manufacturing Company.

Girls served informally as nurses, moved back to their family farms to help these run, or took other positions that men had left when they joined the army.

[7] The lack of mill girls meant that the owners turned to Irish immigrants, who had arrived in number beginning in the mid-1840s fleeing the Great Famine (1845-1852).

The Irish community developing in Lowell, Massachusetts was not exclusively female, unlike the previous housing of mill girls in dormitories.