Another old written thing

Only about ten or so minutes before I head off for the night, so no real blog post. However, I will leave you with another one of my old papers to read should you people feel the need. This time, it's on the 19th century mill systems of New England. I know, extremely exciting, huh?

New England is known for many things, one of them being the early industrial cities. Cities like Lowell, Massachusetts, Manchester, New Hampshire, and Saco, Maine. These cities were home to the massive textile mills that drove the New England economy, politics, and life throughout the 1800’s. These mills had, and continue to have an impact of the lives of the people that live near them. Perhaps the largest impact these mills had upon American life was being a catalyst to the creation of what would become the women’s movement. These mills were this catalyst because of an idea held by the man that brought the machinery to the United States in the first place, Francis Cabot Lowell. His idea became known as the Lowell System, and it is a major factor behind the empowerment of women.

Perhaps I should begin with an explanation as to what the Lowell System was. The Lowell System, named after the industrialist Francis Cabot Lowell, was a manufacturing process that depended on standardization and mechanization of machinery run by women, who could be paid less than male laborers. The system reportedly increased efficiency, productivity, and most importantly, profit. This success made the Lowell system become the basis for which all manufactories in New England and the northeast worked off of. To keep the mills running, thousands of daughters of New England farmers moved to mill towns and lived in communities completely owned and operated by the companies. To placate the fathers of the mill girls, who found women working immoral, factory owners emphasized the maintenance of a proper environment: they enforced strict curfews, mandatory church attendance, gave their workers with a healthy diet, and kept the factories as clean as possible. The effort of the companies paid off; the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts were clean, the women’s dormitories were kept well and were superior to others, and wages were good when juxtaposed to other working wages of the day. The System was quickly successful in garnering interest from the local population. The transition from farm life to the tedium of factory work was difficult for the girls and the competition in the industry made the higher standards hard to maintain and by the 1850’s the Lowell System was done away with in favor of cheaper Irish immigrant workers.

The girls that worked at the Lowell mills ran the gamut from as young as ten and up through middle age, with the average being from sixteen to twenty-five. They came from as far away as Canada for the promise of high wages and high standard of living. The youngest and the smallest were used as doffers. A doffer, or mite, had the job of running from machine to machine, removing empty spools and the filled bobbins. A former doffer recollected on her job.

[I can see myself now, racing down the alley, between the spinning frames, carrying in front of me a bobbin box bigger than I was. These mites had to be swift…so as not to keep the spinning frames stopped long, and they worked only about fifteen minutes every hour. The rest of the time was their own, and when the overseer was kind they were allowed to read, knit or even to go outside the mill-yard to play.]

Older women held the myriad other jobs at the mills. Carding; combing the fibers and aligning them into a string called a sliver. Spinning; Twisting and drawing out the slivers to create yarn. Warping; gathered yarn from bobbins and winding them together on a reel or a spool. Weaving; crossing the threads onto a loom to create the finished cloth. It was weaving was the possibly the most desired position in the mills. It was among the highest paid and the most well respected of the positions. It was common for weavers to pose with their shuttles when taking a photograph as a means to show their status and position.

The women in the mills had much of their time scheduled for them. Most of the time they spent working at their machines, from 6:30 in the morning until 6: 30 at night, except for Saturdays when they would ring out earlier, usually from 3:00 pm through 5:00 pm. On Sundays, church attendance was mandatory. In the summer months, some of the workers would return home to live with family or friends. Free time, when available, was spent teaching the younger child laborers, or through leisure activities such as reading and knitting. The length of the work schedule was considered tyrannical and met with resistance from the workers. One woman from Lowell wrote in 1841:

[I am going home, where I shall not be obliged to rise so early in the morning, nor be dragged about by the factory bell…Up before day at the clang of the bell…and at work in obedience to that ding-dong of a bell.]

This type of resistance is what kept the girls from remaining at one mill for very long. Most did not last more than a year of employment before leaving. Many other would come to take their place within a short period of time.

The companies using the Lowell System insisted on building company run boarding houses for their workers to live in. This made for almost entire communities populated by women. This was remarked upon by John Greenleaf Whittier, who characterized the city of Lowell as “Acres of Girlhood, beauty reckoned by the square mile.” The boarding house system was actually favored by the working women. The boardinghouse life fostered a sense of community amongst the workers. It was most likely through social pressure of living in such close quarters, rather than strict rules, which maintained order in the communities. These rules were often broken by the more independently minded workers. The rooms the women lived in were cramped, at best. A description of the inside of the large mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, was written in a letter home from a worker

[Imagine to yourselves a girl just entered her twenty-fifth year seated at a small light-stand with writing utensils before her and endeavoring to write a few of her uppermost thoughts near a window that overlooks the principal street in Lawrence in the fourth story of a long brick factory boarding block, with ten beds situated on the east side of the room with a lot of old dresses & skirts hung up behind them & some where in the vicinity of six trunks on the west & south side of the room & a closet filled to overflowing say nothing about the band boxes & carpet bags these with a couple of looking glasses and a chair comprise the contents that contains your daughter & sister]

There were reasons that many girls left their homes to work under the employ of the mills. One of the most important reasons was economical. The mill girls earned, on average, between $2.50 and $3 per week. This small amount of money was the first real wage cash wage earned by females workers. The ability to purchase gave the young women a sense of empowerment that had not been felt before. The lure of making money on a person own was a great one and brought many of the independent farm girls from their homes and families.

Relocating to an industrious city like Lowell was also seen as the girls only escape from the isolated farm life and parental control exerted over them at home. The farm girls had, in reality, only one option available to them on the farms, that of a domestic servant. The city, however, offered them the opportunity and prospect of adventure and excitement. A common sentiment towards farm life is example in a letter from Sally Rice to her home in Vermont, in 1839:

[No one knows how much I suffered the ten weeks that I was at home. I never can be happy there in among so many mountains…and as for mayyring(sic) and settling in that wilderness I wont, and if a person ever expects to take comfort it is while they are young I feel so.]

Another, more open, rejection of farm life came in an 1858 article entitled “Farming in New England”.

[The most intelligent and enterprising of the farers’ daughters become school-teachers, or tenders of shops, or factory girls. They contemn the calling of their father, and will nine times out of ten, marry a mechanic in preference to a farmer. They know that marrying a farmer is serious business. They remember their worn-out mothers.]

As can be seen by the feelings of the mill girls, leaving the farm just for the sake of leaving the farm was a major influence on why they would leave to work in the city mills.

The high to tyrannical pressures put upon the mill girls would not last. The communities of workers, empowered by their numbers and independence, as well as being boosted by the solidarity of their close knit society began to organize into unions for better treatment. An economic panic in 1834 brought about a twenty-five percent wage cut. This wage cut was the catalyst in the formation of the Factory Girls Association an early union for the mills. The girls of the mills immediately went on strike. One sixth of the woman workers of Lowell turned out for the mass protest. The operatives of the strikers made three demands. According to the Boston Evening Transcript, they were as follows:

[Resolved, that we will not go back into the mills to work unless our wages are continued…as they have been.
Resolved, that none of us will go back, unless they receive us all at one.
Resolved, that if any have not money enough to carry them home they shall be supplied]

The strike itself was a failure, by the next week the mills were running at near capacity. The greater impact of the strike was the fact that the operatives were women. This kind of solidarity in the face of a not only a large company, but a male dominated enterprise, would lay the foundation for later unionization and unrest.

A serious depression in 1837 put an end to the first period of labor struggle for the mills. A new labor movement grew in Lowell between 1843 and 1848 as the economy grew and the treatment of workers was seen less as a necessity for the times. A series of experiments were made by the companies to determine the maximum amount of work a single worker could handle. These experiments eventually left an individual working at four looms at the same time and making the same wages as before. Small victories against the “stretching-out” as it was called, spurred the women’s movement onward to fighting for a much greater prize, the ten hour workday. Having learned from the operatives of a decade prior, and with state-wide support from other workers seeking the same, the work day was shortened to ten hours. The shorter work day was an important immediate victory for the workers, but the other result was far more encompassing to the later lives of the women.

The solidarity of women gained by closed society living, a taste of economic independence, and the labor movements of the 1830’s and 40’s brought a change. Women were beginning to feel, and were, empowered. They, through numbers, hard work, and determination, banded together and formed a group that could get them the power that they wanted. Later decades would see the spirit of the mill girls come to light in other areas. The woman’s suffrage movement had its roots back in the strike workers in the shadows of the mills. The woman’s liberation and equality movements look back to those mill girls as their precursors. Without the Lowell System to bring them together and subsequently exploit them, the changes and reform for women would have been pushed back decades, if it would have happened at all. Truthfully, the mill yards of New England had a great impact on the country economically, but their impact on this country can be seen far more not on the dollar, but on our society itself. With the development of the mills, came the development of woman’s equality.