Instead of hiring children, the Boston Associates developed the “Waltham System” of employing young, unmarried women in their new textile mills.
The first mill operations performed only the task of spinning wool, cotton, and other fibers into thread; soon weaving was also mechanized so that fabric ready to be cut and sewn was manufactured. Note that the workers are all women, supervised by a male foreman.
For a generation after the opening of the Merrimack Manufacturing Company in 1823, the thriving factory towns of Lowell, Chicopee, and Manchester provided the background for a remarkable industrial idyll. Young women came from farms all over New England to work for a year or two in the mills. They were lodged in company boardinghouses, which, like college dormitories, became centers of social life. Unlike modern college dormitories, the boardinghouses were strictly supervised; straitlaced New Englanders did not hesitate to permit their daughters to live in them. The regulations laid down by one company, for example, required that all employees “show that they are penetrated by a laudable love of temperance and virtue.” “Ardent spirits” were banished from company property, and “games of hazard and cards” prohibited. A 10 PM curfew was strictly enforced.
The women earned between $2.50 and $3.25 a week, about half of which went for room and board. Some of the remainder they sent home, the rest (what there was of it) they could spend as they wished.
Most of these young women did not have to support themselves. They worked to save for a trousseau, to help educate a younger brother, or simply for the experience and excitement of meeting new people and escaping the confining environment of the farm. “The feeling that at this new work, the few hours they had of every-day leisure was entirely their own was a satisfaction to them,” one Lowell worker recalled. Anything but an industrial proletariat, they filled the windows of the factories with flowering plants, organized sewing circles, edited their own literary periodicals, and attended lectures on edifying subjects. That such activity was possible on top of a seventy-hour work week is a commentary on both the resiliency of youth and the leisurely pace of these early factories. The English novelist Charles Dickens, though scarcely enchanted by other American ways, was impressed by his visit to Lowell, which he compared most favorably to “those great haunts of misery,” the English manufacturing towns. “They were all well dressed,” he wrote of the workers. “They were healthy in appearance, many of them remarkably so, and had the manners and deportment of young women. . . . The rooms in which they worked were as well ordered as themselves.” Life in the mills was nevertheless demanding. Although they made up 85 percent of the workforce, women were kept out of supervisory positions. In 1834 workers in several mills “turned out” to protest cuts in their wages and a hike in what they paid for board. This work stoppage did not force a reversal of management policy. Another strike two years later in response to a work speedup was somewhat more successful. But when a drop in prices in the 1840s led the owners to introduce new rules designed to increase production, workers lacked the organizational strength to block them. By then young women of the kind that had flocked to the mills in the 1820s and 1830s were beginning to find work as schoolteachers and clerks. Mill owners turned increasingly to Irish immigrants to operate their machines.
World History
