In the 1820s the Lowell Mill system opened in Massachusetts. By the early 1850s, Lowell’s population had swelled to 33,000, of which 10,000 laborers made up the work force in its forty mill buildings. These factories housed 10,000 looms and 320,000 spindles. One of the unique aspects of the Lowell experience was the vision of its founder, Francis Cabot Lowell, and his associates to hire large numbers of young women in the mills. These single women, usually aged fifteen to twenty-five years but some as young as thirteen, came to the mills on a one - to three-year employment before returning home to marry. They lived according to strict regulations that dictated work, residence in boarding houses, and church attendance, rules intended to maintain both the productivity and the morals of the work force. Life for these women was essentially positive, although on several occasions in the 1830s they staged vocal public protests against the reduction in their wages. The selection below is a reflection of one woman’s experience at Lowell. It should be emphasized that she did not mention the unrest but rather focused on the nature of the young women and the opportunities offered to them while employed in the factories. One point of interest was the mention of the visit to Lowell by Charles Dickens, whose observation of its life was a striking contrast to his opinion of contemporary British factory conditions.
...The place was named for Mr. Francis Cabot Lowell, whose improvements of the power-loom were such as to make him practically its inventor, and who was the originator of the cotton cloth manufacture, as now carried on in America. It is interesting to think of the cultured Boston gentleman in the seclusion of the room he had taken for his work, ... perfecting the details of his loom, and at the same time developing plans by which this new branch of industry should be made pleasant and remunerative to his countrymen, but more especially to his countrywomen, whose assistance he looked for in carrying out his project, In this connection arose questions which a man of large-hearted humanity, like Mr. Lowell could not but weigh with utmost care, as they concerned the well-being of those he meant to employ....
Mr. Nathan Appleton, who was closely associated with Mr. Lowell, thus reports the result of their conferences on a point which justly gave them some anxiety.
Here was in New England a fund of labor, well-educated and virtuous. The operatives of in the manufacturing cities of Europe were notoriously of the lowest character for intelligence and morals. The question, therefore, arose, and was deeply considered, whether this degradation was the result of the peculiar occupation, or of other and distinct causes. We could not perceive why this peculiar description of labor should vary, in its effects upon character, from all other occupations. The fund of labor, referred to by Mr. Appleton, meant the younger people of the rural districts, scattered abroad in villages and lonely farmhouses, who were, he says, induced to these mills for a temporary period. They were chiefly the young women of the land, who had been brought up to earn their own living in the fear and love of God, as their fathers and mothers had done before them.... A girl’s opportunities for earning money were few, and the amount received was small for such employments as strawbraiding, binding shoes, and domestic labor. An occupation as easy as any of these, with a larger compensation, could now be offered her, and the project seemed to promise benefit to all concerned, while it would undoubtedly give the business of the country an unprecedented impetus.
.. .It was absurd to think that, as employments, their character could be intrinsically changed by the use of machinery, or by the bringing together of numerous worthy young women form country homesteads to pursue them socially in the mills.
The important thing would be, to keep the surroundings of any community thus formed free from all that could be harmful to personal character, and to leave it open in every direction to pure and healthful influences... his first care was to place such guards around the every-day life of these young countrywomen of his as they would naturally find in their own homes. The corporation boarding system was to be established upon this idea. The houses were to be rented to matrons of assured respectability, many of whom would bring their own daughter with them....
... no immoral person was to be admitted to employment in the mills. In brief, these young girls were to be assured of an unobjectionable occupation, the privileges and wholesome restrictions of home, and a moral atmosphere as clear and bracing as that of the mountains from whose breezy slopes many of them were to come____
The cotton mill itself, as known in this country, was an original idea of Mr. Lowell. In Great Britain, the weaving, spinning, and so forth were done each as a separate business. His plan, adopted everywhere, was to have the raw cotton taken in from the picker on the lower floor of the mill, ascend in regular order through the processes of carding, spinning, and dressing, and come out of the weaving room in the upper story, finished cloth____
My mother’s widowhood was the occasion of her removal to Lowell. Left without any means of maintenance for her large family, she bethought herself of the new manufacturing town... she decided... to go there and take charge of one of the boarding-houses____
A few young girls had followed my mother from our own neighborhood, but the most who lived with us were natives of Vermont or New Hampshire or Maine... there was always a large preponderance in the community of intelligent and interesting young women____
The home life of the mill-girls as I knew it in my mother’s family was nearly like this. Work began at five o’clock on summer mornings and at daylight in the winter. Breakfast was eaten by lamplight, during the cold in winter; in summer an interval of half an hour was allowed for it, between seven and eight o’clock. The time given for the noon meals was between half to three quarters of an hour. The only hours of leisure were from half past seven or eight to ten in the evening, the mills closing a little earlier on Saturdays. It was an imperative regulation that lights should be out at ten. During those two evening hours... they gathered around the tables and sewed, and read, and wrote, and studied... They made and mended all their own clothing—often doing a good deal of unnecessary fancy work besides. They took books from libraries; went to singing-schools, conference meetings, concerts and lectures; watched at night by a sick girl’s bedside, and did double work for her in the mill, if necessary; and on Sundays they were at church, not difference in appearance from other well-dressed and decorous young women. Strangers who had been sitting beside them in a house of worship were often heard to ask, on coming out, But where were the factory-girls?
Lowell was eminently a church-going place.... The mill-girls not only cheerfully paid their pew-rents, but gave their earnings to be built into the walls of new churches, as the population increased. Their contributions to social and foreign charities also were noticeably liberal. What they did for their own families keeping a little sister at school, sending a brother to college, lifting the burden of a homestead debt from a parents old age was done so frequently and so quietly as to pass without comment....
While yet a child, I used to consider it special good fortune that my home was at Lowell. There was a frank friendliness and sincerity in the social atmosphere that wrought upon me unconsciously, and made the place pleasant to live in. People moved about their every-day duties with purpose and zest, and were genuinely interested in one another____
No child was continuously kept at work in the mills. The rule requiring all under thirteen years of age to go to school
Three months in the year was strictly enforced____We were never
Unkindly treated. We had homes and careful guardianship; none of us knew what real poverty meant; and everything about us was educating us to become true children of the republic____
Whatever influence stirred the country deeply, moved us also. In the anti-slavery reform, especially, many were intensely interested. Petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia grew yards in length, as they circulated through the mills. With some of the older ones, the question now and then pressed close, whether it was right to be at work upon the material so entirely the product of slave labor as cotton. But since the cloth woven from it was supposed to worn by the most zealous antislavery agitators, the question was allowed to pass as one too complicated for us to decide____
Lowell was one of the towns a foreign traveler in New England usually visited, as a matter of course. Charles Dickens came there in 1842, and made a report of his observations in the American Notes. The contrast between life in Lowell and in the great manufacturing towns of England he speaks of as the contrast between good and evil, the living light and the deepest shadow... He mentions three things about the mill-girls at Lowell which he thought would strike his countrymen as remarkable: that some of them had pianos in their boarding-houses, that they subscribed to circulating libraries, and that they published
A magazine among themselves, filled with original articles____
Mr. Dickens was pleased with his visit and writes, I solemnly declare that from all the crowd I saw in the different factories that day I cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me
A painful impression____ He afterwards adds a paragraph which
Contains one significant fact in the life of the Lowell mill-girls; there is not manufacturing population in Lowell, so to speak: for these girls come from other States, remain a few years in the mills, and then go home for good.
And so it was. The girls always looked upon their life in
The mills as a temporary one____To the appellation mill-girl, or
Factory-girl, there is no objection, as indicating an occupation for the time being.... The young girls at work in the Lowell
Mills were certainly not a class____ Certainly we mill-girls did
Not regard our own lot as an easy one, but we had accepted its fatigues and discomforts as unavoidable, and could forget them in struggling forward to what was before us. The charm of our life is that it had both outlook and outlet. We trod a path full of commonplace obstructions, but there were no difficulties in it we could not hope to overcome, and the effort to conquer them
Was in itself a pleasure____To be identified with those who have
Won from a commonplace industry the means of making themselves and others happier, wiser, and better is reason for gratitude not unmixed with pride.
Source: ‘‘Among Lowell Mill Girls: A Reminiscence,’’ The Atlantic Monthly (Vol. 48, No. 289, November 1881), 593-612.
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