The Lowell mill girls were young female workers who came to work in textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts during the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The workers initially recruited by the corporations were daughters of New England farmers, typically between the ages of 15 and 35. By 1840, at the height of the Textile Revolution, the Lowell textile mills had recruited over 8,000 workers, with women making up nearly three-quarters of the mill workforce.
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. He also wanted to provide an environment that sharply contrasted the poor conditions of the British mills notoriously portrayed by Dickens. Their wages were only half of what men were paid, yet many women were able to attain economic independence for the first time. The Lowell mill girls earned between three and four dollars per week. The cost of boarding ranged between seventy-five cents to $1.25, giving them the ability to acquire good clothes, books, and savings. 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.
Yet through the Lowell Offering and other reports published around the time, it is demonstrated that the reality of working in the mills was not all rewarding. Though women gained economic independence, it came at various costs. The Lowell mill girls would work 12-14 hours a day in terrible conditions. The factories were dangerous and would put the girls' health in jeopardy. Along with the factories being unsafe, the girls' dormitories were crowded and unsanitary. While the factories had many dangerous aspects, it is hard to view them as completely negative. Along with giving girls the opportunities for financial freedom, it offered education. While working at the factories, education was available to them; they could attend lectures and had access to a library. While the Lowell mills provided new employment and educational opportunities for women, the working conditions were often harsh. When respected figures visited the mills, it was noted that the visitors were only presented with the nicely dressed operatives, while they did not gain a glimpse of the condition of most individuals working at the mills. Both the physical and mental state of workers were negatively impacted, representing the hidden dark realities of the mills. While the employers lived luxuriously, the workers faced an average working life of only three years. The Boston Quarterly Report of 1840 claims that workers were likely better off before beginning their labor at the mills than the condition that they developed during and after starting. Therefore, the poor conditions of those working the mills depict a contrasting mission that Francis Cabot Lowell claimed to pursue. Although he claimed to desire an improvement from the poor conditions of the British mills, he may not have achieved that. Though women particularly were searching for economic freedom, the belief that their quest ended at the Lowell Mills may be contested. There may have been greater economic freedom than before, but it came at the cost of low wages to increase the economic wealth of their employers.The Laboring Classes an Article from the Boston Quarterly Review | Boston B.H. Greene| 1840| Accessed May 2024
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. The culture at the mills was often materialistic. With many shops enticing girls to purchase items and girls persuading each other, women at the mills still were not economically free. They continued to face many voices on how to spend their money. Employers already gave them low wages. With the expectations to quickly spend their money, women have many external voices determining what enters and exits their wallets. Consequently, women at the mills are not reaching the economic freedom that they may have at first sought out for.title = Abby's Year in Lowell, The Lowell Offering| 1841 | E.T Hazeltine, Harvard University - Collection Development Department| Accessed May 2024
Over time, adult women displaced child labor, which an increasing number of factory owners were disinclined to hire. As the "factory system" matured, however, many women joined the broader American labor movement to protest increasingly harsh working conditions. Labor historian Philip Foner observed that "they succeeded in raising serious questions about woman’s so-called ‘place’."
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. The Association adopted a newspaper called the Voice of Industry, in which workers published sharp critiques of the new industrialism. The Voice stood in sharp contrast to other literary magazines published by female operatives.
Industrialization of Lowell
In 1813, businessman Francis Cabot Lowell formed a company, the Boston Manufacturing Company, and built a textile mill next to the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts. Unlike the earlier Rhode Island System, where only carding and spinning were done in a factory while the weaving was often put out to neighboring farms to be done by hand, the Waltham mill was the first integrated mill in the United States, transforming raw cotton into cotton cloth in one building.
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. Incorporated as the Town of Lowell in 1826, by 1840, the textile mills employed almost 8,000 workers — mostly women between the ages of 15 and 35.Robinson, Harriet (1883). "Early Factory Labor in New England", Internet History Sourcebooks Project; retrieved on August 27, 2007.
The "City of Spindles", as Lowell came to be known, quickly became the center of the Industrial Revolution in America. New, large scale machinery, which had come to dominate the production of cloth by 1840, was being rapidly developed in lockstep with the equally new ways of organizing workers for mass production. Together, these mutually reinforcing technological and social changes produced staggering increases: between 1840 and 1860, the number of spindles in use went from 2.25 million to almost 5.25 million; bales of cotton used from 300,000 to nearly 1 million, and the number of workers from 72,000 to nearly 122,000.Lowell (Mass.). Trades and Labor Council,Lowell, A City of Spindles, retrieved on November 8, 2018,
This tremendous growth translated directly into large profits for the textile corporations: between 1846 and 1850, for instance, the dividends of the Boston-based investors, the group of textile companies that founded Lowell, averaged 14% per year. Most corporations recorded similarly high profits during this period.
Work and living environment Contemporary observers thought that by the 1830s, the social position of the factory girls had been degraded considerably in France and England. 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...." 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.
Factory conditions The Lowell System combined large-scale mechanization with an attempt to improve the stature of its female workforce and workers. A few girls who came with their mothers or older sisters were as young as ten years old, some were middle-aged, but the average age was about 24. The very young girls of ages 10–15 were often called "doffers" as they would take off the full bobbins and replace them, otherwise known as doffing. Usually hired for contracts of one year (the average stay was about four years), new employees were given assorted tasks as spare hands and paid a fixed daily wage while more experienced loom operators would be paid by the piece. They were paired with more experienced women, who trained them in the ways of the factory.
Conditions in the Lowell mills were severe and grueling by modern American labor standards. Employees worked long and brutal hours from 5:00 am until 7:00 pm, for an average of 73 hours per week. Even the young girls (or "doffers") were forced to work for an average of 14 hours, with breaks of only 30 minutes for breakfast and 45 minutes for lunch each day. Women worked under these conditions for roughly 8 to 10 months of the year. Each room usually had 80 women working at machines, with two male overseers managing the operation. The noise of the machines was described by one worker as "something frightful and infernal", and despite the heat they generated, windows were often kept closed during the summer to maintain optimal conditions for thread work. The air, meanwhile, was filled with particles of thread and cloth. The mill buildings had minimal safety regulations, allowing for unstable building structures, limited ventilation, hazardous machinery, and overcrowding of rooms, threatening the health and wellbeing of every employee. Women seeking independence were soon facing life-threatening working conditions."A Description of Factory Life by an Associationist in 1846" . Online at the Illinois Labor History Society . Retrieved on August 27, 2007.
Charles Dickens visited in 1842, and remarked favorably on the conditions: "I cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me a painful impression; not one young girl whom, assuming it to be a matter of necessity that she should gain her daily bread by the labour of her hands, I would have removed from those works if I had had the power."Dickens, Charles (1842). American Notes. New York: The Modern Library. . 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. There they sat, row behind row...all wakeful and interested, all well-dressed and ladylike." 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." The "sober reality" was twelve to fourteen hours of dreary, exhausting work, which many workers experienced as hostile to intellectual development.National Council for Historical Education, "New England Mill Girls," https://www.backstoryradio.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2015/02/Mill-Girls-Sources.pdf , accessed November 30, 2018
Living quarters