to Liverpool in 1784, and seized at the Custom House on the ground that
so much cotton could not be produced in America, but must come from
some foreign country, lay the seed of a new movement in labor, in which,
from the beginning, women have taken larger part than men. By 1800
cotton had proved itself a staple for the Southern States, and even the
second war with England hardly hindered the planters. In 1791 two
million pounds had been raised; in 1804 forty-eight million; the
invention of the cotton-gin, in 1793, stimulating to the utmost the
enthusiasm of the South over this new road to fortune.
It is with the birth of the cotton industry that the work and wages of
women begin to take coherent shape; and the history of the new
occupation divides itself roughly into three periods. The first includes
the ten or fifteen years prior to 1790, and may be called the
experimental period; the second covers the time from 1790 to 1811, in
which the spinning-system was established and perfected; and the third
the years immediately following 1814, in which came the introduction of
the power loom and the growth of the modern factory system.
The experimental stage found an enthusiastic worker in the person of
Tench Coxe, known often as the "Father of American Industries," whose
interest in the beginning was philanthropic rather than commercial. Bent
upon employment for idle and destitute workmen, he exhibited in
Philadelphia in 1775 the first spinning-jenny seen in America. He had
already incorporated the "United Company of Philadelphia for Promoting
American Manufactures," and they at once secured the machine and made
ready to operate it. Four hundred women were very speedily at work at
hand spinning and weaving; and though the company presently turned its
attention to woollen fabrics, a large proportion of women was still
employed.
Till the building of the great mill at Waltham, Mass., in which every
form of the improved machinery found place, spinning was the only work
of the factories. All the yarn was sent out among the farmers to be
woven into cloth, the current prices paid for this being from six to
twelve cents a yard. American cotton was poor, and the product of a
quality inferior to the coarsest and heaviest-unbleached of to-day; but
experiment soon altered all this.
To manufacture the raw product in this country was a necessity. For
England this had begun in 1786; but she guarded so jealously all
inventions bearing upon it that none found their way to us. Our
machinery was therefore of the most imperfect order, the work chiefly of
two young Scotch mechanics. In 1788 a company was formed at Providence,
R.I., for making "homespun cloth," their machinery being made in part
from drawings from English models. Carding and roving were all done by
hand labor; and the spinning-frame, with thirty-two spindles, differed
little from a common jenny, and was worked by a crank turned by hand.
Even at this stage England was determined that America should have
neither machinery nor tools, and still held to the act passed in 1789
which enforced a penalty of five hundred pounds for any one who
exported, or tried to export, "blocks, plates, engines, tools, or
utensils used in or which are proper for the preparing or finishing of
the calico, cotton, muslin, or linen printing manufacture, or any part
thereof."
Nothing could have more stimulated American invention; but there were
many struggles before the thought finally came to all interested, that
it might be possible to condense the whole operation with all its
details under one roof,--a project soon carried out.
Thus far all had been tentative; but the building in 1790 at Pawtucket,
R.I., of the first large factory with improved machinery gave the
industry permanent place. Another mill was erected in the same State in
1795, and two more in Massachusetts in 1802 and 1803. In the three
succeeding years ten more were built in Rhode Island and one in
Connecticut, altogether fifteen in number, working about 8,000 spindles
and producing in a year some 300,000 pounds of yarn. At the end of the
year 1809 eighty-seven additional mills had been put up, making about
80,000 spindles in operation. Eight hundred spindles employed forty
persons,--five men and thirty-five women and children.
The first authoritative record as to the progress of the manufacture,
numbers employed, etc., was made in a report to the House of
Representatives in the spring session of 1816. In the previous year
90,000 bales had been manufactured as against 1,000 in 1800. The capital
invested was $40,000, and the relative number of males and females
employed is also recorded,--
Males employed from the age of 17 and upward 10,000
Women and female children 66,000
Boys under 17 years of age 24,000
For these women spinning was the only work. Hand-looms still did all the
weaving, nor was it possible to obtain any plan of the power
looms,--then in use in England, and a recent invention. Another mill had
been built in 1795; and thus the first definite and profitable
occupation for women in this country dates back to the close of the
eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth century, the history of
its phases having been written by Tench Coxe. The village tailoress had
long gone from house to house, earning in the beginning but a shilling a
day, and this sometimes paid in kind; and in towns a dressmaker or
milliner was secure of a livelihood. But work for the many was unknown
outside of household life; and thus wage rates vary with locality, and
are in most cases inferential rather than matter of record.
Cotton would seem, from the beginning of manufacturing interests, to
have monopolized New England; but other industries had been very early
suggested. In May, 1640, the General Court of Massachusetts made an
order for the encouragement by bounties of the manufacture of linen and
woollen as well as cotton. In 1638 a company of Yorkshiremen came over
and settled in Rowley, Mass., where they built the first fulling-mill in
the United States. Fustians and the ordinary homespun cloth were woven;
but few women were employed, the work being far heavier than the weaving
of cotton. It was hoped that broadcloths as good as those imported could
be made; but American wool proved less susceptible of high finish,
though of better wearing quality than the English. Various grades of
cloth, with shawls, were manufactured; but the growth of the industry
was slow, and constantly hampered by heavy duties and much interference.
In 1770 the entire graduating class at Harvard College were dressed in
black broadcloth made in this country, the weaving of which had been
done in families. Yarn was sent to these after the wool had been made
ready in the mills, and the census of the United States for 1810 gives
the number of yards woven in this way as 9,528,266.
What proportion of women were engaged we have no means of knowing; but
the census of 1860 shows that New England had 65 per cent of the total
number then at work. The cotton manufacture had but 38 per cent of males
as against 62 per cent of females; while in woollen, males were 60 per
cent. In New England 10,743 women were in woollen-mills; in the Middle
States, 4,540; and in the South, 689. For the West no returns are given.
Many more would be included in the Southern returns were it not that
most of the weaving is still a home industry, this resulting from the
sparseness and scattered nature of the population.
Knitting formed one of the earliest means of earning for women, the
demand for hose of every description being beyond the power of the
family to supply. Knitting-machines of various orders were in use on the
Continent, and had been brought into England; but any attempt to employ
them here was for a long time unsuccessful. Yarn was spun especially for
this purpose, usually with a double thread, and in the year 1698
Martha's Vineyard exported 9,000 pairs. The German and English settlers
of Pennsylvania brought many handknitting machines with them, and were
rivals of New England; but Virginia led, and the census of 1810 credits
her with over half of the hand-knit pairs exported, Connecticut coming
next. In Pennsylvania the women earned half a crown a pair for the long
hose, and this in the opening of the eighteenth century; and the State
still retains it as a household industry. The percentage for the United
States of women engaged in it by the last census is 61,100.
The early stages of the industry employed very few women, the processes
involving too heavy labor; and out of 159 workers in the first mills,
only eight were women, these being employed in carding and fulling.
According to our last census, 10,743 are employed in New England mills
alone; but the proportion remains far below that of the cotton-mills,
and at many points in the South and remote territories it is still a
household industry in which all share.
Until well on in the nineteenth century the factory and the domestic
system were still interwoven, nor had there been intelligent definition
of the actual meaning of this system until Ure formulated one:--
"The factory system in technology is simply the combined operation
of many orders of work-people in tending with assiduous skill a
series of productive machines, continuously impelled by a central
power."[15]
A central power controlling an army of workers had been the dream of all
mechanicians; and Ure formulated this also:--
"It is the idea of a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical
and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the
production of a common object,--all of them being subordinate to a
self-regulated moving force."
This was the result brought about by the gradual extension of the
factory system. The objections made from the beginning, and still made,
with such answers as experience has suggested, find place later on.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] By Thorold Rogers.
[5] Weeden's Economic and Social History of New England, vol. i. p. 304.
[6] Caulkins, p. 273.
[7] Rider's Book Notes, vol. ii. p. 7.
[8] Boston News-Letter, Jan. 25, 1773.
[9] Boston News-Letter, Jan. 25, 1773.
[10] Barry's Massachusetts, vol. xi. p. 193.
[11] Weeden's Social and Economic History of New England, vol. ii. p.
790.
[12] Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1798-1835, p.
353.
[13] Atlantic Monthly, December, 1883, p. 773.
[14] For further detail, see McMaster's History of the United States,
vol. i. p. 62.
[15] Philosophy of Manufactures, by Andrew Ure, M.D., p. 13.
III.
EARLY ASPECTS OF FACTORY LABOR FOR WOMEN.
Lack not only of machinery but of any facilities for its manufacture
hampered and delayed the progress of the factory movement in the United
States; but these difficulties were at last overcome, and in 1813
Waltham, Mass., saw what is probably the first factory in the world that
combined under one roof every process for converting raw cotton into
finished cloth.
Manufacturing, even when most hampered by the burden of taxation then
imposed and the heavy duties and other restrictions following the long
war, began under happier conditions than have ever been known elsewhere.
Unskilled labor had smallest place, and of this class New England had
for long next to no knowledge. Her workers in the beginning were
recruited from the outlying country; and the women and girls who
flocked into Lowell, as in the earliest years they had flocked into
Pawtucket, were New-Englanders by birth and training. This meant not
only quickness and deftness of handling, but the conscientious filling
of every hour with the utmost work it could be made to hold.
The life of the Lowell factory-girls has full record in the little
magazine called the "Lowell Offering," published by them for many years.
Lucy Larcom has also lately given her "Recollections," one of the most
valuable and characteristic pictures of the life from year to year, and
it tallies with the summary made by Dickens in his "American Notes."
Beginning as a child of eleven, whose business was simply to change
bobbins, she received a wage of one dollar a week, with one dollar and a
quarter for board, the allowance made by most of the corporations while
the system of boarding-houses in connection with the factories lasted.
The oldest corporation, known as the Merrimack, introduced this system,
and for many years retained oversight of all in its employ. With
increasing competition and the increase of the foreign element,
alteration of methods began, and Lowell lost its characteristic
features.
In the beginning the conditions of factory labor for New England at the
point where work was initiated, were, as compared with those of England,
almost idyllic. The Lowell workers came from New England farms, many of
them for the sake of being near libraries and schools, and thus securing
larger opportunities for self-culture.
The agricultural class then outranked merchants and mechanics. There
were no class distinctions, and the workers shared in the best social
life of Lowell. The factory was an episode rather than a career; and the
buildings themselves were kept as clean as the nature of the work
admitted, growing plants filling the windows; and the swift-flowing
Merrimac turning the wheels.
In 1841 the girls had to their credit in the savings-banks established
by the corporations over one hundred thousand dollars; and many of them
shared their earnings with brothers who sought a college education, or
lifted the mortgages on the home farms. At the International Council of
Women, held in Washington in 1888, Mrs. H.H. Robinson, after telling how
she entered the Lowell Mills as a "doffer," when a child, gave a
brilliant description of the intellectual life and interests of the
workers. She remained in the mill till married, and said: "I consider
the Lowell Mills as my _alma mater_, and am as proud of them as most
girls of the colleges in which they have been educated."
With the growth of the factory system under very different conditions
from that of Lowell, there were as different results. Factories had
risen, at every available point in New England, all of them thronged by
women and girls. But great cities were still unknown; and the first
census, that for 1790, showed that hardly four per cent of the people
were in them. The tide set toward the factory towns as strongly as it
now does toward the cities, though factory labor for the most part was
of almost incredible severity. The length of a day's labor varied from
twelve to fifteen hours, the mills of New England running generally
thirteen hours a day the year round. Several mills are on record, the
day in one of which was fourteen hours, and in the other fifteen hours
and ten minutes, this latter being the Eagle Mill at Griswold, Conn.;
and previous to 1858 there were many others where hours were equally
long. Work began at five in the morning, or at some points a little
later; and there is a known instance of a mill in Paterson, N.J., in
which women and children were required to be at work by half-past four
in the morning.
In most of the New England factories, the operatives were taxed for the
support of religion. The Lowell Company dismissed them if often absent
from church, and their lives without and within the factory were
regulated as minutely as if in the cloister. Women and children were
urged on by the cowhide; and the first inspection of the factories,
notably in Connecticut, revealed a state of things hardly less harrowing
than that which had brought about the passage of the first Factory Acts
in England. At the same time wages were very inadequate. In twelve
hours' daily labor the weavers of Baltimore were able to earn from sixty
to seventy cents a day, the wage of the women being half or a third this
amount; and they declared it not enough to pay the expenses of schooling
for the children.
With the increase of production and the growing competition of
manufacturers, wages were steadily forced downward. Less and less
attention was paid to the comfort or well-being of the operatives, and
many factories were unfit working-places for human beings. Overseers,
whose duty it was to keep up the utmost rate of speed, flogged children
brutally; and the treatment was so barbarous that a boy of twelve at
Mendon, Mass., drowned himself to escape factory labor. Windows were
often nailed down, and their raising forbidden even in the hottest
weather.
The most formidable and trustworthy arraignment of these conditions is
to be found in a pamphlet printed in 1834, the full title of which is as
follows: "An Address to the Working-men of New England, on the State of
Education, and on the Condition of the Producing Classes in Europe and
America."
The author of this pamphlet, a mechanic of some education, stirred to
the heart by the abuses he saw, made an exhaustive examination of the
New England mills; and he gives many details of the hours of labor, the
wages of employees, and the abuses of power which he found everywhere
among unscrupulous manufacturers. The principal value of his work lies
in this, and in his reprint of original documents like the "General
Rules of the Lowell Manufacturing Company," and "The Conditions on which
Help is hired by the Cocheco Manufacturing Company, Dover, N.H." These
conditions were so oppressive that in several cases revolt took
place,--usually unsuccessful, as no organization existed among the
women, and they were powerless to effect any marked change for the
better.
By 1835 chiefly the poorer order of workers filled the mills, but even
skilled labor made constant complaint of cruelties and injustices. Not
only were there distressing cases of cruelty to children, but outrage of
every kind had been found to exist among the women workers, whose wage
had been lowered till nearly at the point known to-day as the
subsistence point. Parents then, as now, gave false returns of age, and
caught greedily at the prospect of any earning by their children; and
any specific enactments as to schooling, etc., were still delayed.
These evils were not confined to New England, but existed at every point
where manufacturing was carried on. But New England was first to decide
on the necessity for some organized remonstrance and resistance, and
the first meeting to this end was held in February, 1831. Of this there
is no record; but the second, held in September, 1832, is given in the
first "Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor," issued in 1870.
Boston sent thirty delegates, and the workingmen of New York City
addressed a letter to the workers of the United States, showing that the
same causes of unrest and agitation existed at all points.
"These evils," they said, "arise from the moral obliquity of the
fastidious, and the cupidity of the avaricious. They consist in an
illiberal opinion of the worth and rights of the laboring classes, an
unjust estimation of their moral, physical, and intellectual powers, and
unwise misapprehension of the effects which would result from the
cultivation of their minds and the improvement of their condition, and
an avaricious propensity to avail of their laborious services, at the
lowest possible rate of wages for which they can be induced to work."
The evils protested against here did not lessen as time went on. Irish
emigration had begun in 1836, and speedily drove out American labor,
which was in any case insufficient for the need. A lowered wage was the
immediate consequence, the foreigner having no standard of living that
included more than bare necessaries. At this distance from the struggle
it is easy to see that the new life was educational for the emigrant,
and also forced the American worker into new and often broader channels.
But for those involved such perception was impossible, and the
new-comers were regarded with something like hatred. English and German
emigrants followed, to give place in their turn to the French-Canadian,
who at present in great degree monopolizes the mills.
In the beginning little or no effort was made toward healthful
conditions of work and life, or more than the merest hint of education.
England, in which far worse conditions had existed, had, early in the
century, seen the necessity of remedial legislation. But though the
first English Factory Act was passed in 1802, it was not till 1844 that
women and children were brought under its provisions. The first one,
known as the Health and Morals Act, was the result of the discovery made
first by voluntary, then by appointed inspectors, that neither health
nor morals remained for factory-workers, and that hopeless deterioration
would result unless government interfered at once. Hideous epidemic
diseases, an extinction of any small natural endowment of moral sense,
and a daily life far below that of the brutes, had showed themselves as
industries and the attendant competition developed; and the story in all
its horror may be read in English Bluebooks and the record of government
inspectors, and made accessible in the works of Giffen, Toynbee, Engels,
and other names identified with reform.
The bearing of these acts upon legislation in our country is so strong
that a summary of the chief points must find mention here. In the Act of
1802 the hours of work, which had been from fourteen to sixteen hours a
day, were fixed at twelve. All factories were required to be frequently
whitewashed, and to have a sufficient number of windows, though these
provisions applied only to apprenticed operatives. In 1819 an act
forbade the employment of any child under nine years of age, and in 1825
Saturday was made a half-holiday. Night work was forbidden in 1831, and
for all under eighteen the working day was made twelve hours, with nine
for Saturday.
By 1847 public opinion demanded still more change for the better, and
the day was made ten hours for working women and young persons between
thirteen and eighteen years, though they were allowed to work between
six A.M. and six P.M., with an allowance of an hour and a half at
mealtime. Our own evils, while in many points far less, still were in
the same direction. Here and there a like evasion of responsibility and
of the provisions of the law was to be found. Even when a corps of
inspectors were appointed, they were bribed, hoodwinked, and generally
put off the track, while the provisions in regard to the shielding of
dangerous machinery, cleanliness, etc., were ignored by every possible
method. Were law obeyed and its provisions thoroughly carried out,
English factory operatives would be better protected than those of any
other country, America not accepted. Sanitary conditions are required to
be good. All factories are to be kept clean, as any effluvia arising
from closets, etc., renders the owners liable to a fine. The generation
of gas, dust, etc., must be neutralized by the inventions for this
purpose, so that operatives may not be harmed thereby. Any manufacturer
allowing machinery to remain unprotected is to be prosecuted; and there
are minute regulations forbidding any child or young person to clean or
walk between the fixed and traversing part of any self-acting machine
while in motion. At least two hours must be allowed for meals, nor are
these to be taken in any room where manufacturing is going on.
For this country such provisions were long delayed, nor have we even now
the necessary regulations as to the protection of machinery. In the
early days, though many mills were built by men who sought honestly to
provide their employees with as many alleviations as the nature of the
work admitted, many more were absolutely blind to anything but their own
interest. With the disabilities resulting we are to deal at another
point. It is sufficient to say here, that the struggle for
factory-workers became more and more severe, and has remained so to the
present day.