THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE EARLY FACTORY GIRLS.
When I look back into the factory life of fifty or sixty years ago, I
do not see what is called “a class” of young men and women going to and
from their daily work, like so many ants that cannot be distinguished
one from another; I see them as individuals, with personalities of
their own. This one has about her the atmosphere of her early home.
That one is impelled by a strong and noble purpose. The other,--what
she is, has been an influence for good to me and to all womankind.
Yet they were a class of factory operatives, and were spoken of (as the
same class is spoken of now) as a set of persons who earned their daily
bread, whose condition was fixed, and who must continue to spin and
to weave to the end of their natural existence. Nothing but this was
expected of them, and they were not supposed to be capable of social
or mental improvement. That they could be educated and developed into
something more than mere work-people, was an idea that had not yet
entered the public mind. So little does one class of persons really
know about the thoughts and aspirations of another! It was the good
fortune of these early mill-girls to teach the people of that time that
this sort of labor is not degrading; that the operative is not only
“capable of virtue,” but also capable of self-cultivation.
At the time the Lowell cotton-mills were started, the factory girl was
the lowest among women. In England, and in France particularly, great
injustice had been done to her real character; she was represented
as subjected to influences that could not fail to destroy her purity
and self-respect. In the eyes of her overseer she was but a brute, a
slave, to be beaten, pinched, and pushed about. 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.” At first only a few came;
for, though tempted by the high wages to be regularly paid in “cash,”
there were many who still preferred to go on working at some more
_genteel_ employment at seventy-five cents a week and their board.
But in a short time the prejudice against factory labor wore away, and
the Lowell mills became filled with blooming and energetic New England
women. They were naturally intelligent, had mother-wit, and fell easily
into the ways of their new life. They soon began to associate with
those who formed the community in which they had come to live, and were
invited to their houses. They went to the same church, and sometimes
married into some of the best families. Or if they returned to their
secluded homes again, instead of being looked down upon as “factory
girls” by the squire’s or the lawyer’s family, they were more often
welcomed as coming from the metropolis, bringing new fashions, new
books, and new ideas with them.
In 1831 Lowell was little more than a factory village. Several
corporations were started, and the cotton-mills belonging to them were
building. Help was in great demand; and stories were told all over the
country of the new factory town, and the high wages that were offered
to all classes of work-people,--stories that reached the ears of
mechanics’ and farmers’ sons, and gave new life to lonely and dependent
women in distant towns and farmhouses. Into this Yankee El Dorado,
these needy people began to pour by the various modes of travel known
to those slow old days. The stage-coach and the canal-boat came every
day, always filled with new recruits for this army of useful people.
The mechanic and machinist came, each with his home-made chest of
tools, and oftentimes his wife and little ones. The widow came with her
little flock and her scanty housekeeping goods to open a boarding-house
or variety store, and so provided a home for her fatherless children.
Many farmers’ daughters came to earn money to complete their wedding
outfit, or buy the bride’s share of housekeeping articles.
Women with past histories came, to hide their griefs and their
identity, and to earn an honest living in the “sweat of their brow.”
Single young men came, full of hope and life, to get money for an
education, or to lift the mortgage from the home-farm. Troops of young
girls came by stages and baggage-wagons, men often being employed to go
to other States and to Canada, to collect them at so much a head, and
deliver them at the factories.
A very curious sight these country girls presented to young eyes
accustomed to a more modern style of things. When the large covered
baggage-wagon arrived in front of a block on the corporation, they
would descend from it, dressed in various and outlandish fashions,
and with their arms brimful of bandboxes containing all their worldly
goods. On each of these was sewed a card, on which one could read the
old-fashioned New England name of the owner. And sorrowful enough
they looked, even to the fun-loving child who has lived to tell the
story; for they had all left their pleasant country homes to try their
fortunes in a great manufacturing town, and they were homesick even
before they landed at the doors of their boarding-houses. Years after,
this scene dwelt in my memory; and whenever anyone said anything about
being homesick, there rose before me the picture of a young girl with
a sorrowful face and a big tear in each eye, clambering down the steps
at the rear of a great covered wagon, holding fast to a cloth-covered
bandbox, drawn up at the top with a string, on which was sewed a paper
bearing the name of Plumy Clay!
Some of these girls brought diminutive hair trunks covered with the
skin of calves, spotted in dun and white, even as when they did skip
and play in daisy-blooming meads. And when several of them were set
together in front of one of the blocks, they looked like their living
counterparts, reposing at noontide in the adjacent field. One of this
kind of trunks has been handed down to me as an heirloom. The hair is
worn off in patches; it cannot be invigorated, and it is now become a
hairless heirloom. Within its hide-bound sides are safely stowed away
the love-letters of a past generation,--love-letters that agitated
the hearts of the grandparents of to-day; and I wonder that their
resistless ardor has not long ago burst its wrinkled sides. It is
relegated to distant attics, with its ancient crony, “ye bandbox,” to
enjoy an honored and well-earned repose.
Ah me! when some of us, its contemporaries, are also past our
usefulness, gone clean out of fashion, may we also be as resigned, yea,
as willing, to be laid quietly on some attic shelf!
These country girls had queer names, which added to the singularity of
their appearance. Samantha, Triphena, Plumy, Kezia, Aseneth, Elgardy,
Leafy, Ruhamah, Lovey, Almaretta, Sarepta, and Florilla were among them.
Their dialect was also very peculiar. On the broken English and Scotch
of their ancestors was ingrafted the nasal Yankee twang; so that many
of them, when they had just come _daown_, spoke a language almost
unintelligible. But the severe discipline and ridicule which met them
was as good as a school education, and they were soon taught the “city
way of speaking.”
Their dress was also peculiar, and was of the plainest of homespun,
cut in such an old-fashioned style that each young girl looked as if
she had borrowed her grandmother’s gown. Their only head-covering was
a shawl, which was pinned under the chin; but after the first pay-day,
a “shaker” (or “scooter”) sunbonnet usually replaced this primitive
head-gear of their rural life.
But the early factory girls were not all country girls. There were
others also, who had been taught that “work is no disgrace.” There were
some who came to Lowell solely on account of the social or literary
advantages to be found there. They lived in secluded parts of New
England, where books were scarce, and there was no cultivated society.
They had comfortable homes, and did not perhaps need the _money_ they
would earn; but they longed to see this new “City of Spindles,” of
which they had heard so much from their neighbors and friends, who had
gone there to work.
And the fame of the circulating libraries, that were soon opened, drew
them and kept them there, when no other inducement would have been
sufficient.
The laws relating to women were such, that a husband could claim his
wife wherever he found her, and also the children she was trying to
shield from his influence; and I have seen more than one poor woman
skulk behind her loom or her frame when visitors were approaching the
end of the aisle where she worked. Some of these were known under
assumed names, to prevent their husbands from trusteeing their wages.
It was a very common thing for a male person of a certain kind to
do this, thus depriving his wife of _all_ her wages, perhaps, month
after month. The wages of minor children could be trusteed, unless
the children (being fourteen years of age) were given their time.
Women’s wages were also trusteed for the debts of their husbands, and
children’s for the debts of their parents.
As an instance, my mother had some financial difficulties when I was
fifteen years old, and to save herself and me from annoyance, she gave
me my time. The document reads as follows:--
“Be it known that I, Harriet Hanson, of Lowell, in consideration that
my minor daughter Harriet J. has taken upon herself the whole burden
of her own support, and has undertaken and agreed to maintain herself
henceforward without expense to me, do hereby release and quitclaim
unto her all profits and wages which she may hereafter earn or acquire
by her skill or labor in any occupation,--and do hereby disclaim
all right to collect or interfere with the same. And I do give and
release unto her the absolute control and disposal of her own time
according to her own discretion, without interference from me. It
being understood that I am not to be chargeable hereafter with any
expense on her account.
(Signed) HARRIET HANSON.
_July 2, 1840._”
It must be remembered that at this date woman had no property rights. A
widow could be left without her share of her husband’s (or the family)
property, a legal “incumbrance” to his estate. A father could make his
will without reference to his daughter’s share of the inheritance. He
usually left her a home on the farm as long as she remained single. A
woman was not supposed to be capable of spending her own or of using
other people’s money. In Massachusetts, before 1840, a woman could not
legally be treasurer of her own sewing-society, unless some man were
responsible for her.
The law took no cognizance of woman as a money-spender. She was a ward,
an appendage, a relict. Thus it happened, that if a woman did not
choose to marry, or, when left a widow, to re-marry, she had no choice
but to enter one of the few employments open to her, or to become a
burden on the charity of some relative.
In almost every New England home could be found one or more of these
women, sometimes welcome, more often unwelcome, and leading joyless,
and in many instances unsatisfactory, lives. The cotton-factory was a
great opening to these lonely and dependent women. From a condition
approaching pauperism they were at once placed above want; they could
earn money, and spend it as they pleased; and could gratify their
tastes and desires without restraint, and without rendering an account
to anybody. At last they had found a place in the universe; they were
no longer obliged to finish out their faded lives mere burdens to male
relatives. Even the _time_ of these women was their own, on Sundays and
in the evening after the day’s work was done. For the first time in
this country woman’s labor had a money value. She had become not only
an earner and a producer, but also a spender of money, a recognized
factor in the political economy of her time. And thus a long upward
step in our material civilization was taken; woman had begun to earn
and hold her own money, and through its aid had learned to think and to
act for herself.
Among the older women who sought this new employment were very many
lonely and dependent ones, such as used to be mentioned in old wills
as “incumbrances” and “relicts,” and to whom a chance of earning money
was indeed a new revelation. How well I remember some of these solitary
ones! As a child of eleven years, I often made fun of them--for
children do not see the pathetic side of human life--and imitated their
limp carriage and inelastic gait. I can see them now, even after sixty
years, just as they looked,--depressed, modest, mincing, hardly daring
to look one in the face, so shy and sylvan had been their lives. But
after the first pay-day came, and they felt the jingle of silver in
their pockets, and had begun to feel its mercurial influence, their
bowed heads were lifted, their necks seemed braced with steel, they
looked you in the face, sang blithely among their looms or frames, and
walked with elastic step to and from their work. And when Sunday came,
homespun was no longer their only wear; and how sedately gay in their
new attire they walked to church, and how proudly they dropped their
silver fourpences into the contribution-box! It seemed as if a great
hope impelled them,--the harbinger of the new era that was about to
dawn for them and for all women-kind.
In passing, let me not forget to pay a tribute, also, to those noble
single and widowed women, who are “set solitary in families,” but
whose presence cements the domestic fabric, and whose influence is
unseen and oftentimes unappreciated, until they are taken away and the
integral part of the old home-life begins to crumble.
Except in rare instances, the rights of the early mill-girls were
secure. They were subject to no extortion, if they did extra work
they were always paid in full, and their own account of labor done by
the piece was always accepted. They kept the figures, and were paid
accordingly. This was notably the case with the weavers and drawing-in
girls. Though the hours of labor were long, they were not over-worked;
they were obliged to tend no more looms and frames than they could
easily take care of, and they had plenty of time to sit and rest. I
have known a girl to sit idle twenty or thirty minutes at a time. They
were not driven, and their work-a-day life was made easy. They were
treated with consideration by their employers, and there was a feeling
of respectful equality between them. The most favored of the girls
were sometimes invited to the houses of the dignitaries of the mills,
showing that the line of social division was not rigidly maintained.
Their life in the factory was made pleasant to them. In those
days there was no need of advocating the doctrine of the proper
relation between employer and employed. _Help was too valuable to be
ill-treated._ If these early agents, or overseers, had been disposed
to exercise undue authority, or to establish unjust or arbitrary laws,
the high character of the operatives, and the fact that women employees
were scarce would have prevented it. A certain agent of one of the
first corporations in Lowell (an old sea-captain) said to one of his
boarding-house keepers, “I should like to rule my help as I used to
rule my sailors, but so many of them are women I do not dare to do it.”
The knowledge of the antecedents of these operatives was the safeguard
of their liberties. The majority of them were as well born as their
“overlookers,” if not better; and they were also far better educated.
The agents and overseers were usually married men, with families of
growing sons and daughters. They were members, and sometimes deacons,
of the church, and teachers in the same Sunday-school with the girls
employed under them. They were generally of good morals and temperate
habits, and often exercised a good influence over their help. The
feeling that the agents and overseers were interested in their welfare
caused the girls, in turn, to feel an interest in the work for which
their employers were responsible. The conscientious among them took
as much pride in spinning a smooth thread, drawing in a perfect web,
or in making good cloth, as they would have done if the material had
been for their own wearing. And thus was practised, long before it was
preached, that principle of true political economy,--the just relation,
the mutual interest, that ought to exist between employers and employed.
Those of the mill-girls who had homes generally worked from eight to
ten months in the year; the rest of the time was spent with parents or
friends. A few taught school during the summer months.
When we left the mill, or changed our place of work from one
corporation to another, we were given an “honorable discharge.” Mine,
of which I am still quite proud, is dated the year of my marriage, and
is as follows:--
“HARRIET J. HANSON has been employed in the Boott Cotton Mills, in a
dressing-room, twenty-five months, and is honorably discharged.
(Signed) J. F. TROTT.
LOWELL, _July 25, 1848_.”
The chief characteristics of the early mill-girls may be briefly
mentioned, as showing the material of which this new community of
working-women was composed. Concerning their personal appearance, I
am able to quote from a magazine article written by the poet John G.
Whittier, then a resident of Lowell. He thus describes,--
“THE FACTORY GIRLS OF LOWELL.
“Acres of girlhood, beauty reckoned by the square rod,--or miles by
long measure! the young, the graceful, the gay,--the flowers gathered
from a thousand hillsides and green valleys of New England, fair
unveiled Nuns of Industry, Sisters of Thrift, and are ye not also
Sisters of Charity dispensing comfort and hope and happiness around
many a hearthstone of your native hills, making sad faces cheerful,
and hallowing age and poverty with the sunshine of your youth and
love! Who shall sneer at your calling? Who shall count your vocation
otherwise than noble and ennobling?”
Of their literary and studious habits, Professor A. P. Peabody, of
Harvard University, gives his opinion in an article written not long
ago in the _Atlantic Monthly_. He says, “During the palmy days of _The
Lowell Offering_ I used every winter to lecture for the Lowell Lyceum.
Not amusement, but instruction, was then the lecturer’s aim.... The
Lowell Hall was always crowded, and four-fifths of the audience were
factory-girls. When the lecturer entered, almost every girl had a book
in her hand, and was intent upon it. When he rose, the book was laid
aside, and paper and pencil taken instead; and there were very few who
did not carry home full notes of what they had heard. I have never seen
anywhere so assiduous note-taking. No, not even in a college class, ...
as in that assembly of young women, laboring for their subsistence.”
To introduce a more practical side of their character I will quote an
extract from a letter received not long ago from a gentleman in the
Detroit Public Library, which says, “The factory-girls went to Lowell
from the hills of Vermont when I was a boy, numbers of them from every
town in my county (Windsor); and it was considered something of a
distinction to have worked for ‘the corporation,’ and brought home some
hard cash, which in many and many cases went to help lift a mortgage on
the farm, or to buy something needed for the comfort of the old folks,
or to send a younger brother or sister to the Academy. I knew several
of these girls who brought home purses from Lowell which looked big in
those days, and I recall one who is still living in my native town of
Pomfret.”
It may be added here, that the majority of the mill-girls made just
as good use of their money, so newly earned, and of whose value they
had hitherto known so little. They were necessarily industrious. They
were also frugal and saving. It was their custom on the first day of
every month, after paying their board-bill ($1.25 a week), to put their
wages in the savings-bank. There the money stayed, on interest, until
they withdrew it, to carry home or to use for a special purpose. It is
easy to see how much good this sum would do in a rural community where
money, as a means of exchange, had been scarce. Into the barren homes
many of them had left it went like a quiet stream, carrying with it
beauty and refreshment. The mortgage was lifted from the homestead; the
farmhouse was painted; the barn rebuilt; modern improvements (including
Mrs. Child’s “Frugal Housewife”--the first American cook-book) were
introduced into the mother’s kitchen, and books and newspapers began to
ornament the sitting-room table.
Some of the mill-girls helped maintain widowed mothers, or drunken,
incompetent, or invalid fathers. Many of them educated the younger
children of the family, and young men were sent to college with the
money furnished by the untiring industry of their women relatives.
Indeed, the most prevailing incentive to our labor was to secure the
means of education for some _male_ member of the family. To make a
_gentleman_ of a brother or a son, to give him a college education, was
the dominant thought in the minds of a great many of these provident
mill-girls. I have known more than one to give every cent of her wages,
month after month, to her brother, that he might get the education
necessary to enter some profession. I have known a mother to work
years in this way for her boy. I have known women to educate by their
earnings young men who were not sons or relatives. There are men now
living who were helped to an education by the wages of the early
mill-girls.
In speaking of this subject, Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson says,--
“I think it was the late President Walker who told me that in his
judgment one-quarter of the men in Harvard College were being carried
through by the special self-denial and sacrifices of women. I cannot
answer for the ratio; but I can testify to having been an instance of
this myself, and to having known a never-ending series of such cases
of self-devotion.”
Lowell, in this respect, was indeed a remarkable town, and it might be
said of it, as of Thrums in “Auld Licht Idyls,” “There are scores and
scores of houses in it that have sent their sons to college (by what a
struggle), some to make their way to the front in their professions,
and others, perhaps, despite their broadcloth, never to be a patch upon
their parents.”
The early mill-girls were religious by nature and by Puritan
inheritance, true daughters of those men and women who, as some one has
said, “were as devoted to education as they were to religion;” for they
planted the church and the schoolhouse side by side. On entering the
mill, each one was obliged to sign a “regulation paper” which required
her to attend regularly some place of public worship. They were of many
denominations. In one boarding-house that I knew, there were girls
belonging to eight different religious sects.
In 1843, there were in Lowell fourteen regularly organized religious
societies. Ten of these constituted a “Sabbath School Union,” which
consisted of over five thousand scholars and teachers; three-fourths of
the scholars, and a large proportion of the teachers, were mill-girls.
Once a year, every Fourth of July, this “Sabbath School Union,” each
section, or division, under its own sectarian banner, marched in
procession to the grove on Chapel Hill, where a picnic was held,
with lemonade, and long speeches by the ministers of the different
churches,--speeches which the little boys and girls did not seem to
think were made to be listened to.
The mill-girls went regularly to meeting and “Sabbath-school;” and
every Sunday the streets of Lowell were alive with neatly dressed young
women, going or returning therefrom. Their fine appearance on “the
Sabbath” was often spoken of by strangers visiting Lowell.
Dr. Scoresby, in his “American Factories and their Operatives,” (with
selections from _The Lowell Offering_,) holds up the Lowell mill-girls
to their sister operatives of Bradford, England, as an example of
neatness and good behavior. Indeed, it was a pretty sight to see so
many wide-awake young girls in the bloom of life, clad in their holiday
dresses,--
“Whose delicate feet to the Temple of God,
Seemed to move as if wings had carried them there.”
The morals of these girls were uniformly good. The regulation paper,
before spoken of, required each one to be of good moral character; and
if any one proved to be disreputable, she was very soon turned out
of the mill. Their standard of behavior was high, and the majority
kept aloof from those who were suspected of wrong-doing. They had,
perhaps, less temptation than the working-girls of to-day, since
they were not required to dress beyond their means, and comfortable
homes were provided by their employers, where they could board
cheaply. Their surroundings were pure, and the whole atmosphere of
their boarding-houses was as refined as that of their own homes. They
expected men to treat them with courtesy; they looked forward to
becoming the wives of good men. Their attitude was that of the German
_Fräulein_, who said, “Treat every maiden with respect, for you do not
know whose _wife_ she will be.”
But there were exceptions to the general rule,--just enough to prove
the doctrine of averages; there were girls who came to the mill to work
whom no one knew anything about, but they did not stay long, the life
there being “too clean for them.”
The health of the girls was good. The regularity and simplicity of
their lives, and the plain and substantial food provided for them, kept
them free from illness. From their Puritan ancestry they had inherited
sound bodies and a fair share of endurance. Fevers and similar diseases
were rare among them; they had no time to pet small ailments; the
boarding-house mother was often both nurse and doctor, and so the
physician’s fee was saved. It may be said that, at that time, there was
but one _pathy_ and no “faith cures” nor any “science” to be supported
by the many diseases “that flesh is heir to.”
By reading the weekly newspapers the girls became interested in public
events; they knew all about the Mexican war, and the anti-slavery cause
had its adherents among them. Lectures on the doctrine of Fourier were
read, or listened to, but none of them were “carried away” with the
idea of spending their lives in large “phalansteries,” as they seemed
too much like cotton-factories to be models for their own future
housekeeping.
The Brook Farm experiment was familiar to some of them; but the fault
of this scheme was apparent to the practical ones who foresaw that a
few would have to do all the manual labor and that an undue share would
naturally fall to those who had already contracted the working-habit.
Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, one of the early pioneers of the dress-reform
movement, found followers in Lowell; and parlor meetings were held at
some of the boarding-houses to discuss the feasibility of this great
revolution in the style of woman’s dress. _The Lowell Journal_ of 1850
states that on the Fourth of July a party of “Bloomerites” walked
in the procession through the public streets, and _The London Punch_
embellished its pages with a neat cartoon, a fashion-plate showing the
different styles of the Bloomer costume. This first attempt at a reform
in woman’s dress was ridiculed out of existence by “public opinion;”
but from it has been evolved the modern bicycle costume, now worn by
women cyclers.
It seems to have been the fashion of the mill-girls to appear in
procession on all public occasions. Mr. Cowley, in his “History of
Lowell,” speaks of President Jackson’s visit to that city in 1833. He
says: “On the day the President came, all the lady operatives turned
out to meet him. They walked in procession, like troops of liveried
angels clothed in white [with green-fringed parasols], with cannons
booming, drums beating, banners flying, handkerchiefs waving, etc. The
old hero was not more moved by the bullets that whistled round him
in the battle of New Orleans than by the exhilarating spectacle here
presented, and remarked, ‘They are very pretty women, by the Eternal!’”