American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Along with the house and farm chores many country women still made clothes for their families, at least until ready-made clothing began to penetrate the more remote rural towns by the 1840s. Girls started weaving thread into cloth as early as their fifth year. An older and steadier hand was required to gauge the amount of flax to spin: if too thick, the thread would bunch up; if too thin, it would break. To spin enough for a single square yard of cloth required one full day. Weaving was faster, five or six square, yards a day. Women made sheets, blankets, towels, and rugs as well as the family clothing.

  A farm woman typically was expected to rear six children on a two-and-one-half-year cycle of childbirth from her early twenties to her late thirties. The emotional and physical burden of repeated childbirth overwhelmed many women, resulting in ill health and premature aging if not in death. Although conscious family limitation was occasionally practiced, a historian noted, effective contraception was not available, and “custom, myth, religion, and men” acted to limit birth control. “I would it were not thus,” Millicent Leib Hunt, wife of a prominent Detroit settler, complained on the birth of still another child. “I love my liberty, my ease, my comfort and do not willingly endure the inconveniences and sufferings of pregnancy and childbirth,” but these were “God’s ways” and she reproached herself for daring to complain. Before the birth of each of her five children she expected that either she or the baby—or both—would die.

  Mothers had constantly to confront illness and death in the home. Children by the thousands died in epidemics of scarlet fever, cholera, ague, bilious fevers: the younger they were, the more vulnerable. Of the deaths recorded in South Carolina one year, nearly one-half were children under the age of five, nearly one-fourth children under one year.

  Some women managed to escape all this—at least for a time. The growing factories of the Northeast continued to recruit women. Immigrants and farm girls flocked to Lowell and other mill towns. The work they turned to liberated other women as well, for they could now replace a large part of their labor time with manufactured clothing. Every time a woman left home to work in the mills she expanded both the labor reserve and the market for the specific goods of her industry. Every worker who swelled the ranks of the mill dimmed the prospects of better working conditions or even the success of the whole lot. By the 1840s, the bloom was off the social experiment that was to have been a shining example of the Yankee ideal of profit combined with virtue.

  Alterations in the means and mode of production lay at the root of the change. As the owners faced sharpening competition, the pressure came to be unrelenting, forcing heavier workloads on women who were paid at piece rates. In the 1820s and 1830s, each operator was expected to handle two looms, allowing some relief and rest; later they were compelled to handle three or four. In 1834 the Lowell management, taking advantage of the labor pool, announced a 15 percent wage cut. Hours had always been long; but the speedup combined with wage cuts made conditions in the mills almost intolerable. The women worked amid an infernal racket, in rooms polluted by flying lint particles and fumes from whale-oil lamps and kept oppressively warm and humid because the threads had to be damp to prevent breakage. Although the mill girls had been vaccinated against smallpox, nevertheless typhoid, dysentery, and especially tuberculosis took their toll in the crowded factories.

  As textile operations expanded, the repressive aspects of the old Yankee paternalism persisted while the more personal and benign elements faded. Mill owners could ignore women’s problems of illness, exhaustion, restlessness, simple desire for change, because all knew that many workers would sooner or later be returning to homes elsewhere and would take these sorts of problems back with them. The fact that the owners’ concept of factory labor ultimately turned on the basic premise that they were simply buying one more object—human labor—became increasingly blatant. Stepped-up mechanization and widening routinization within the factories were beginning to produce a class of proletarians far removed from the early image of the happy mill girl.

  Would the mill workers become conscious of their altered status? The historian usually was left to speculate about the “short and simple annals of the poor.” But in this case the factory women left a superb legacy of writings—not only letters and diaries but a “literature of the mill.” The best side of Yankee paternalism—the concern for “enlightening” and “elevating” the mill girl—had a remarkable effect. The night-school classes, Improvement Societies, Lyceum lectures given by Emerson, Everett, Horace Mann, Robert Owen, and other notables, the subscriptions to circulating libraries, even the Sunday-school classes, all helped produce an outpouring of writing in the operatives’ own magazine, the Lowell Offering, and elsewhere. They were exposed to all kinds of socialist, democratic, and Utopian thought, the labor movement, abolition, poverty, budding class consciousness. The editor of the Offering, Harriet Farley, was expected by management to maintain strict neutrality, but the feelings of the mill hands, and especially their rising consciousness of the nature of factory life, burst through.

  Thus a “fictional” account of a mill girl’s first day at work:

  “The next morning she went into the Mill, and at first the sight of so many bands, and wheels, and springs in constant motion, was very frightful. She felt afraid to touch the loom, and she was almost sure she could never learn to weave…the shuttle flew out, and made a new bump on her head; and the first time she tried to spring the lathe, she broke out a quarter of the treads.”

  Letters also revealed feelings.

  “Dear Friend,” wrote a mill worker to a confidante back home, “according to my promise I take my pen in hand to Write to you to let you no that i am A Factory girl and i wish you Was one i dont no But thaire Will be aplace For you in a fortnigh or three Weeks and as Soon as thaire is iwill let you no and as soon as you Can board With me We will have first rate fun getting up mornings in the Snow Storms.…Elisebeth is a lot of hansome fellows here….for pitty Sake dond Show this letter to any body for the girls are talking So that idont no What iWrite.”

  “Dear Harriet,” wrote H. E. Back to a friend in New Hampshire. “With a feeling which you can better imagine than I can describe do I announce to you the horrible tidings that I am once more a factory girl! yes; once more a factory girl, seated in the short attic of a Lowell boarding house with a half dozen of girls seated around me talking and reading.…I almost envy you happy Sundays at home. A feeling of loneliness comes over me when I think of my home, now far away; you remember perhaps how I used to tell you how I spent my hours in the mill—in imagining myself rich and that the rattle of machinery was the rumbling of my charriot wheels but now alas, that happy tact has fled from me and my mind no longer takes such airy and visionary flights for the wings of my imagination have folded themselves to rest.…”

  The writings of the mill girls mirrored their mounting unrest. Their feelings were often too strong for the Offering. An outspoken mill worker, Sarah Bagley, attacked the magazine for accepting corporation subsidies and presenting a rosy picture of life at Lowell. “One would suppose,” she wrote, “that the Lowell mills were filled with farmers’ daughters who could live without labor and who go there merely as a resort for health and recreation, instead of a large portion of poverty’s daughters whose fathers do not possess one foot of land, but work day by day for the bread that feeds their families.”

  Workers complained more and more of the denial of their liberty. “The evils and abuses of the present system of factory labor,” Mehitable Eastman told her fellow workers in 1846, “have accumulated too rapidly to be passed by in silence. I have been employed by a manufacturing company, for eight years,—have been subject to its increasing heartlessness and cruelty, and from bitter experience can affirm that a change cannot be effected too soon.…We have witnessed from time to time the cruelties practiced by brutal Overseers and selfish agents upon defenceless operatives, while they dare not speak in self-defence lest they should be deprived of the means of earning
their daily bread.…”

  A poem, “The Factory Bell,” published in the Factory Girl’s Garland in Exeter, New Hampshire, remarks on the relentless ringing of the factory bell calling the workers, as it sometimes seemed, up to death’s door, which was equated with the factory gate:

  … Sisters, haste, the bell is tolling, Soon will close the dreadful gate.…

  The poem continues with a comment on the relentless ding-dong-ding all day long: bells for meals; bells for return to work; and, finally, “our toil is ended, Joyous bell, good night, good night.”

  Lucy Larcom had loved her factory life at first—“even the familiar, unremitting clatter of the mill, because it indicated that something was going on. I liked to feel the people around me…I felt that I belonged to the world, that there was something for me to do in it, though I had not yet found out what….” But later she would put her feelings about the routine and the crowdedness into verse.

  The persons who uttered their grievances, in prose and poetry, were the more articulate women, potential leaders of their sisters. Much depended on whether the Sarah Bagleys, Lucy Larcoms, and the like could arouse their fellow-operatives to full consciousness of their lack of liberty and equality. And here the owners’ system itself played into the militants’ hands. The homogeneity of the women—the great majority were native-born New Englanders—their segregation from the rest of the population, their closeness in age, their communal housing, and above all their mutual dependence on one another for social and psychological support—all strengthened the bonds of sisterhood. Although this closeness had its drawbacks in lack of privacy and tranquillity, and conformity was often the price of acceptance, “much of our happiness, nay, everything,” as Sarah Bagley said, “depends on our social existence.…Our whole life is interwoven, with each other, in a greater or lesser degree.…”

  The test was whether the rank and file could be organized for economic action. Occasional sporadic strikes broke out. In the winter of 1834, eight hundred of Lowell’s female operatives turned out to protest the 15 percent wage cut. They marched on other mills and held an outdoor rally, to persuade fellow workers to join them. Their statement of principles, headed “UNION IS POWER,” invoked the spirit of our “Patriotic Ancestors” who had preferred privation to bondage, and asserted that the “oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us.” The mill owners were aghast. Describing the strikers’ procession as an “amazonian display,” the agent of the Lawrence Company complained that “a spirit of evil omen” had prevailed over the “friendly and disinterested advice” that had been given by the company to the “girls of the Lawrence mills.” The owners coolly waited, adamant, and the strike spluttered out as women returned to work or left town. Other walkouts were hardly more successful.

  Turning to political action, women mill hands sought to achieve the ten-hour day through state legislation. The leader in this effort, the indefatigable Sarah Bagley, was described as a “fiery and persuasive leader, as effective in a small committee meeting as she was addressing a crowd.” Working closely with other militants such as Mehitable Eastman and Huldah Stone, Bagley founded the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association and soon attracted several hundred members. She edited The Voice of Industry, a labor newspaper originally published by the New England Workingmen’s Association but later purchased by the LFLRA. Hoping to build a united New England labor movement, LFLRA leaders began organizing branches in a half dozen mill towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

  Their main target was the Massachusetts legislature in general and in particular William Schouler, chairman of the Committee on Manufactures. After the LFLRA had collected 2,000 signatures on a petition denouncing working conditions in Lowell and calling for the ten-hour day, Schouler headed an investigating committee that vaguely favored shorter workdays and better ventilation but concluded that “the remedy is not with us. We look for it in the progressive improvement in art and science, in a higher appreciation of man’s destiny, in a less love for money, and a more ardent love for social happiness and intellectual superiority.” When Schouler was beaten for re-election, the LFLRA claimed a victory and moved that the voters of Lowell be formally thanked for consigning Schouler to “the obscurity he so justly deserves.” Schouler then pursued a personal vendetta against Sarah Bagley in his paper, the Lowell Courier.

  The fact that the women had to thank the voters of Lowell betrayed their central political weakness, for it was men they were thanking, men who had the vote. If women had their own concept of liberty—liberty from harsh working conditions, liberty to strike and protest—the political establishment had its concept: liberty of contract. When workers gained a ten-hour law in New Hampshire, the legislature included a free contract exemption at the request of the mill owners, who soon signed up women willing to work twelve hours. In Massachusetts, the indomitable Bagley finally gave up and faded from the labor scene. The Middlesex mills of Lowell again cut wages in 1850, by one-quarter, and this time the employers used the blacklist to punish protesters.

  Factory women turned first to direct economic action, such as strikes, and only then to the political. Middle-class women stressed political action to meet their needs. Above all; leaders among middle- and upper-class women felt keenly their need and right of the ballot. In the heady political days of the mid-1830s, they had begun to organize, starting with charity clubs called “female fragment societies.” Their concerns tended to be more diffuse than those of the mill workers. Education was central, and they were proud of Emma Willard’s achievements in founding in 1821 a model school, the Troy Female Seminary, with a curriculum of science, mathematics, geography, and history said to equal that of the best men’s colleges, and a teacher-training program that was superior. Oberlin began to admit women to higher education in 1833, though this was admittedly to help meet the needs of male scholars for meals and laundry—and for high moral conduct that would shame the male students out of indulging in the depravities of “monastic society.” Middle-class women were also taking the lead in temperance movements, charity issues, and marital rights. But many focused on the two great political issues, slavery and the suffrage.

  When the National Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women met in Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia in the spring of 1838, crowds hostile to the emancipation of slaves and women broke down the doors and set fire to the building. As the flames rose, the mob began to make its way to the home of Lucretia Mott, the demure Quaker preacher who had organized the Philadelphia branch. “I felt at the moment,” she wrote later, “that I was willing to suffer whatever the cause required.”

  Several American antislavery societies sent women as delegates to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in June 1840. The convention refused to seat the women delegates with the men and assigned them seats in the gallery. Lucretia Mott, in her dove-gray coal and white cap, walked down Great Queen Street deploring this segregation arm and arm with another delegate, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a graduate of the Troy Seminary and a young bride of twenty-five, who had come to the convention with her abolitionist husband as part of their honeymoon. The two women agreed to hold a women’s rights convention on their return to America. It was almost eight years before Elizabeth Cady Stanton, by then living in Seneca Falls in upstate New York and feeling rather isolated, had a chance to take up the question with Lucretia Mott, who was attending a Quaker meeting in the area. They agreed to put an advertisement in the Seneca County Courier calling for a “Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious rights of women,” on July 19-20, 1848, in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls.

  It was a faltering start. The chapel was locked when the organizers arrived—only by accident?—and Mrs. Stanton’s nephew had to be boosted through a window to unlock it. The meeting was to be for females only, but forty men turned up with the two hundred and fifty women and had to be admitted. This was just as well, because no woman present quite dared to preside over the meeting and Lucretia Mott’s husband, J
ames, took the chair. Mrs. Stanton gave a maiden speech of ample proportions and noble sentiment.

  In a brilliant stroke, the delegates proclaimed their principles in the form of a new Declaration of Independence for women: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position…to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them.…We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.…The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.”

  Then the list of grievances: man had not permitted woman to vote; had compelled her to submit to laws in the forming of which she had had no voice; had “made her, if married, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead”; had taken from her all right in property; had passed grossly unfair divorce laws; had denied her a college education; had excluded her from the ministry. The convention passed resolutions calling for equal rights in trades, universities, and professions; equality in marriage; equal rights as to property, wages, and children; equal rights to make contracts and to testify in court. But the suffrage? That resolution carried by only a small majority. Lucretia Mott herself dared not support it.

  Other women’s rights conventions followed: Rochester, Akron, Worcester, Syracuse. The journey to the voting booth would take far longer than the most pessimistic leader might have dreamed. Only one woman present at Seneca Falls would vote for President by living long enough to vote in 1920.