The model of expansion through replication—many separate mill buildings, controlled by many separate companies—proved something of a dead end. When other companies began to approach and then exceed the size of the Boston Associates network, like the Pennsylvania Railroad, Standard Oil, and U.S. Steel, some experimented with interlocking directorates, but most quickly moved to consolidate corporate control and financial supervision, even with far-flung facilities.32 Organizationally idiosyncratic, nonetheless it was the Waltham-Lowell system that first brought large-scale factories to the United States, and it was that system that until the Civil War represented industrialism in political and cultural discourse, a pole for criticism and, more often, praise of a new type of society.
Factory Girls
“The American factory girl,” declared an 1844 article about Lowell in the New-York Daily Tribune, “is generally the daughter of a farmer, has had a common education at the district school, and has gone into the factory for a few seasons to acquire a little something for a start in life. She spends some weeks or months of every year under her father’s roof, and generally marries and settles in its vicinity. Many attend Lectures and evening schools after the day’s work is over, and of the six thousand more than half regularly occupy and pay for seats in the numerous Churches of Lowell. . . . [H]ardly any where is Temperance more general or are violations of the law less frequent.” The newspaper perhaps painted an overly rosy picture, but its description was basically accurate. It was the character of the Lowell “girls” and their life in the mill town that so impressed visitors from home and abroad and led them to sharply contrast American mills to British ones.33
Frances Lowell and his partners turned to farm girls as a workforce largely out of a lack of alternatives. The Lowell group sought to avoid the social disapproval that accompanied the wholesale employment of children and, in any case, their power looms required considerable strength to operate, necessitating adult operators. Unlike Britain, the United States had neither a surplus of urban male workers nor an overpopulated countryside to draw on. Perhaps in an earlier era slaves might have been used; in the much smaller Southern textile industry, they were used; by one estimate, more than five thousand slaves labored in Southern cotton and woolen mills by 1860. But by the time Lowell built the Waltham mills, slavery was all but over in the North.
Instead, the Waltham-Lowell–style factories found a brilliant solution in the recruitment of young women from rural New England. Unmarried, in their teens and twenties, they provided a well-educated workforce, accustomed to seeing and doing hard work and being subservient to male authority, but not so vital to their families that their withdrawal would create an economic or social crisis. And, to the mill owners’ liking, they were a revolving labor force. When they became unhappy or the mills lacked work, they could return to their families rather than staying nearby and making trouble, avoiding the discontent and disorder that came in England with the creation of a permanent proletariat.34
For these workers, the mills represented an opportunity before marrying to expose themselves to a wider world, while economically helping themselves and their families. Few came from destitute homes, desperate for additional income, as was so commonly the case in Great Britain. Rather, they typically came from middling families, daughters of farmers or rural artisans. But money did play a big part in why they came. Typically, they kept their earnings, using them to buy clothes, accumulate a dowry, save money for normal school, or to set themselves up independently from their families. Many also sent money home, to help pay off a farm mortgage or family debts, to support a widowed mother, or to pay for a brother’s education. A big attraction of the Waltham-Lowell–style mills was that they paid cash, not credit at a company store, like many of the Rhode Island–style mills. At the time, women had few other ways to make money, except domestic service (which many New Englanders rejected as subservient), schoolteaching (more seasonal than factory labor), or seamstressing.
But money was not the whole story. The mills also provided an escape from families, rural life, boredom, and isolation, a chance to experience a new, more cosmopolitan world of independent living, consumer goods, and intense sociability. Earning their own living gave women a sense of independence and relieved their parents of a burden. Ironically, the mills themselves made redundant one of the main contributions young women had made to the family economy, spinning yarn and weaving cloth at home for family use or for the market.35
There were other components of the mill workforce besides young women. Especially in the early days, there was a strict sexual division of labor. Women held almost all the jobs operating machinery, except for picking and carding. Men did all the construction, maintenance, and repair work and held all the supervisory positions. In addition, the mills recruited skilled male workers from England and Scotland for specialized jobs for which there was no pool of qualified native workers, including calico printing and producing woolens. A small number of children worked in the mills, too (though the Lowell mills generally did not hire anyone under age fifteen), as did a few older, married women. The Hamilton Manufacturing Company was probably typical in 1836, with women making up 85 percent of its workforce. Over time, the percentage of female workers dropped, at least modestly. In 1857, excluding the all-male Lowell Machine Shop, the Lowell textile workforce as a whole was a bit over 70 percent female.36
The Lowell-style mills rarely had to advertise for workers. Young women—a sample of Hamilton workers found their average age on hiring just under twenty—came on their own after hearing about the mills, often joining or sending for sisters, cousins, or friends. The Lowell Offering, a magazine of poetry and fiction by mill workers, not only received extensive praise from visitors, it also served as a form of job advertising for the companies (which quietly subsidized it). When nearby hinterlands became tapped out of workers, the mills sent recruiters to scour the more distant countryside, bringing back their finds on wagons before railroads eased transportation.37 Female mill workers typically had a relatively short tenure. Most estimates agree that women stayed on average something like four or five years, commonly returning home for stretches while employed.38
From the start, mill owners calculated that parents would allow their daughters to live on their own and work in the mills only if they were assured of their safety and well-being. For the mills “To obtain their constant importation of female hands from the country,” wrote the Burlington [Vermont] Free Press in 1845, “it is necessary to secure the moral protection of their characters while they are resident in Lowell.” To that end, the companies established what the paper termed a system of “moral police.” Elaborate company rules regulated workers off the job as well as on. The Middlesex Company declared that it would “not employ any one who is habitually absent from public worship on the Sabbath, or whose habits are not regular and correct.” Workers were forbidden from smoking or using any kind of “ardent spirit” in the mills and were generally required to live in company-owned boardinghouses unless they had family living nearby. The boardinghouses, in turn, had their own sets of rules, including a ten o’clock curfew and, in at least one case, the requirement that all residents be vaccinated for smallpox (which the company agreed to pay for). The matrons who ran the boardinghouses had to report rules violators, who could be fired. Companies required workers to sign one-year contracts and give two weeks’ notice before quitting. They circulated among themselves lists of workers who had been discharged or who had quit before the end of their contracts, whom they agreed not to hire, and imposed fines for lateness and poor-quality work.39
Company paternalism was not simply regulatory or punitive; especially in the early years the companies tried to make the mills attractive places to work and the mill towns attractive places to live. Lowell was carefully laid out, with trees lining its broad streets and an orderly placement of the mills, boardinghouses, and commercial structures. Companies planted trees and put in flower beds around their buildings and in th
eir mill yards and allowed workers to grow plants and flowers on windowsills inside the factories. One newly arrived worker in Manchester, impressed by the brick houses and “very handsome streets,” wrote her sister that she thought it “a beautiful place.” The sociability of the mill towns, especially Lowell, with its lectures and literary societies, was widely praised, though also somewhat exaggerated, since, given the very long hours of work, workers had limited time for other activities. Still, cities like Lowell and Manchester looked and felt very different than the crowded, filthy, impoverished English textile centers like Wigan, Bolton, and the namesake Manchester.40
The experience of working in a factory and living in a factory town transformed the women who flocked to Lowell, Manchester, Chicopee, and the like. Augusta Worthen, two of whose sisters had worked in Lowell, later recalled that the young women from her town, Sutton, New Hampshire (population 1,424 in 1830), who traveled to take jobs in Lowell or Nashua had “a chance to behold other towns and places, and see more of the world than most of the generation had ever been able to see. They went in their plain, country-made clothes, and after working several months, would come for a visit, or perhaps to be married, in their tasteful city dresses, and with more money in their pockets than they had ever owned before.” For one group in particular, mill work could be utterly altering, widows and older unmarried women, dependent on their relatives for support. Mill worker Harriet Robinson later remembered them “depressed, modest, mincing, hardly daring to look one in the face. . . . But after the first pay-day came, and they felt the jingle of silver in their pocket 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.”
Many mill workers returned to their hometowns to marry, sometimes settling down to farm lives much like those of their parents. But a detailed study, by historian Thomas Dublin, of women who had worked for Hamilton Manufacturing found that they typically married at a somewhat later age than women from their hometowns who had not gone to a mill, were far less likely to marry a farmer, and were more likely to settle down in a city, with quite a few staying in Lowell after marrying. Although the New England countryside itself was changing, with improvements in transportation and the spread of commercial relations, for young workers the mill experience accelerated the transition out of a world of semi-subsistence agriculture into an emerging commercial society. Even those women who settled back home were never quite the same as those who never left.41
Unlike British textile workers, the young women who flocked to the New England mills left behind a veritable flood of words. Almost all literate, they kept diaries, wrote letters back home and to one another, contributed to The Lowell Offering, its successor, The New England Offering, and labor papers like The Voice of Industry, and, in a few cases, wrote memoirs or autobiographies. In their letters, money is discussed frequently: wage rates, how much could be earned in alternative types of employment, expenses, and so on. Work itself does not figure as strongly as activities outside of work, family news, or religion. There are very occasional comments on the pace of work, but surprisingly little description of the mills. Social life and saving money—the reasons why so many workers left their homes—remain at the forefront, while work tasks and the factories in which they occurred seemed to have been taken for granted.42
Perhaps one reason was that, at least in the first decades, mill workers generally did not consider their labor especially arduous. “Many of the girls who come to Lowell, from the country,” an 1843 editorial in The Lowell Offering noted, “have been taught by their good mothers that industry is the first of virtues.” Responding to claims about the unhealthful effects of factory labor, the editorial declared mill work “light—were it not so there would not be so many hurrying from their country homes to get rid of milking cows, washing floors, and other such healthy employments.”
Just as in England, often new hires walking into a mill for the first time found the noise and motion of the machinery overwhelming, the experience of sharing a huge work space with scores of others disorienting, and the tasks tiring. But acclimation usually followed. Though the intensity of jobs varied considerably, at least in the early years, when the companies were still perfecting machinery and operations and profits were high, many jobs were not especially taxing. In the spinning and weaving rooms, workers often had stretches of free time while they monitored equipment, waiting for a thread to break or a bobbin to need replacing, in some case defying rules to read or socialize.43
But the work was work. In a review of Dickens’s American Notes, The Lowell Offering quoted approvingly his comment about the “Lowell operatives” that “It is their station to work. And they do work. . . . upon an average, twelve hours a day; which is unquestionably work, and pretty tight work too.” Repetitive actions over the long days brought boredom and fatigue. The air in the mills was often foul, especially during the winter when candles and lamps were needed for light, and the noise could become oppressive. Often it was too hot or too cold. And many workers resented the tight regulation of their lives, what some came to call “factory tyranny.”44
Mill town life also had its downside. Some newcomers found being surrounded by so many other people, after having spent their lives on isolated farms or in small villages, disconcerting. The boardinghouses were crowded, with four to six women sharing each bedroom (two to a bed), affording little privacy (though that was nothing new for those who had grown up in large New England farm families, crammed into close quarters). But the opportunities for richer social, intellectual, and religious life than possible in their hometowns—and to make money—seemed to outweigh the challenges of urbanity for most of the newcomers.45
Conditions, however, were not static; they deteriorated over time. An extended burst of mill building—both of the Slater and Lowell types—began narrowing the gap between supply and demand for cloth. By 1832, some five hundred cotton mills operated in New England alone. To keep up dividends in the face of growing competition and falling prices, the Boston-based corporations sought to cut costs. Payroll was not necessarily their biggest expense. In some years, companies paid more for raw cotton than for the labor to convert it into cloth. But it was an expense over which they had control.46
Companies reduced labor costs in multiple ways. Sometimes they simply lowered wage rates, which for many workers were piece rates. In March 1840, for example, the directors of Merrimack Manufacturing voted “That in consequence of the depression of the times a reduction of the wages of the operatives is indispensable,” authorizing the company treasurer to cut wages “to the point that they may be deemed expedient & practicable.” The companies also began running machinery at higher speeds, taking advantage of technical improvements in shafting and equipment. And they began assigning spinners and weavers more machines to monitor. Whereas once a weaver might have been assigned one or two looms, by the 1850s it was common to assign three or four. As output—and the strain of work—went up, piece rates were reduced, so that wages rose at most modestly. A study of four Lowell-style mills in northern New England found that between 1836 and 1850 productivity increased by almost a half, while wages went up only 4 percent.47
In the 1830s, in response to wage cuts, a few dramatic if brief flashes of protest occurred. They came at a moment of increasing labor organization nationally, as a language and politics of worker mobilization emerged. An announcement by the Lowell mills in early 1834 of a forthcoming 12½ percent wage cut set off a wave of meetings, petitions, and agitation, seeking to reverse the decision. When a mill agent fired a leader of the protest, other workers walked out with her, parading the streets and visiting other mills, calling for their employees to walk out, too. Some eight hundred women joined the “turnout.” But it was short-lived and unsuccessful. Within less than a week the strikers had either returned to their jobs or quit them, and the wage redu
ction went through as planned.
Two years later, 1,500 to 2,000 workers took part in a much better organized turnout, protesting a hike in the price of room and board in the company boardinghouses, effectively another wage cut. At some mills, the walkout lasted for weeks, with at least one company having to shut down a mill, consolidating its nonstriking workers in its others to keep production going. A newly formed Factory Girls’ Association, with a reported 2,500 members, coordinated the strike. Though the exact outcome remains unclear, at least some mills partially or fully rescinded the increase.48
These were not the first mill worker strikes; there had been earlier, brief walkouts in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Waltham and Dover, Massachusetts. But the Lowell walkouts were bigger and carried more symbolic weight because they took place in the most celebrated factory town in the nation. Also, though the organized labor movement in the United States had been developing in fits and starts since soon after the Revolution, walkouts by women and factory workers were still a novelty.
In other ways, though, the Lowell strikes fit a national pattern, in which the language of republicanism and the spirit of the Revolution were invoked to mobilize workers against what was seen as an emerging tyranny of economic power. “We circulate this paper,” read one petition circulated during the 1834 strike, “wishing to obtain the names of all who imbibe the spirit of our Patriotic Ancestors, who preferred privation to bondage. . . . The oppressing hand of avarice would enslave. . . . [A]s we are free, we would remain in possession of what kind Providence has bestowed upon us, and remain daughters of freemen still.” Strikers saw wage reductions and the power to impose them as not just a menace to their economic well-being but also to their independence and respectability, threatening to reduce them to the opposite of freemen—or daughters of freemen—slaves. Just as in England, workers feared that the mill might not be a source of freedom but of its opposite. During the 1836 walkout, strikers walking in procession down the Lowell streets sang:
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