In the 1820s, the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, provided the daughters of local farmers a way to contribute to their family incomes and experience some adventure. Soon, however, a slowing economy led to reduced wages, longer hours, and demands for increased productivity. The Lowell workers organized to protest these changes and went on strike several times during the late 1820s and the 1830s. The first selection below is from an 1844 edition of The Lowell Offering, a magazine to which mill workers contributed stories and poems. Factory owners controlled the content of the magazine to ensure an idealized vision of life in the mills. Still, the letter from “Susan” below does highlight the physical toll of industrial labor. Susan was a pseudonym for Harriet Farley, a weaver and the editor of The Lowell Offering. The selection at right is by Harriet Robinson, who entered the mills at age ten in 1834. She published a memoir in 1898 in which she recalls the growing dissatisfaction of the women workers and her critical role in a strike in 1836.
| 11.1 | Letter from a Lowell Factory Worker, 1844 |
It makes my feet ache and swell to stand so much, but I suppose I shall get accustomed to that too. The girls generally wear old shoes about their work, and you know nothing is easier; but they almost all say that when they have worked here a year or two they have to procure shoes a size or two larger than before they came. The right hand, which is the one used in stopping and starting the loom, becomes larger than the left; but in other respects the factory is not detrimental to a young girl’s appearance. Here they look delicate, but not sickly; they laugh at those who are much exposed, and get pretty brown; but I, for one, had rather be brown than pure white. I never saw so many pretty looking girls as there are here. Though the number of men is small in proportion there are many marriages here, and a great deal of courting. I will tell you of this last sometime. . . .
You ask if the work is not disagreeable. Not when one is accustomed to it. It tried my patience sadly at first, and does now when it does not run well; but, in general, I like it very much. It is easy to do, and does not require very violent exertion, as much of our farm work does.
You also ask how I get along with the girls here. Very well indeed.
Source: Harriet Farley, “Letters from Susan, Second Letter,” The Lowell Offering, June 1844, 170–71.
| 11.2 | Harriet Robinson | Reflections on the 1836 Lowell Mills Strike, 1898 |
My own recollection of this first strike (or “turn out” as it was called) is very vivid. I worked in a lower room, where I had heard the proposed strike fully, if not vehemently, discussed; I had been an ardent listener to what was said against this attempt at “oppression” on the part of the corporation, and naturally I took sides with the strikers. When the day came on which the girls were to turn out, those in the upper rooms started first, and so many of them left that our mill was at once shut down. Then, when the girls in my room stood irresolute, uncertain what to do, asking each other, “Would you?” or “Shall we turn out?” and not one of them having the courage to lead off, I, who began to think they would not go out, after all their talk, became impatient, and started on ahead, saying, with childish bravado, “I don’t care what you do, I am going to turn out, whether any one else does or not”; and I marched out, and was followed by the others.
As I looked back at the long line that followed me, I was more proud than I have ever been since at any success I may have achieved, and more proud than I shall ever be again until my own beloved State gives to its women citizens the right of suffrage.
The agent of the corporation where I then worked took some small revenges on the supposed ringleaders; on the principle of sending the weaker to the wall, my mother [a landlady] was turned away from her boarding-house, that functionary saying, “Mrs. Hanson, you could not prevent the older girls from turning out, but your daughter is a child, and her you could control.”
It is hardly necessary to say that so far as results were concerned this strike did no good. The dissatisfaction of the operatives subsided, or burned itself out, and though the authorities did not accede to their demands, the majority returned to their work, and the corporation went on cutting down the wages.
Source: Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle; or, Life among the Early Mill Girls (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1898), 84–86.
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