Struggle for Equal Work
The development of the Lowell Mills in the 1820s provided American women with their first opportunity to work outside the home with reasonable wages and relatively safe work. About ten years later however, working in the mills wasn’t the same. Working conditions became more vigorous, the mills were unsafe and the pay received didn’t match the amount of work done.
The Lowell family’s textile mills were set up to attract the unmarried daughters of farm families, hoping that they would work a few years before getting married. These young women were called “Lowell Mill Girls.” A typical working day in the mills started with a factory bell ringing at about four in the morning to wake up employees. After this, employees had to be at the mills in an hour and work until late in the evening. This would sometimes lead to 12-14 hour days. Often times, women were expected to tend about three or four machines at the same. It was a lot of work, but at the time the pay offered was the highest wage available. In the 1830s, wages ranged from $.44 to $1.58 per day, depending on the speed and skill of the worker. This was about half the amount paid to the male mill worker.
The air in the mills was not circulated causing it to become very hot in the summer and extremely cold in the winter. Company supervisors believed that opening any windows would cause threads to break more often so they chose to leave windows shut tight at all times. This is an example of how product...
What would one expect to be the sentiment of a young women who worked in the Lowell textile mills? It is just such a depressing story; and the sad heroines are the young women of Lowell - Lucy Larcom- who Stephen Yafa portrays in his excerpt “Camelot on the Merrimack.” A perception through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old Lucy Larcom reveals that, “For her and the other young girls, the long and tedious hours they spent tending to demanding machines robbed them of their childhood.” The imagery in “Camelot on the Merrimack,” from Big Cotton by Stephen H. Yafa disclose the working conditions in those sordid mills.
A multitude of mills going up created back water which hindered the mill’s wheels from turning more freely, but with more competitors came more jobs to the area. In addition to more work came the need for more workers. Francis Lowell of Massachusetts decided to make a wholesome atmosphere to attract young country women to his mill to work. He offered wholesome living with room and board, decent pay, strict rules, and curfews to enforce the safety of the girls that worked for him. These workers came to be known as the “Lowell girls”.
Women of the nineteenth century had very set expectations. There were only two types of women: upper class bourgeoisie and lower class farmer’s wives or daughters. Women were considered physically weaker to men, which meant that they were best suited to the domestic sphere while the men workers and made the money. The mill girls defied all of this, and created their own class of women: wage earning middle class women. These women were not like farmers’ wives that were typically uneducated, nor like the bourgeoisie women that were educated, by mostly in domestic and “womanly” skills. The mill girls went to college if they so desired, most of the time doing that in the stead of getting married and becoming a housewife. The mill girls were a
Kelley then uses the example of a 13-year-old girl from Pennsylvania. She calls the workers “breadwinners” (12) and then says that the largest number of these breadwinners were young females. This shows that the young women are working intensively and are the income of their families. Also, in the previously stated quote (“Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy.
In the late nineteenth century, many European immigrants traveled to the United States in search of a better life and good fortune. The unskilled industries of the Eastern United States eagerly employed these men who were willing to work long hours for low wages just to earn their food and board. Among the most heavily recruiting industries were the railroads and the steel mills of Western Pennsylvania. Particularly in the steel mills, the working conditions for these immigrants were very dangerous. Many men lost their lives to these giant steel-making machines. The immigrants suffered the most and also worked the most hours for the least amount of money. Living conditions were also poor, and often these immigrants would barely have enough money and time to do anything but work, eat, and sleep. There was also a continuous struggle between the workers and the owners of the mills, the capitalists. The capitalists were a very small, elite group of rich men who held most of the wealth in their industries. Strikes broke out often, some ending in violence and death. Many workers had no political freedom or even a voice in the company that employed them. However, through all of these hardships, the immigrants continued their struggle for a better life.
As many women took on a domestic role during this era, by the turn of the century women were certainly not strangers to the work force. As the developing American nation altered the lives of its citizens, both men and women found themselves struggling economically and migrated into cities to find work in the emerging industrialized labor movement . Ho...
Weiner, Lynn Y. From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820-1980. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 1985.
Factory workers of this time had very little freedom. Aside from having to work outrageous hours for 6 days of the week, there was no job security, no solid way to survive day-to-day, and if a family member were to suffer an accident, families had no financial means to carry on. In the early 1900s, there were no labor laws, including the right to organize, an eight-hour day, safety standards, or unemployment/disability pensions. M...
The mills filled with girls from smaller towns who had good country morals and stayed away from the unpleasant urban conditions. These women workers were given the name mills girls. In 1836, Lowell boasted twenty mills with 6,000 workers: 85 percent of Lowell's labor force consisted of single women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine (Inventing America p.394).
A huge part of the economical grow of the United States was the wealth being produced by the factories in New England. Women up until the factories started booming were seen as the child-bearer and were not allowed to have any kind of career. They were valued for factories because of their ability to do intricate work requiring dexterity and nimble fingers. "The Industrial Revolution has on the whole proved beneficial to women. It has resulted in greater leisure for women in the home and has relieved them from the drudgery and monotony that characterized much of the hand labour previously performed in connection with industrial work under the domestic system. For the woman workers outside the home it has resulted in better conditions, a greater variety of openings and an improved status" (Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850, pg.4) The women could now make their own money and they didn’t have to live completely off their husbands. This allowed women to start thinking more freely and become a little bit more independent.
Harriet Robinson, who worked at the mills from 1834 to 1848, began working at the Lowell mills at the age of ten after her family had migrated there out of economic necessity so that her mother could work at a boarding house there; Mary Paul was attracted to the mills as a young adult by the promise of high wages and individual economic gain (Robinson 28-29, Dublin 122). Harriet Robinson, although having to work longer hours than Mary Paul, worked only a quarter out of every hour. Mary Paul was expected to work the entirety of her time at the mills each day. Robinson was given the rest of the her time to play or learn with the other girls in the factory, while Mary Paul did not indicate that she had time for leisurely or scholarly activities. Perhaps the most significant difference was the environment of the mill itself. In its early days, when Robinson was a worker there, the mills advertised better pay than most other occupations for women and a safe and pleasant environment so as to attract workers to it and dispel the prejudices against mills that came from the way they were run in England. The mill owners encouraged their workers to pursue their education and cultivate an enriching setting for themselves. However, by the time Mary Paul came to the mills, this atmosphere had dissipated and she, like the other workers, were seen as only
The Industrial Revolution in America began to develop in the mid-eighteen hundreds after the Civil War. Prior to this industrial growth the work force was mainly based in agriculture, especially in the South (“Industrial Revolution”). The advancement in machinery and manufacturing on a large scale changed the structure of the work force. Families began to leave the farm and relocate to larger settings to work in the ever-growing industries. One area that saw a major change in the work force was textile manufacturing. Towns in the early nineteen hundreds were established around mills, and workers were subjected to strenuous working conditions. It would take decades before these issues were addressed. Until then, people worked and struggled for a life for themselves and their families. While conditions were harsh in the textile industry, it was the sense of community that sustained life in the mill villages.
It was estimated that nearly 35 percent to 53 percent of female workers were less than 16 years old in England (Document C), an age that was illegal for employment in modern society. Some of them were even under the age of ten. "I think the youngest children is about seven...I dare say there are twenty under nine years old" the description of the situations in Mr. Wilson's Mill from a worker named Hannah Goode in 1833 (Document J). In addition, a report in 1841 showed that 43% percent of the female workers were no more than 20 years old in four English textile industries in cotton, silk, lace and woolen manufacturing (Document C). In Japan, in the silk factory in Nagano, Japan 1901, 66 percent of female worker were under 20 years old. Female worker were more or less working for gaining more family income in order to release their financial burden. However, did they really contributed to family income and did they get the reasonable payment from the
In 1963, President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law, making it unlawful to discriminate against a worker on the basis of sex. Since that time, the wage gap between men and women in the United States has narrowed by just 15 cents, now being 74 cents, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau.
In the essay, “Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills” by author Thomas Dublin explains the textile mills back in the 1850’s in Lowell, Massachusetts enjoyed by monetary and cultural desirability. Interest was triggered by a gigantic ratio of the mills, the efficiency of the machinery, and the circumstances that women contained the majority of the workforce. Dublin wraps up about the lives and labor of Lowell’s female workforce that the visitors was hit by the uniqueness of the mills and cities also the sophistication of the female crew which they worked really hard to have a good payment. Women went on a strike to protest wage cuts because the measure of the work needed to rise up later on women complain on the company policies and working circumstances they couldn't get enough money for all the work they’ve done.