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Essays on children in the industrial revolution
Child labour in the industrial revolution effects
Essays on children in the industrial revolution
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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. Yafa’s description of the mills presents a setting that is ugly, monotonous, and rigidly regulated. The mills is a common fixture to a manufacturing factory in modern society, so the readers can identify with the uniformity Yafa describes. From five until seven in …show more content…
This was the first-time people had seen factories like this is America. Many famous, affluent, and powerful men visited these textile mills only long enough to admire the engineering advancements Lowell had made, and completely missed the inhumane treatment of the workers inside. Though the Industrial Revolution was supposed to bring an easier lifestyle to the world, however in reality only gave factory owners a chance to increase the amount of product they could produce within a shorter amount of time, and this prompted them to hire people desperate enough for jobs who would be paid in small sums of money to produce large amounts of product. Camelot on the Merrimack, this title is ironic, for Lowell was no fairy tale “Camelot.” For the girls, life in the textile factories was unmitigated
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”.
English textile factories were very bad for the health of the working class families. As Dr. Ward stated, “Last summer I visited three cotton factories with Dr. Clough of Preston and Mr. Barker of Manchester, and we could not remain ten minutes in the factory without gasping for breath...¨ This shows that the conditions were so bad that they had trouble breathing because how bad the air was. Dr. Ward also says, ¨Cotton factories are highly unfavourable, both to the health and morals of those employed in them. They are really nurseries of disease and vice. These factories were very unsafe and you could get many diseases and injuries, especially if you were a kid as a lot were. The kids were in many accidents in the factories, as Dr. Ward states,
In Slavicek’s “Lucy Larcom: Mill Girl Poet” (2015), she discusses the life and literature of a famous poet and mill girl Lucy Larcom. Like most child mill workers, Lucy began as a bobbin doffer, Monday through Friday she spent up to fourteen hours a day at the mill, and eight hours a day on Saturdays. Lucy wrote in her autobiography: "I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough." She escaped the busy mill through her writing, a common escape for many Lowell mill girls. Lucy cut articles from newspapers and pasted them around the window 's wooden frame next to her spinning wheel. Several of Lucy 's poems appeared in the Lowell Offering, a monthly magazine for the mill girls that featured stories, songs, and poems written by the young mill girls themselves. This made them different from many of the other women of their time
During the mid-nineteenth century, as the industrial revolution was taking shape, so too, was an economic system in Lowell, Massachusetts. The system involved a series of textile mills, which hired mostly women from rural towns, which were slowly giving way to the large cities as a result of industrialization. The textile mills hired the women to work long hours in brutal, often dangerous conditions, and many paid high rent to company boardinghouses. This may sound like feudalism, but it was, in fact, an example of oligarchical capitalism. However, it shares features with the conditions in "Norma Rae" and "Matewan".
O’Donnell who was with his company for eleven years, would lose their jobs to a machine who could do the job quicker or to a worker who would work for a lower wage, like young boys or immigrants. O’Donnell described how men would gather to be picked for work in the mill and the men with young boys to serve as “back-boys” always got picked first because they could do the work faster and the young boys worked for $.30 or $.40 a day as opposed to the $1.50 O’Donnell usual took home for a day’s work. He also described how it didn’t take a skilled worker like himself to operate the new ring-spinners that expedited the cotton spinning process. But skilled workers and laborers weren’t the only ones who were “under the plating” of the Gilded Age. In Document 19-2, women described the struggles of working as domestic servants. Many women went to work during the late 19th century to help out their families in this time of financial anguish. Many took up jobs as domestic
A woman's job in the early 1700s was to cook, clean, teach the children and tend to the house while the men worked outside. However because of the Lowell system, women were viewed immensely different. Thanks to Frances Lowell, not only women but unmarried women were allowed to work in factories and raise money for the family or themselves. However, because the role of women changed, many people were unsure of how to accept their new roles in society. Many were spectacle of women rising society because for the past hundred years, society had viewed the role of the women as lower than men because they were not able to do as much work because most work during the time period was physically demanding and a woman's body is not built as strong as a man's. However, because of the Lowell system, women were able to work and earn money, thus rise to new level in society. But even then, people still viewed women working in the factories as inferior to those women who did not work in the factory. Mostly older women did not believe that the women should work in a factory. For example throughout the book Lyddie, whenever people saw a “factory girl” they always gave her dirty looks and talked about how they should be at home, not working in a factory. They still had an older mindset on the role of women. Even though the workers faced the prejudices of others, they still succeed in life are rose
The Lowell textile mills were a new transition in American history that explored working and labor conditions in the new industrial factories in American. To describe the Lowell Textile mills it requires a look back in history to study, discover and gain knowledge of the industrial labor and factory systems of industrial America. These mass production mills looked pretty promising at their beginning but after years of being in business showed multiple problems and setbacks to the people involved in them.
Provoking thoughts occurred as a result of viewing a certain piece of art at the San Jose Museum of Art. This piece of art piece labeled Fallen Fruit by David Burns and Austin Young was the awe and inspiration for my topic of this paper. The piece made me think of working conditions and how far they have improved in the past century. The digital print coldly depicts assembly line workers packaging fruits for a company. The print displays the average worker in monochrome while the environment juxtaposes the workers with its tinted bright colors. The contrast between the monochrome workers and the tinted environment creates a feeling where the worker is lost in a sea of color and reveals a sense of seriousness of the morbid reality that most workers faced during the 1920s. This contrast was created by Burns and Young as a metaphor to illuminate the audience on the emphasis that companies placed on the workplace itself and the products that were being produced rather than the conditions of the workers. The angle and focus of the workers in the print also help establish a feeling of disregard for the workers. This cruel reality established by the print led me on the train of thought of the Progressive Era. An era of great change, Progressive reforms helped the quality of life for the average worker and helped pave the way for future improvements. Although Progressive reforms for the workplace were loosely enforced, these labor reforms were effective to help create better working conditions, help regulate big business, and push for the creation of unions and bureaus.
Although few employment situations exist in America today resembling the O.P. Henley Textile Mill, the story depicts an ideal scenario for organization and textbook strategy by the union representative. The mill displayed poor judgement in their response to the previously failed union attempts and forfeited the opportunity they had to improve working
In the Child Labor in the Carolinas, photos and depictions of children working in mills show how working class children did not have the opportunities to branch out and have a childhood as defined by today’s standards. Though the pamphlet creators may have been fighting for better standards for child labor in textile mills of the Carolinas, they simultaneously show how working class families depended on multiple members to support the family: in “Chester, South Carolina, an overseer told me frankly that manufacturers [in] all the South evaded the child labor law by letting youngsters who are under age help older brothers and sisters” (McElway, 11). Children were used because they were inexpensive labor and were taken advantage of in many ways because they were so...
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.
The textile factory portrayed in Norma Rae, was not a pristine example of capitalism, since the factory was steeped with bad practice. Throughout the film, the supervisors and managers manipulated regulations in order to maintain an infer-structure that maximized profits. This film is an example of the system of checks and balances that have come to exist in capitalist society. These checks and balances permit manufacturing facilities to earn a fair profit and remain in business while, at the same time, provide workers with fair wages and decent working conditions. Because competition exists, both in terms of the labor market and the market for goods, the greater society is able to demand that industry conform to certain collective standards.
The girls that worked in the textile mills enjoyed new freedoms but also faced many challenges. Per Feller, the mill girls found “a blend of independence, conviviality, respectability, and reward” (120). These new experiences for the young women of New England came with many rules and harsh conditions but provided them with a sense of purpose and unique liberties.
The Industrial Revolution was a fundamental change in the production of goods that altered the life of the working class. Similar to most other historical turning points, it had skeptics, or people that doubted the change, and fanatics, people who saw the value in the change being made. The Industrial Revolution and the period that followed shortly after highlight these varying opinions, as people were more conflicted than ever about the costs of industrialization. While industrialization started in England as an attempt to capitalize on the good fortune they had struck, it quickly developed into a widespread phenomenon that made the production of goods more exact and controlled by higher level people. Many industries, such as the cotton and textile businesses, were previously run through organizations called “cottage industries”.
Harriet Hanson Robinson, a “Lowell Girl,” Describes her labor in a textile mill, 1831 pg.239