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 …show more content…
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 …show more content…
How the Factory Girls Do Rig Up!” (2010), she describes how the women of that time period defined themselves, “by what she read ... at least as much as by how she dressed, what she ate, or how she furnished her house." She goes on to talk about how the mill girls were no exception, spending their hard earned wages on clothing and adornments. Cook discusses how clothing was “the frontier between the self and the not-self”, and a classic way of middle class expression. They are similarly situated at the boundary between the solitary individual and the encompassing world and the mind and its material embodiment. Thomas Carlyle had written metaphorically in 1834 that clothes were "unspeakably significant", and the mill girls were no
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.
Summary The PBS special, “Mill Times”, hosted by David Macaulay, gives a viewer insight into what aided in igniting the Industrial Revolution and changing how textiles are produced. Through documentary snippets and an animated storyline the viewer is able to imagine life before technological changes. Viewers are shown how clothing was produced prior to the mill, the benefits of the mill, the Lowe girls and their working environment, and further technological advancements which aided in making production more mobile and independent of waterways. The beginning of the program shows how laborious and strenuous it was to manufacture any cloth before the waterwheel invention.
The literature of the nineteenth century cataloged the social, economical and political changes during its period. Through it many new concerns and ideologies were proposed and made their journeys through intellectual spheres that have endured and kept their relevance in our own period today. The literature, sometimes quite overtly, introduced the issues arising with the changes in society specifically due to the industrial revolution. In this mixture of new ideas was the question of women's labor and functions among this rapidly changing society. American authors as well as Victorian authors, like George Gissing and Mabel Wotton, explored these issues somewhat explicitly during this period. In America, Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Perkins Gilman expressed these issues in short stories with strong implications of the dangers of unfulfilled or unsatisfying labor available to women.
...ultiple children which, as any parent will tell you, would’ve been more than a full-time job. One key point from “A Fourierist Newspaper Criticizes the Nuclear Family” that supports the assertion is the fact that not all women back then were fulfilled being a full-time homemaker, and desired more opportunities and rights than society allowed them to possess. Their desire to be more than a homemaker would often be completely ignored, though, so just like slaves of the period, they had no other option than to fulfill their societal role. One key point from “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” that supports the assertion is the fact that a women’s education would be primarily in the domestic and social spheres with only a minimal amount of proper education, showing that society considered them only to have enough intellectual capacity to be a domestic household servant.
As mentioned above, women’s role were unjust to the roles and freedoms of the men, so an advanced education for women was a strongly debated subject at the beginning of the nineteenth century (McElligott 1). The thought of a higher chance of education for women was looked down upon, in the early decades of the nineteenth century (The American Pageant 327). It was established that a women’s role took part inside the household. “Training in needlecraft seemed more important than training in algebra” (327). Tending to a family and household chores brought out the opinion that education was not necessary for women (McElligott 1). Men were more physically and mentally intellectual than women so it was their duty to be the educated ones and the ones with the more important roles. Women were not allowed to go any further than grammar school in the early part of the 1800’s (Westward Expansion 1). If they wanted to further their education beyond grammar, it had to be done on their own time because women were said to be weak minded, academically challenged and could n...
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...
In the early years while the profits were high working conditions looked promising to the mill girls in their brief opening experiences of factory work. Jobs required little skill because the machinery was mostly self-acting. It looked very pleasant at first, the rooms were so light, spacious, and clean, the girls so pretty and neatly dressed, and the machinery so brightly polished or nicely painted (Harriet Farley, Letters from Susan, Letter Second).
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.
In the text, one learns of how bags, or toe-sacks as I have always heard, were turned into bed linens, bath linens, undergarments, cookware, and dresses. The fact that women were smart enough to re-use feed bags for necessary household and personal care says a lot about the southern farm-women’s mind. They are already supporting peddlers, making their own money to become economically stable, and now they are making their own beautiful linens. One story of this wonderful invention comes from north Georgia’s Harriet Echols who says “I’d try to go buy feed so I could match the bags with what I had at home… I’d take a bag of every color that I had.” Later in the nineteenth century, cotton bags became a more popular source of bags. Cotton bag clothes were given to those who were not economically stable yet to help in times of need. The Georgia Emergency Relief Administration was one of the most successful relief projects and were “classes for young girls who longed for pretty things but could not afford to buy them and could not make them.” Southern farm women gained much attention for the way that they thought of things; for thinking up the idea of sewing feed sacks to make high-demand linens. Here we are in late 2016, still using the ideology based off of sewing feed sacks. Not only was this idea very unique, but it was also beneficial. This was another clever way in which women found to excel in the economy. If they were only sewing for themselves or their family, they did not lose money because they were using recycled products and in the grand scheme of things were making clothes basically at no cost. If they were selling their linens to others who maybe had no interest or time in sewing, they were using recycled sacks and could have sold their linens so they were actually gaining profit. By these women re-using feed sacks,
Many of us complain about the tough hours we work or the amount of chores we have to complete, but think about the truly harsh conditions that young girls and women had to work in the textile industry with very little pay and no accolades. Back in the 18th century, when the Industrial Revolution struck, it made it hard for female mill workers to enjoy being employed. Due to the terrible working conditions, the amount of hours worked, and the low wages were a few of the similarities that the female mill workers in England and Japan shared.
... dresses more since I know that from the very beginning when the cotton is ripe in the hot sun, little boys and girls must pick it for my dresses, while their backs grow tired and their heads ache”. This shows that the girl in this passage appreciates her clothes more because she knows that children are being forced to labor in the fields so that the cotton they pick can be used to make different items. With this, many children across the country are being deprived of a regular childhood and are not being allowed to do what they want as kids.
Harriet Hanson Robinson, a “Lowell Girl,” Describes her labor in a textile mill, 1831 pg.239
The women on the trail, though it shows, had little time to care about mending clothes, “The majority of the overland women wore what clothing they had and prayed that what they wore would not tear. They were too preoccupied with the necessities of the day to consider fashion at all (Schlissel 105). ” I would be happy if I were these women because that just means one less chore that was their “duty” to perform. In conclusion, the woman of the Victorian Era had her role in life planned out from before she was born. Although it was a dreadful role, these women carried it out in a way that shows their purity of the heart and willingness to do so many things for others and for little return.
The industrialization of the nineteenth century was a tremendous social change in which Britain initially took the lead on. This meant for the middle class a new opening for change which has been continuing on for generations. Sex and gender roles have become one of the main focuses for many people in this Victorian period. Sarah Stickney Ellis was a writer who argued that it was the religious duty of women to improve society. Ellis felt domestic duties were not the only duties women should be focusing on and thus wrote a book entitled “The Women of England.” The primary document of Sarah Stickney Ellis’s “The Women of England” examines how a change in attitude is greatly needed for the way women were perceived during the nineteenth century. Today women have the freedom to have an education, and make their own career choice. She discusses a range of topics to help her female readers to cultivate their “highest attributes” as pillars of family life#. While looking at Sarah Stickney Ellis as a writer and by also looking at women of the nineteenth century, we will be able to understand the duties of women throughout this century. Throughout this paper I will discuss the duties which Ellis refers to and why she wanted a great change.
The only way Mill said that women living in the mid-nineteenth century in Europe could get their opinions known was through written works. The main argument women were trying to make was to be as educated and given the same opportunities that men received. Women wanted to obtain jobs in high positions; jobs that required men to listen to women and follow the orders that women gave to men. According to Mill, men wanted women to tend to their needs without forcing them. A wife who seemed to be forced to serve their husband was an undesirable one.