In her autobiography, Harriet Hanson Robinson, the wife of a newspaper editor, provided an account of her earlier life as a female factory worker (from the age of ten in 1834 to 1848) in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. Her account lets us see the women as active participants in their own lives - for instance in their strike of 1836.
In 1832, Lowell was little more than a factory village. Five “corporations” were
started, and cotton mills belonging to them were building. Help was in great
demand and stories were told all over the country of a new factory place, and the
high wages that were offered to all classes of work-people; stories that reached
the ears of mechanics’ and farmers’ sons and gave new life to lonely and
dependent women in distant towns and farm houses… Troops of young girls
came from different parts of New England, and from Canada, and men were
employed to collect them at so much a head. and deliver them at the factories.
…
At the time the Lowell cotton mills were started the caste of the factory girl was
the lowest among the employments of women. In the eyes of the overseer she
was but a brute, a slave, to be beaten, pinched and pushed about. It was to
overcome the prejudice that such high wages had been offered to women that
they might be induced to become mill-girls, in spite of the opprobrium that still
clung to this degrading occupation… The mill-girls were of different ages. Some
were not over ten years old; a few in the middle life, but the majority were
between the ages sixteen and twenty-five. The very young girls were called
“doffers.” They “doffed,” or took off, the full bobbins from the spinning frames and
replaced them with empty ones. They were paid ten dollars a week. The
working hours of all the girls extended from five o’clock in the morning until seven
in the evening, with one half hour each for breakfast and dinner.
…
The most prevailing incentive to labor was to secure the means of education for
some male member of the family. To make a gentleman of a brother or son, to
give him a college education, was the dominant thought in the minds of a great
many of the better class of the mill-girls. Her labor could command but small
return. If she worked out as a servant, her wages were from 50 cents to one
dollar a week: or if she went from house to house by the day to spin or weave, or
do tailors work, she could get but 75 cents a week and her meals. As a teacher,
her services were not in demand, and the arts, the professions, and even the
trades and industries, were nearly all closed to her.
As late as 1840 there were only seven vocations outside the home into which the
women of New England had entered. At this time women had no property rights.
A widow could be left without her husband’s property, and “incumbrance” to his
estate. A woman was not supposed to be capable of spending her own, or of
using other people’s money.
