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Industry,Technology,and Labor
Museums of Industry, Technology, and Labor (Table, opposite)
Plastics Plastics are synthetic materials molded, cast, or extruded into various shapes. Production of celluloid plastic in Massachu- setts began about , years after its dis- covery. The most successful celluloid firm was Viscoloid, founded in when Bernard Doyle, who supplied horn to combmakers in Leominster, realized that celluloid was an ex- cellent substitute for increasingly scarce horn and ivory. Made from nitrated cellulose and camphor, the celluloid was molded and pressed in blocks, cut into sheets similar to horn or tortoiseshell, and then processed by traditional combmaking techniques. By , when Du Pont purchased Viscoloid, several Leominster firms fabricated objects from cel- luloid sheet. One successful company was Foster Grant, headed by Samuel Foster, Jr., and his son Joseph, who commercialized in- jection molding of finished objects from cellu- lose acetate in . Injection molding transformed the plastics Mill operatives, Dover, N.H., ca. industry during the s. No longer “the comb city,” Leominster became “the plastic city,” a center of molders, fabricators, and Lucy Larcom, Harriet Hanson Robinson, tions”; the first walkout in Lowell was in . companies like Standard Tool, which made Harriet Farley, and Sarah Bagley, contempo- Throughout the s and s, mill girls ag- molds and presses. Opposing integration of raries who were at one time or another associ- itated against pay cuts, rent increases for com- supply by petrochemical companies, in ated with the literary magazine the Lowell pany housing, longer work hours, production Foster Grant opened a plant at Baton Rouge, Offering. Larcom, who spent approximately speedups, and regulations restricting women’s La., to produce styrene monomer, the source years in the Lawrence Company Mills, began freedoms inside and outside factories. Poems of polystyrene, for the firm’s trademark writing poetry for the Offering. Later a friend and speeches evoked the rhetoric of the sunglasses. After American Hoechst pur- and business associate of John Greenleaf American Revolution, claiming that Yankee chased Foster Grant in , gradually phasing Whittier’s, Larcom was a member of the New women would not be treated as slaves. Some out local production, Leominster remained England literati, an editor for Ticknor and , workers struck in , forming the Fac- home to molding companies like Union Prod- Fields publishing house, and a popular poet. tory Girls’ Association. Labor activism among ucts, known for its polyethylene pink fla- In Houghton Mifflin published the native-born women peaked in the s. mingos. Household Edition of Larcom’s Poetical Works. Most agitation failed, however, when own- Other New England cities entered plastics Harriet Hanson Robinson, also a contributor ers advertised for new operators and turned manufacture after Bakelite phenolic resin was to the Offering, chronicled the life of the mill out leaders, or when weak markets undercut commercialized in . Waterbury, Conn., girls’ community in her book Loom and Spin- the workers’ bargaining position. Owners also known for brass manufacturing, attracted dle (). Both Harriet Farley and Sarah responded by hiring immigrants—Irish in the molders of phenolic because it could be substi- Bagley distinguished themselves in the posi- s and s, and French Canadians and tuted for brass in some applications. Plastic tion of editor: Farley of the Lowell Offering, other immigrant groups after the Civil War. molding also developed in areas with a con- and Bagley of the labor-union newspaper The Nevertheless, a tradition of female labor agita- centration of machinists to provide molds, Voice of Industry. The relationship between tion had been established that would rise presses, and other equipment, such as Bridge- Farley and Bagley was often contentious be- again with the famous Bread and Roses strike port and Hartford, Conn., and the mill towns cause their views differed on such issues as the against the American Woolen Company of of Rhode Island and southeastern Massachu- social role of women, the working conditions Lawrence in . setts. Reed-Prentice of Worcester, Mass., be- in the mills, and whether women writers came a leading U.S. manufacturer of molding should enter the political sphere. Later in life Mary Blewett, We Will Rise in Our Might: Working- presses. Makalot, a Boston resin supplier, sold women’s Voices from th-Century New England (); Sarah Bagley became superintendent of the phenolic compounds to several local molding ffi Thomas Dublin, Women at Work:The Transformation Lowell telegraph o ce and is believed to have of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, firms, such as Northern Industrial Chemical. been the nation’s first female telegrapher. – (); Dublin, Transforming Women’s General Electric, which molded plugs, switch Labor activism began among mill girls of Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution plates, and bases of radio tubes in Pittsfield, Dover, N.H., and Lowell in the early th cen- (); Shirley Marchalonis, The Worlds of Lucy Lar- Mass., also became a large national “custom tury. About workers staged a walkout in com, – (). molder,” providing other manufacturers with Dover in to protest “obnoxious regula- Susan Alves molded parts to order. After World War II,