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The Lords and the Mill Girls

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The Lords and the Mill Girls The Lords and the Mill Girls Onegroup ofMassachusetts businessmen tried to avoid the ugly factory towns and hom- ble working conditions that Korngold describes in his proJile of Caniron (selection 16). Theyformed the Boston Associates, an organization financiers who buib a model mill town in Massachusetts called Lowell. 7lestory ofLowel1- America'sjrst planned in- dustrial community -tells us a great deal about the dreams and realities ofa nation al- ready undetgoing considerable industrial and urban growth. Maury Klein relates that story with a vivid pen -the landscaped town on the banks 4 the Concord and Merri- muck Rivers that commanded worldwide attention, the healthy farmgirls who worked its looms. In 1833, President Andrew Jackson and Vice President Martin Van Buren vis- ited edll and watched transjxed as 2,500 mill girls, dad in blue sashes and white dresses, with parasols above their heads, marched by two abreast. "Very pretty women, by the Eternal!" exclaimed the president. Although they loathed Jackson, the members 4 the Boston Associates were pleased with his observation, for they were proud o/ their working girls -the showpieres 4 what they believed was the model of enlightened in- dustrial management. To their delight, Lowell became a famous international attraction. English visitors were especially impressed, berausejmale workers in England's coal mines toiled in in- mdible misery: naked, covered withjlth, they had to pull carts ofcoal on their hands and knees through dark, narrow tunnels. By conhast, as one historian has said, Lowd seemed a "jemale paradise. " Equally impressive was the remarkable productivity of Lowell's 'power-driven machineb." Bejore long, Lowell became (in historian Linda Evans's words) "the heart ofthe American textile industry and ojthe industrial rrvolu- lion itselJ " Lowell's relatively well-disciplined and well-treated work force seemed to demonstrate that industrial capitalism need not be exploitive. Even so, the Lowell system was pater- nalistic and strict. Sensitive to criticism that it was immoralfor women to work, the mill bosses maintained close supervision over their female operatives, imposing curfews and compulsory church attendance. Neveriheless, the mill girls, as they were called, were transjomed by their work experience. As Linda Evans says, "Most of these workers saw their mill work as a way to reestablish their value to the family," buause they were no longer a burden to their parents (indeed, they could send money home now) and because they could savejor their own dowries. "Soon," writes Evans, "it was hard to separate their sense ojdutyjom their sense ojindependence. " They felt a group solidarity, too, and in their boarding houses created "a working-classfemale culture. " They also became aware ofthemselves as a working class with specialproblems,for they were powerless and hadfew options. They could notJinn otherjobs, as could their male counterparts, could not become sailors or dockhands or work on constructiongangs. For most ofthe women, mill work was their only option. As others have said, their very powerlessness led to the eventual demise ojthe pater- nalistic factory system. As more and more textile fim moved to Lowell and other towns, the pressure ofwmpetition led to overproduction, to the same cycles ojboom and bust that plagued the entire national economy. Thanks to overproduction, many mills fell into decline; wages dropped, and working conditions deteriorated. In a display ojsol- idarity, the millgirls oganized a union and went on strikes to protest wage cuts and ris- ing rents. In 1844, organized as the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, they campaigned for a ten-hour workday and wen took their grievances to the state legisla- ture. As Maury Klein points out in the selection that/ollows, "their efirts were dogged, impressive, and ultimately futile" because they lacked political leverage. The union failed, and the textile bosses eventually replaced most ojtheir once-prized millgirls with another labor jorce- desperate immigrants, most from Ireland, who worked for lower wages and were jar less demanding. By 1860, Lowell had bewme another grim and crowded mill town, another "squalid slum." As you ponder LoweII's story, consider what it suggests about the nature of American industrialization and about the special problems of women and labor in an industrializing society. Do you agree with Klein, that what happened in Lowell reveals some harsh truths about the incompatibility ojde- mocratic ideals and the profit motive? THE GROWTH OF TECHNOLOGY GLOSSARY APPLETON, NATHAN One of the largest stockholders in the Merrimack Manubcturing Conlpany. hey flocked to the village of Lowell, these BAGLEY, SARAH One of sevenl wonlen leaders visitors fiom abroad, as if it were a compul- of the Lowell Female Labor Refoml Association and sory stop on the grand tour, eager to verify the ten-hour workday movement. T rumors of a utopian system of manufacturers. Their BOOTT, KIRK Planned and supervised the skepticism was natural, based as it was on the Euro- building of the Lowell mill village, which Klein calls pean experience where industry had degraded work- "the nation's first planned industrial conmlunity." ers and blighted the landscape. In Enghsh manufac- turing centers such as Manchester, observers had BOSTON ASSOCIATES Founders of Lowell and stared into the pits of hell and shrank in horror &om the Memmack Manufacturing Co., their textile empire eventually comprised eight major firms, the sight. Charles Dickens used this gloonly, pumd twenty mills, and more than six thousand cesspool of misery as a model in Hard Times, while enlployees. Alexis de Tocqueville wrinkled his nose at the "heaps of dung, rubble from buildings, putrid, stag- LOWELL, FRANCIS CABOT "Farsighted nant pools" amid the "huge palaces of industry" that nlerchant" who formed the Boston Associates and pioneered a unique textile mill at Waltham; after kept "air and light out of the human habitations his death, the associates established another null which they donunate.. A sort of black smoke village on the Meninlack River and named it covers the city. Under this half daylight 300,000 Lowell. human beings are ceaselessly at work. A thousand noises disturb this damp, dark labyrinth, but they are LOWELL FEMALE LABOR REFORM ASSOCIATION Formed by the null girls in 1844 not at all the ordinary sounds one hears in great to protest falling wages, this women's labor union cities." campaigned for a ten-hour workday and other Was it possible that America could produce an reforms during its short existence. alternative to this hideous scene? It seemed so to the visitors who gaped in wonderment at the vil- LOWELL OFFERING Monthly magazine edited and published by the Lowell mill girls. lage above the confluence of the Concord and Merrimack rivers. What they saw was a planned MERRIMACK MANUFACTURING community with mills five to seven stories high COMPANY The new corporation that ran the flanked by dormitories for the workers, not Lowell null and turned it into largest and most "the jammed together but surrounded by open space unique nlill town in the nation." filled with trees and tlower gardens set against a WALTHAM SYSTEM Unique production backdrop of the river and hills beyond. Dwelling methods at Francis Lowell's mill. Ma~iry Klein. "Thc Lor& and the Mill Girls." from "Fmm Utopia to Mill TOWII"by Maiiry Klein in At~rericat~History 1llti~- trared, October and Novenlber 1981. Reprinted by permission of Cowln Magazines. publisher of Attaricnn History Pistrared. 19 THE LORDS AND THE MILL GIRLS Lowell, Massachiaetts, was a nrodel nrill .,,.. .,.,.... ,.. .... buildings stwd in groups separated by trees, shnrbs, and strips 4 banks 4th~Cotlord and Mcm'rnack Rivers. 7he community at- lawn that wpre attractively landscaped awd rc~trinisct~tcc.,rt 4acollege rraued worldwide aaetttion ~JCCAUS~it presented a shntp contrast to cmpus. (Corbis-Bertmann) lhc squalor ojmarrufactrrring centers in England and Europe. 77rc houses, shops, hotels, churches, banks, even a li- swear," he added "that every 'Bakery,' 'Grocery' and brary lined the streets in orderly, uncrowded rows. 'Bookbindery' and every other kind of store, took its Taken whole, the scene bore a flavor of meticulous shutters down for the first time, and started in busi- composition, as if a painting had sprung to life. ness yesterday." The contrast between so pristine a vision and the If Lowell and its social engineering impressed visi- nightmare of Manchester startled the most jaded of tors, the mill workers dazzled them. Here was noth- foreigners. "It was new and &esh, like a setting at the ing resembling Europe's Untemrencchen, that doomed opera," proclaimed Michel Chevalier, a Frenchman proletariat whose brief, wretched lives were squeezed who visited Lowell in 1834. The Reverend William between child labor and a pauper's grave. These Scoresby, an Enghshman, marveled at how the were not men or children or even families as found buildings seemed "as fiesh-looking as if built within in the Rhode Island mills. Instead Lowell employed a year." The indefatigable Haniet Martineau agreed, young women, most ofthem fresh off New England as did J. S. Buckingham, who pronounced Lowell to farms, paid them higher wages than females earned be "one of the most remarkable places under the anywhere else (but still only half of what men sun." Even Dickens, whose tour of America ren- earned), and installed them in dormitories under dered him immune to most of its charms, was strict supervision. They were young and industrious, moved to lavish praise on the town. "One would intelligent, and entirely respectable. Like model citi- THE GROWTH OF TECHNOLOGY zens of a burgeoning republic they saved their poorhouses, a source lacking in America. Both the money, went to church, and spent their leisure hours family system and use of apprentices had been tried in self-improvement. in Rhode Island with little success. Most men pre- More than one visitor hurried home to announce ferred farming their own land to working in a fac- the arrival of a new industrial order, one capable of tory for someone else.
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