To Strike or Not to Strike in 1830s Lowell: A Role Play In this activity you will perform a role play of a talk show between Lowell workers and factory owners. To research your characters, you will analyze primary sources. Objectives 1. You will analyze how changing working conditions and decreasing pay led to strikes in the 1830s. 2. You will dramatize the conflict between factory owners and factory workers over changing working conditions and pay. Instructions 1. Step 1: Divide into four equal groups: one group to play the factory owner, one group to play a girl who wants to go on strike, one group to play a girl who does not want to go on strike, and one group to play the talk show host. Pass locate copies of the To Strike or Not to Strike worksheet describing the situation and we will go over the parts of the role play carefully. 2. Step 2: Please locate the character planning worksheets, as well as the primary and secondary documents. In your character groups, review the readings and select evidence and information you wish to include in the talk show role play. You should consider the arguments and evidence the character would use, and how he/she would counter the arguments of the other characters. The talk show host groups should also plan for what kinds of questions they will ask the other characters. 3. Step 3: Each group should choose one member to perform the role play for the class. Please locate copies of the Scene Assessment Rubric (only needed by the non-performing members of the class). We will go over directions for completing it as you actively listen to the role play; as you watch the talk show, you should take notes about the main points of each character and the sources the actors used to create their dialogue. Now, the designated characters present the role play to the class. 4. Step 4: After concluding the role play, we will discuss the following points: How did factory work benefit the girls? In what ways was factory work not a benefit to the girls? Historical Context A group of Boston capitalists built a major textile manufacturing center in Lowell, Massachusetts beginning in the 1820s. The first factories recruited women from rural New England as their labor force. These young women, far from home, lived in rows of boardinghouses adjacent to the growing number of mills. The industrial production of textiles was highly profitable, and the number of factories in Lowell and other mill towns increased. More mils, however, led to overproduction, which led to a drop in prices and profits. Mill owners reduced wages and speeded up the pace of work. They also raised the rent for their boardinghouses. The young female operates organized to protest these wage cuts in 1834 and 1836. A Former Lowell Girl Remembers Working in the Mills Lucy Larcom worked in the mills at Lowell as a young woman. In her memoir, written more than forty years later, she remembered how she and other young female mill workers felt about their jobs. I know that sometimes the confinement of the mill became very wearisome to me. In the sweet June weather I would lean far out of the window, and try not to hear the unceasing clash of sound inside…. I regard it as one of the privileges of my youth that I was permitted to grow up among these active, interesting girls…. They were earnest and capable; ready to undertake anything that was worth doing…. They gave me a larger, firmer idea of womanhood…. Country girls were naturally independent, and the feeling that at this new work the few hours they had of every-day leisure were entirely their own was a satisfaction to them. They preferred it to going out as ‘hired help.’ It was like a young man’s pleasure in entering upon business for himself. Girls had never tried that experiment before, and they liked it. SOURCE | Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889). CREATOR | Lucy Larcom ITEM TYPE | Biography/Autobiography Regulations of the Middlesex Company and Its Boarding Houses The Lowell textile factories, and the boarding houses where they required their female workers to live, had strict rules. The women accepted these rules and even helped enforce them. All persons [working for] the Middlesex Company . [must live] in one of the boarding-houses belonging to the Company. The Company will not employ any one who is habitually absent from public worship on the Sabbath, or whose habits are not regular and correct. All persons entering into the employment of the Company are considered as engaged for twelve months; and those who leave sooner will not receive a regular discharge. Smoking within the factory yards will in no case be permitted. Boarders are not permitted to have company at unreasonable hours. Boardinghouse doors must be closed at ten o’clock in the evening, and no one admitted after that time without some reasonable excuse. The keepers of the Boarding House must . report the names of such as are guilty of any improper conduct, or are not in the regular habit of attending public worship. SOURCE | Samuel Lawrence, 1 July 1846; Tsongas Industrial History Center and Center for Lowell History, http://www.uml.edu/tsongas/bringing- history-home/page_00/index.htm. CREATOR | Samuel Lawrence ITEM TYPE | Pamphlet Young Women Ask Permission to Work in Lowell Starting in the 1820s, a group of business owners built textile mills in New England, where for the first time, people could use machines to weave cotton into cloth. The first factories recruited women from rural New England as their labor force. Most of these young women viewed mill work as a temporary stage in live, a way to escape the limits of farm life and to earn money for themselves and to help support their families. Sally Rice Writes to Her Parents, 1839 I am most 19 years old. I must of course have something of my own before many more years have passed. And where is that something coming from if I go home and earn nothing? . You may think me unkind, but how can you blame me for wanting to stay here? I have but one life to live and I want to enjoy myself. Mary Paul Asks Her Father to Go to Lowell, circa 1830-1860 I want you to let me go to Lowell if you can. I think it would be much better for me than to stay about here. I could earn more to begin with than I can any where about here. I am in need of clothes which I cannot get if I stay about here and for that reason I want to go to Lowell or some other place. We all think if I could go with some steady girl that I might do well. I want you to think of it and make up your mind. Mercy Jane Griffith is going to start in four or five weeks. Aunt Miller and Aunt Sarah think it would be a good chance for me to go if you would consent—which I want you to do if possible. SOURCE | Thomas Dublin, ed., Farm to Factory: Women’s Letters, 1830-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). CREATOR | Various ITEM TYPE | Diary/Letter A Former Mill Girl Remembers the Lowell Strike of 1836 Harriet Hanson Robinson began work in Lowell at the age of ten, later becoming an author and advocate of women's suffrage. In 1834 and 1836, the mill owners reduced wages, increased the pace of work, and raised the rent for the boardinghouses. The young female workers went on strike (they called it “turning out” then) to protest the decrease in wages and increase in rent. In 1898 Robinson published a memoir of her Lowell experiences where she describes the strike of 1836. Cutting down the wages was not their only grievance, nor the only cause of this strike. [Before] the corporations had paid twenty-five cents a week towards the board of each operative, and now it was their purpose to have the girls pay the sum; and this, in addition to the cut in the wages, would make a difference of at least one dollar a week. It was estimated that as many as twelve or fifteen hundred girls turned out, and walked in procession through the streets. They had neither flags nor music, but sang songs, [including] “Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I- Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die? Oh ! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave, For I’m so fond of liberty That I cannot be a slave.” SOURCE | Harriet Hanson Robinson, Loom and Spindle or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (New York, T. Y. Crowell, 1898), 83–86, fromHistory Matters: The U.S. Survey on the Web, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5714/. CREATOR | Harriet Hanson Robinson ITEM TYPE | Biography/Autobiography Time Table of the Lowell Mills The young farm women who worked in the Lowell textile mills were used to hard work, but working the large, noisy mills was different. On the farm, women had controlled their own work schedule, and they did may different tasks. In the mill, women did one task over and over again. Factory owners now controlled the speed and hours of work. SOURCE | Time Table of the Lowell Mills, Merrimack Valley Textile Museum, from Uses of Liberty Rhetoric Among Lowell Mill Girls, http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/americanstudies/lavender/lowell.html.