Lowell had envisioned an ideal workforce for his mills—the unmarried daughters of New England farm families. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, many young women were eager to work in the mills, viewing it as a chance to be independent or to provide income for their families.
· Overproduction during the 1830s caused the price of finished cloth to drop. In response, the mills cut wages and increased work duties, forcing the workers to work harder at a faster pace. New management took over and the mills soon began to change, according to the book The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture:
The “Lowell girls,” as they were called, usually ranged in age from about sixteen to thirty. Most worked two or three years at the mill before returning home to marry and start a family. By 1831, women made up almost forty thousand of the fifty-eight thousand factory workers in the textile industry. The women who operated the machines in ...
· The Lowell Mill Girls were young women employed in an innovative system of labor in textile mills centered in Lowell, Massachusetts during the early 19th century. Employing women in a factory was novel to the point of being revolutionary. The system of labor in the Lowell mills became widely admired because the young women were housed in an ...
As they migrated from rural homesteads to urban boarding houses, however, the shift from agricultural work to industrial labor severed the more direct connection they had once had …
How did craft work change over the course of the nineteenth century? Fewer skilled craftsmen were required to complete the work. Over time, craft work was deskilled; that is, production employed more machines and used techniques in which workers repeated the same task over and over again.
Why were skilled workers offended by the factory work organization of the 1830s? They were treated as dependents rather than independent craftsmen. Skilled workers were offended by the new regime, which treated them as wage-earning dependents rather than as independent craftsmen.
What distinguished products-like shoes-made in factories after the 1820s from those made in the old craft tradition? They were cheaper.
When the Lowell factory system began, workers were fairly well paid and lived in supervised dormitories. As the factory system progressed into the 1840s, the owners increasingly used immigrants as their labor force.
In a stable and structured environment like the one provided by Lowell Mills, what became a major problem by the middle 1830s? a deadly potato famine.
Factory Jobs Often Meant Family Separations In factories, coal mines and other workplaces, people worked long hours in miserable conditions. As countries industrialized, factories became larger and produced more goods. Earlier forms of work and ways of life began to disappear.
How did the "forty-niners" shape California in the late 1840s and early 1850s? They destroyed the environment where they sought gold. How did Chinese men manage to make a steady income after they were run off their claims by Anglo-American gold miners in California in the late 1840s and early 1850s?
Why were house slaves among the most feared by owners in the South in the first half of the nineteenth century? They were in intimate contact with white families.
Why did the South become increasingly dependent on the North and West between the 1790s and 1840s? The North provided most of its political leadership. Only Northerners were willing to buy slave-made cotton. The North provided the South with significant subsidies.
How did the rise of factories affect workers? -Workers and management became sharply divided. -Workers' status in the community declined.
the textile industryThe Waltham-Lowell system was a labor and production model employed during the rise of the textile industry in the United States, particularly in New England, amid the larger backdrop of rapid expansion of the Industrial Revolution the early 19th century.
That system was established at a cotton-spinning mill near Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1790.
The operators fed the threads into the machine and then allowed it to do the work, stopping the process only if threads broke or there was a malfunction. It was not easy to be a mill worker, though. For the total mill operation to run smoothly, all the machines had to be operating at the same time and at a steady speed. Factory work allowed for little independent action. Hours were long, and the work was repetitive.
By 1836, the Lowell mills employed six thousand workers. By 1848, the city of Lowell had a population of about twenty thousand and was the largest industrial center in America. Its mills produced fifty thousand miles of cotton cloth each year.
The Boston Associates made cost reductions at the expense of the workers, who were forced to tend more looms and spindles at once and to operate them at a faster speed. In 1836, with profits down, the Lowell managers actually reduced workers’ wages and raised their boarding fees. Two thousand women walked off their jobs in protest. The company fired the leaders of the strike but called off the pay reductions.
In October 1840, some of the women from the mills got together to produce and publish a sixteen-page journal called the Lowell Offering , the nation's first journal to be written solely by women. The Offering, which sold for about 6 cents a copy, published poems, articles, and stories contributed by mill women.
By 1831, women made up almost forty thousand of the fifty-eight thousand factory workers in the textile industry. The women who operated the machines in the Lowell mills earned $2.40 to $3.20 a week plus room and board. The Boston Associates tried to attract the young women to work for them by providing decent work. and living conditions.
The “Lowell girls,” as they were called, usually range d in age from about sixteen to thirty. Most worked two or three years at the mill before returning home to marry and start a family. By 1831, women made up almost forty thousand of the fifty-eight thousand factory workers in the textile industry.
The factory town. Lowell died in 1817, but the Boston Associates went on to build a complete factory town along the powerful Merrimack River in Massachusetts, naming it Lowell in his honor. They built more mills on the Merrimack in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New Hampshire .
But the Lowell System of Labor was essentially undone by increased immigration to the United States.
Working in the textile mill seemed like a step up from working on the family farm. Working at a job and earning wages was an innovation in the early decades of the 19th century when many Americans still worked on family farms or at small family businesses.
But one operator, reading of Dickens' impressions, responded in The Voice of Industry newspaper, "Very pretty picture, but we who work in the factory know the sober reality to be quite another thing altogether."
However, the efforts at organized labor were not successful. In the late 1830s, the housing rates for the female mill workers were raised. They attempted to hold a strike but it did not succeed. They were back on the job within weeks.
The mill owners essentially controlled what appeared in the magazine, so the articles tended to be positive. Yet the magazine's very existence was seen as evidence of a positive work environment.
The women also began publishing The Lowell Offering . The magazine was published from 1840 to 1845 and sold for six-and-one-fourth cents a copy. It contained poems and autobiographical sketches, which were usually published anonymously or with the authors identified solely by their initials.
Mill Girls and Their Cultural Programs. The mill girls became known for engaging in cultural programs centered around their boardinghouses. The young women tended to read and discussions of books were a common pursuit. The women also began publishing The Lowell Offering .
For the women, the mills offered a comparatively high wage (more so than teaching, the other main female occupation), relative independence (despite attentive presence of a boardinghouse keeper), as well as the lively culture of a bustling city .
During the nineteenth century, industrial corporations used waterways not only for power but also to dump waste. Cities, too, used local streams and rivers for disposing untreated sewage waste. Recognizing the worsening problem of filthy waterways, in 1878 the state of Massachusetts passed a pioneering pollution control law. Although the legislation was limited in scope, manufacturers filed lawsuits to challenge the law and they convinced the governor to significantly weaken the state board of health, the agency designated to enforce it.
Boston Manufacturing Company establishes the first fully-integrated water-powered textile mill on the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts. 1823. “Boston Associates” expand production by moving to the 32-foot Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River in East Chelmsford (later Lowell), Massachusetts. The industrialists turned the Pawtucket Canal, ...
Female operatives began to arrive in places like Lowell in the 1820s. Many of them were not only literate but also relatively well-educated. In their time off from work some organized study circles and wrote poetry, stories, and essays that they published in literary journals, often using pseudonyms. Within a couple of decades “mill girls” also began to agitate for better wages and working conditions and a few crafted pieces for radical labor newspapers.
Boston investors first attempted fully-integrated cotton textile manufacturing (both spinning and weaving) in Waltham, on the Charles River. Seeking more water power to expand their production, however, they decided to move to what was then East Chelmsford, on the Merrimack River. Other investors had built a transportation canal to skirt the Pawtucket Falls there and the “Boston Associates” turned that into a power canal and built the first mills along tributary canals. These two maps, one from 1821 and the other from 1832, show some of the “changes on the land” that the development of Lowell, MA entailed.
In response, the “mill girls” developed a working-class literary romanticism. They wrote and published poetry, stories, and essays in journals and newspapers that blended musing on metaphysical aspects of the natural world with criticism of noisy, filthy cities and regimented labor in prison-like mills.
As industrialization intensified and cities grew around the increasing number of mills and factories , many streams and rivers also became open sewers. Manufacturers dumped millions of gallons of waste into waterways where it mixed with copious amounts of raw municipal sewage, greatly worsening the frequency and severity of disease epidemics. Some local and state governments tried to address the problem by creating boards of health and passing pollution control laws. Yet even the strongest legislation had significant gaps, making exceptions for heavily industrialized and urbanized areas and providing for only limited enforcement. At the same time, corporations filed lawsuits of their own, questioning and subverting various aspects of the laws.
The Underground Railroad mainly relocated runaway slaves to
Some strike leaders suffered repercussions due to their roles in the action.
Its delegates represented more than twenty-five thousand workers across the North.
Both Whigs and Democrats found it increasingly difficult to ignore slavery in deference to their parties' southern wings.
Garrison believed that participating in electoral politics acknowledged the legitimacy of a government that supported slavery.
George Ripley organized the transcendentalist community Brook Farm according to Fourier's concept of "phalanxes."
Manufacturers generally disapproved, since an end to slavery would disrupt the trade in southern exports.
Writing in the 1830s, transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that the hope of moral perfection could be achieved in which place?
The workers' enthusiasm for protest was short lived.