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Working in factories in the first and second industrial revolution
Working in factories in the first and second industrial revolution
Industries of the industrial revolution
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When envisioning what factory work is like today, the picture we paint in our minds eye is often not a pleasant one; it is one of back-breaking work, loud and dangerous machines, child laborers, low wages. A sweatshop. A job only taken if one has no other choice. However, taking a look into the formative years of the industrial factory system shows that this was not always the case. Through Harriet Robinson’s Loom and Spindle, which gives a firsthand account of life as an early factory worker, it becomes clear that the Lowell mills in Massachusetts and its workers were often at the forefront of both industry and academia. Despite this fact, the Mary Paul letters present a much more similar image to the factory life that is seen today, in spite …show more content…
of them being written about the same mill a few years after the time period Harriet Robinson reflects on. The disparity in the experiences of these two women shows that factory life in Industrial America, although seen as highly favorable in its first few years, rapidly transformed to mirror its English counterpart as bottom tier work. By looking at the experiences of Mary Paul and how they differed from Harriet Robinson’s, it becomes clear that the discrepancies in their factory life can be accounted for by the laws of supply and demand, advancements in technology, adoption of English notions on factory workers, and the shifting demographic of America in the years during which Mary Paul worked as a factory girl. A close reading of Mary Paul’s letters reveals her optimistic hope for economic independence, which she hoped to achieve by going to work at the Lowell mills.
By this time, in 1845, the Lowell mills had long since gained a reputation as a favorable place to work for women, who at the time were excluded from many other occupations. Mary Paul had evidently heard of the prosperity the mills had granted other women who had gotten their start there, like Harriet Robinson, and believed it would provide her with the same (Paul 9/13/1845). Although her optimism remains - even if it does dim slightly - throughout her next few letters, by 1848 Mary Paul resolves to leave the mills as she cannot stand working long hours while taking a pay cut in favor of living and working at a Phalanx that promised equal pay between the men and women there for more reasonable work (Paul 127-131, …show more content…
136). Harriet Robinson and Mary Paul’s experiences working at the Lowell mills were vastly different, as were their reasons for going there.
Harriet Robinson, who worked at the mills from 1834 to 1848, began working at the Lowell mills at the age of ten after her family had migrated there out of economic necessity so that her mother could work at a boarding house there; Mary Paul was attracted to the mills as a young adult by the promise of high wages and individual economic gain (Robinson 28-29, Dublin 122). Harriet Robinson, although having to work longer hours than Mary Paul, worked only a quarter out of every hour. Mary Paul was expected to work the entirety of her time at the mills each day. Robinson was given the rest of the her time to play or learn with the other girls in the factory, while Mary Paul did not indicate that she had time for leisurely or scholarly activities. Perhaps the most significant difference was the environment of the mill itself. In its early days, when Robinson was a worker there, the mills advertised better pay than most other occupations for women and a safe and pleasant environment so as to attract workers to it and dispel the prejudices against mills that came from the way they were run in England. The mill owners encouraged their workers to pursue their education and cultivate an enriching setting for themselves. However, by the time Mary Paul came to the mills, this atmosphere had dissipated and she, like the other workers, were seen as only
automatons that could put money into the mill owner’s hands. These differences, though seemingly having come about out of nowhere, can be thoroughly explained by a historically contingent look at the changes that occurred towards the ends of Harriet Robinsons years at the mills and the years following it when Mary Paul came to work there. Before this, however, it is important to consider the differences in the two primary sources and the biases of each.
What would one expect to be the sentiment of a young women who worked in the Lowell textile mills? It is just such a depressing story; and the sad heroines are the young women of Lowell - Lucy Larcom- who Stephen Yafa portrays in his excerpt “Camelot on the Merrimack.” A perception through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old Lucy Larcom reveals that, “For her and the other young girls, the long and tedious hours they spent tending to demanding machines robbed them of their childhood.” The imagery in “Camelot on the Merrimack,” from Big Cotton by Stephen H. Yafa disclose the working conditions in those sordid mills.
O’Donnell who was with his company for eleven years, would lose their jobs to a machine who could do the job quicker or to a worker who would work for a lower wage, like young boys or immigrants. O’Donnell described how men would gather to be picked for work in the mill and the men with young boys to serve as “back-boys” always got picked first because they could do the work faster and the young boys worked for $.30 or $.40 a day as opposed to the $1.50 O’Donnell usual took home for a day’s work. He also described how it didn’t take a skilled worker like himself to operate the new ring-spinners that expedited the cotton spinning process. But skilled workers and laborers weren’t the only ones who were “under the plating” of the Gilded Age. In Document 19-2, women described the struggles of working as domestic servants. Many women went to work during the late 19th century to help out their families in this time of financial anguish. Many took up jobs as domestic
Nineteenth century industrialism presented the United States with a unique and unprecedented set of problems, as illustrated through the works of Rebecca Harding Davis and Horatio Alger Jr. Although both authors felt compelled to address these problems in their writing, Rebecca Harding Davis’s grasp on the realities faced by the working poor and women was clearly stronger than Alger’s. Not only did Alger possess a naïve view on exactly how much control an individual has over their own circumstances, but he failed to address the struggles of women entirely. As a result, Alger conceived a rather romantic world where the old-fashioned American ideals of hard work, determination, and self-sacrifice enable a young boy to lift himself from poverty.
It was estimated that nearly 35 percent to 53 percent of female workers were less than 16 years old in England (Document C), an age that was illegal for employment in modern society. Some of them were even under the age of ten. "I think the youngest children is about seven...I dare say there are twenty under nine years old" the description of the situations in Mr. Wilson's Mill from a worker named Hannah Goode in 1833 (Document J). In addition, a report in 1841 showed that 43% percent of the female workers were no more than 20 years old in four English textile industries in cotton, silk, lace and woolen manufacturing (Document C). In Japan, in the silk factory in Nagano, Japan 1901, 66 percent of female worker were under 20 years old. Female worker were more or less working for gaining more family income in order to release their financial burden. However, did they really contributed to family income and did they get the reasonable payment from the
A multitude of mills going up created back water which hindered the mill’s wheels from turning more freely, but with more competitors came more jobs to the area. In addition to more work came the need for more workers. Francis Lowell of Massachusetts decided to make a wholesome atmosphere to attract young country women to his mill to work. He offered wholesome living with room and board, decent pay, strict rules, and curfews to enforce the safety of the girls that worked for him. These workers came to be known as the “Lowell girls”.
Industrialization had a major impact on the lives of every American, including women. Before the era of industrialization, around the 1790's, a typical home scene depicted women carding and spinning while the man in the family weaves (Doc F). One statistic shows that men dominated women in the factory work, while women took over teaching and domestic services (Doc G). This information all relates to the changes in women because they were being discriminated against and given children's work while the men worked in factories all day. Women wanted to be given an equal chance, just as the men had been given.
Kelley then uses the example of a 13-year-old girl from Pennsylvania. She calls the workers “breadwinners” (12) and then says that the largest number of these breadwinners were young females. This shows that the young women are working intensively and are the income of their families. Also, in the previously stated quote (“Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy.
Young girls were not allowed to open the windows and had to breathe in the dust, deal with the nerve-racking noises of the machines all day, and were expected to continue work even if they 're suffering from a violent headache or toothache (Doc 2). The author of this report is in favor of employing young women since he claimed they seemed happy and they loved their machines so they polished them and tied ribbons on them, but he didn 't consider that they were implemented to make their awful situations more bearable. A woman who worked in both factory and field also stated she preferred working in the field rather than the factory because it was hard work but it never hurt her health (Doc 1), showing how dangerous it was to work in a factory with poor living conditions. Poor living conditions were common for nearly all workers, and similar to what the journalist saw, may have been overlooked due to everyone seeming
This confusion can be seen in two reports from separate journals that differ greatly--so much so that the ability to attribute them to the same issue seems unlikely and unrealistic. William Alexander Abram, a journalist and historian in the 1860’s, wrote an article about the vast improvements made during the industrialization process (Doc 6). Abram specifically mentions the Hours of Labor in Factories Act of 1844 that prohibited excessively long work days. Additionally, Abram mentioned the increased wages and the subsequent increase quality of life. Abram attempts to justify any issues with the industrialization by addressing the new, more spacious cotton mill and the lower sickness and mortality rates. Abram describes the positive forces that arose during the industrialization to outweigh the mass concerns people had about the laboring class’s working conditions. This positive opinion is counteracted by an image included in a magazine from the 1870’s that shows the visual of a bridge and its surrounding factories at the time (Doc 7). The Graphic, a weekly magazine that dealt with social issues, included the view from Blackfriars bridge over the River Irwell that contained the numerous factories concentrated in the one location. The Graphic was famously influential within the art world for its use of imagery and attempt to conquer grand social issues with art. The factories are all emitting gas and the general conditions of the streets and buildings is less than ideal. This negative portrayal of the industrialization sheds a different light on the effects of industrialization. Between these two conflicting articles, it is difficult to see the true extent of the industrializations process’s benefits and harms. This uncertainty also supports the proposed
consciousness of artisans in New York City during the Jacksonian period. (pp. 14 & 25) The pre-industrial revolutions of the 1800s provided many avenues of employment for masters, journeymen, and laborers; however, the transformation of a merchant capitalist economy provided for many masters to subdivide labor. (pp. 113) Contracted work caused a rift in the structure of the old artisanal class. Masters no longer needed to employ apprentices since they hired out separate tradesmen for the...
Rebecca Harding Davis wrote “Life in the Iron Mills” in the mid-nineteenth century in part to raise awareness about working conditions in industrial mills. With the goal of presenting the reality of the mills’ environment and the lives of the mill workers, Davis employs vivid and concrete descriptions of the mills, the workers’ homes, and the workers themselves. Yet her story’s realism is not objective; Davis has a reformer’s agenda, and her word-pictures are colored accordingly. One theme that receives a particularly negative shading in the story is big business and the money associated with it. Davis uses this negative portrayal of money to emphasize the damage that the single-minded pursuit of wealth works upon the humanity of those who desire it.
In the 1800's the construction of cotton mills brought about a new phenomenon in American labor. The owners needed a new source of labor to tend these water powered machines and looked to women. Since these jobs didn't need strength or special skills th...
The time of the Industrial Revolution was one of immense change for both men and women. The new advancements of British machinery that sparked the Industrial Revolution transformed the economy and way of life in the United States, specifically New England and neighboring states. The recent developments lead to children and women, most of whom were immigrants, to work in factories to produce textiles and ready-made clothing. The factory owners of Lowell exploited the girls’ safety and time, yet the occupation provides opportunities that were not even imaginable before.
In the early years while the profits were high working conditions looked promising to the mill girls in their brief opening experiences of factory work. Jobs required little skill because the machinery was mostly self-acting. It looked very pleasant at first, the rooms were so light, spacious, and clean, the girls so pretty and neatly dressed, and the machinery so brightly polished or nicely painted (Harriet Farley, Letters from Susan, Letter Second).
Eventually, Mary Paul's pursuit of success and happiness takes her in a different direction. She begins to show dissatisfaction with Lowell after working there for only a month. She describes the dangers of working at the mill, "one girl fell down and broke her neck.