The girls that worked in the textile mills enjoyed new freedoms but also faced many challenges. Per Feller, the mill girls found “a blend of independence, conviviality, respectability, and reward” (120). These new experiences for the young women of New England came with many rules and harsh conditions but provided them with a sense of purpose and unique liberties. The women in the mills found independence, earned money and experienced freedoms unavailable in their home communities. They helped their families during the changing market in America. Seller describes “with the agrarian crisis and capitalist transformation delaying marriages, skewing sex ratios and reducing textile production, straitened Yankee farm families needed mill wages …show more content…
more than the domestic labor of unmarried daughters” (288). The mill girls had little opportunity in the rural areas and often needed to work to “accumulating dowry for a more competitive marriage market” (Sellers 288). The girls in the mills worked hard and saved their money. Feller explains “Most hands saved their earnings and quit after a year or two to get married, just as their employers planned” (120). Some of the factories such as Lowell started as a seemingly ideal workplace but soon found themselves competing with other mills which “prompted directors to conserve their profit margins by adding work, extending hours, cutting wages” (Feller 121). The growing market economy shaped the operations of the factory causing profit to become paramount to people. With women as the primary workforce, it was easy to keep wages low and production requirements high. Women had the little opportunity other than farm, domestic or factory work during this period. The mill jobs required the girls to be dedicated and hardworking; one advertisement read “twenty- four good (female) Water Loom Weavers…None need apply unless they are willing to work twelve hours-per-day” (Kulik et al.).
Other examples of long working hours included these rules published in the Zachariah Allen Papers “From 20th March to 20th Septr the wheel starts at sunrise and stops at sunset” (Kulik et al.). In addition to long working hours, they were paid low wages per the Pomfret Manufacturing Company Records “Rhonda chooses to weave two wks by the wk at 12 (12 shillings = $2) then by the yard” (Kulik et al.). Other mills paid similar wages; Sally Rice wrote to her father about the wages in a letter dated Feb 23, 1845. She said, “James Alger’s sister makes 3 dollars per week” (Kulik et al.). Rice compares her wages in the mill to those of a house worker by saying “I think it will be better than to do housework for nine shillings” (Kulik et al.). The mills had other strict rules which included the inability to leave the floor without permission of the overseer, meeting their quota of work daily and few breaks during the often sun up to sundown days. The long hours, poor pay and strict rules took their toll on the women. As Sally Rice told her father in a letter dated September 14,1945 after seven months in a mill job “You surely cannot blame me for leaving the factory so long as I realized that it was killing me to work in it” (Rice). Factory owners and operators viewed the women as a dispensable workforce and did not invest in the employer-employee relationship. (Feller 121). The Mill Girls of New England were an integral part of the workforce in the textile mills during the Jacksonian era. They worked long hours for little pay but enjoyed the freedom and independence these jobs offered. Most did not stay in the mills for extended periods as they left for homes and families. These early factories were part of the market revolution as the demand
for produced goods increased.
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
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.
One of the things that the women went through was alienation by other women, who were deemed as “true” women or respectable women. The alienation was not because of money or race, not even religion, but because the women of the factory wore slacks. A working class woman was seen as less of a woman because a woman during those times was expected to stay at home and play house because of society’s view on gender roles. Plus, the women who worked at factories wore slacks, which was a big taboo during those times also. Women who wore skirts
Harriet Hanson Robinson, a “Lowell Girl,” Describes her labor in a textile mill, 1831 pg.239
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...
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).
As many women took on a domestic role during this era, by the turn of the century women were certainly not strangers to the work force. As the developing American nation altered the lives of its citizens, both men and women found themselves struggling economically and migrated into cities to find work in the emerging industrialized labor movement . Ho...
A huge part of the economical grow of the United States was the wealth being produced by the factories in New England. Women up until the factories started booming were seen as the child-bearer and were not allowed to have any kind of career. They were valued for factories because of their ability to do intricate work requiring dexterity and nimble fingers. "The Industrial Revolution has on the whole proved beneficial to women. It has resulted in greater leisure for women in the home and has relieved them from the drudgery and monotony that characterized much of the hand labour previously performed in connection with industrial work under the domestic system. For the woman workers outside the home it has resulted in better conditions, a greater variety of openings and an improved status" (Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850, pg.4) The women could now make their own money and they didn’t have to live completely off their husbands. This allowed women to start thinking more freely and become a little bit more independent.
When all the men were across the ocean fighting a war for world peace, the home front soon found itself in a shortage for workers. Before the war, women mostly depended on men for financial support. But with so many gone to battle, women had to go to work to support themselves. With patriotic spirit, women one by one stepped up to do a man's work with little pay, respect or recognition. Labor shortages provided a variety of jobs for women, who became street car conductors, railroad workers, and shipbuilders. Some women took over the farms, monitoring the crops and harvesting and taking care of livestock. Women, who had young children with nobody to help them, did what they could do to help too. They made such things for the soldiers overseas, such as flannel shirts, socks and scarves.
The literature of the nineteenth century cataloged the social, economical and political changes during its period. Through it many new concerns and ideologies were proposed and made their journeys through intellectual spheres that have endured and kept their relevance in our own period today. The literature, sometimes quite overtly, introduced the issues arising with the changes in society specifically due to the industrial revolution. In this mixture of new ideas was the question of women's labor and functions among this rapidly changing society. American authors as well as Victorian authors, like George Gissing and Mabel Wotton, explored these issues somewhat explicitly during this period. In America, Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Perkins Gilman expressed these issues in short stories with strong implications of the dangers of unfulfilled or unsatisfying labor available to women.
The oppression and discrimination the women felt in this era launched the women into create the women’s right movement. The economic growth in the market economy women opportunity to work was very low Lucy Stone explained that the same society that pushes men forward keeps woman at home (Doc. H). Only low paying jobs were available such as factories, seamstress, or a teacher and in most states women had no control over their wages. Charlotte Woodward explained how she would sew gloves for a terrible wage but it was under rebellion she wished to choose her own job and the pay (Doc.E). The chart on Doc F explained how women between 1837-1844 dominated men as teachers in the Massachusetts Public School. The idea of the “cult of true womanhood” was that most respectable middle class women should stay at home and take care of the family and be the moral of the home. The advancement in the market economy gave women a chance to make their own money to be able to support themselves and work outside of the home. The nineteenth century was a ferment of reform such as the Second...
In John Mill 's’ essay, “The Subjection of Women”, Mill evaluates and analyses, the social differences between the sexes of the Victorian era. Mills raises some valid points about the subjection of women pertaining to the 19th century. Mills argues that during this time women are treated by their husbands as slaves to a master, not offered an equal opportunity in terms of employment, and their educational achievements aren’t recognized nearly as much as their male counterpart.
The girls are emphasized as being ordinary and blank when the author uses repetition of this word on page 88, and manages to repeat it 5 times in one sentence, so it must be crucial to their character development. The point that Melville is trying to make about the mill is that it's a dismal factory where the only truly living things seem to be the “dark-complexioned man” and “Cupid” and that the girls were being dehumanized and “mere cogs to the wheels” (95,88). Concerning industry, a good example of something that Melville wanted to convey to us was the “young and fair” girl next to the one who has been there longer,who has a “ruled and wrinkled” brow (88). So industry itself is what does the dehumanization to you and makes you work like a mindless machine, working you till the moment you die as shown with the elderly maid who the narrator was concerned for. There is also a powerful message of gender inequality here because girls are the only workforce being used and men are in the seats of what seem to be power and they are the ones benefiting from the all of the maids hard labor. “Bachelors” as the text calls them are shown to be “the very counterpart” of everything that is happening to these woman, and according to you have a
During the Civil War, women began to feel like part of the work force, but along with it, was the downfall of being considered "service workers", which is very similar to being a servant. Nurses had to suffer through much conformity, as they had to wait hand and foot on male patients, while at the same time being scrutinized by their male "overseers". These issues that nurses faced in the nineteenth century, continue even to this day, with a little more ease, but we are still driven by a patriarchal society that just isn't ready to let go. Through the works of Louisa May Alcott and Charlotte Perkins Gillman, one can see the hardships that Nineteenth century women were faced with when it came to working. These stories bring to light the fact that, by overcoming oppression, through the strength and desire that leads to resistance, women have been able to achieve self-reliance, which makes their "service work" considered to have with it, an achieved independence. These stories show us the struggles that women faced in the nin...