Manal Shafiq Mrs. Maisner Honors US History 9 10 April 2024 Why did women choose to work in the Mills? In the New England scene of industry and modernization, women went to work in the mills because of both monetary reasons and also because of the relative freedom it provided. Many things changed during the Industrial Revolution. In the late 1700s, Francis Cabot Lowell introduced the idea of mass manufacturing textiles and the factory setting to New England society. He had stolen the secrets of such a set-up from British factories. Although the basic machinery and ideas were the same, there was one significant difference. Instead of hiring orphans and other children in poverty, the mills in America decided to hire young women from Yankee farming …show more content…
As the pay for working in the mills is more than other jobs, it would be an obvious choice for women looking to support themselves or their families. Because of the superior pay that came from working in the mills, many girls were drawn to them. Working in the textile mills gave women relative freedom. In a letter home to her parents, a mill girl named Sally Rice wrote, “I have earned me enough to school me for awhile.” She went on to explain the various places her money was going. They could not have gotten this opportunity elsewhere. Women finally had the means to do what they wanted. Working in the mills also allowed women to get a higher education. “In the evening, mill hands gathered to hear speakers from the best universities-” (background essay). The workers would not ordinarily have this opportunity since they did not come from wealthy
Though the Industrial Revolution was supposed to bring an easier lifestyle to the world, however in reality only gave factory owners a chance to increase the amount of product they could produce within a shorter amount of time, and this prompted them to hire people desperate enough for jobs who would be paid in small sums of money to produce large amounts of product. Camelot on the Merrimack, this title is ironic, for Lowell was no fairy tale “Camelot.” For the girls, life in the textile factories was unmitigated
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
Many of us complain about the tough hours we work or the amount of chores we have to complete, but think about the truly harsh conditions that young girls and women had to work in the textile industry with very little pay and no accolades. Back in the 18th century, when the Industrial Revolution struck, it made it hard for female mill workers to enjoy being employed. Due to the terrible working conditions, the amount of hours worked, and the low wages were a few of the similarities that the female mill workers in England and Japan shared.
Imagine being forced to work in conditions that might cause you to lose a limb, to be beaten daily, or to be left with long term respiratory conditions. These terrible conditions were realities to families who worked in textile factories in the 1700’s. England was the first to adopt textile factories which would benefit with mass production of cotton material. According to the power point, “Industrial Revolution; Life in English Factories”, low and unskilled workers, often children, ran the machines and moved material, this helped lower the cost of goods. During this time, commissions investigated the working conditions of the factories.
Women of the nineteenth century had very set expectations. There were only two types of women: upper class bourgeoisie and lower class farmer’s wives or daughters. Women were considered physically weaker to men, which meant that they were best suited to the domestic sphere while the men workers and made the money. The mill girls defied all of this, and created their own class of women: wage earning middle class women. These women were not like farmers’ wives that were typically uneducated, nor like the bourgeoisie women that were educated, by mostly in domestic and “womanly” skills. The mill girls went to college if they so desired, most of the time doing that in the stead of getting married and becoming a housewife. The mill girls were a
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
The Industrial Revolution in America began to develop in the mid-eighteen hundreds after the Civil War. Prior to this industrial growth the work force was mainly based in agriculture, especially in the South (“Industrial Revolution”). The advancement in machinery and manufacturing on a large scale changed the structure of the work force. Families began to leave the farm and relocate to larger settings to work in the ever-growing industries. One area that saw a major change in the work force was textile manufacturing. Towns in the early nineteen hundreds were established around mills, and workers were subjected to strenuous working conditions. It would take decades before these issues were addressed. Until then, people worked and struggled for a life for themselves and their families. While conditions were harsh in the textile industry, it was the sense of community that sustained life in the mill villages.
In 1822, a group of Boston merchants and traders began their campaign to transform a riverbank below the thirty-foot falls of the Merrimack River into "the greatest textile manufacturing establishment in the country." These capitalists dug and improved the Merrimack canal, constructed machine shops, and built housing for mill executives, foremen and operatives. The cotton mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, and other New England sites began to employ the first female industrial labor force in the United States. Almost twenty years later, factory workers wrote and edited the Lowell Offering, a literary magazine showcasing the virtues and talents of the female operatives in verse, essays and short fiction (Eisler, 13-22).
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.
The Industrial Revolution was an era between 1780 and 1850 where new inventions and machinery flourished, replacing human labor with machines in the production and manufacturing of goods. The Cottage Industry helped give rise to the Industrial Revolution with its inventions such as the flying shuttle, spinning jenny, water frame, and spinning mule, all of which were mainly operated by women. This opened new opportunities for women in the working industry but this also introduced working class injustices, gender exploitation, and standard-of-living issues. Women 's experiences in factories reflected the profound social changes of the revolution and continuities with traditional working-class ways of life through their poor working conditions, demoralization, and little reward for their hard work.
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 mills filled with girls from smaller towns who had good country morals and stayed away from the unpleasant urban conditions. These women workers were given the name mills girls. In 1836, Lowell boasted twenty mills with 6,000 workers: 85 percent of Lowell's labor force consisted of single women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine (Inventing America p.394).
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.
Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market instigates significant controversy and dispute in many of its critics and readers, despite its deceptively simple form. As such, many individuals have proposed theories regarding the poem's convoluted meanings and challenging messages. However the presence of the apparent sexual references and innuendoes presented in the poem inspire much of the disagreement surrounding Rossetti’s intentions. Nevertheless, Christina Rossetti's canonical poem continues to fascinate and enchant its readers due to insightful evaluation of Victorian female sexual ideologies and expectations. Often seen as a didactic fairytale, the controversial poem can, more importantly, be perceived as a provocative feminist text which explores deviant sexuality and female desire in the Victorian age, with an unusual but seamless metaphor that offers powerful implications. As a result, Rossetti addresses feminine sensuality and desire by concealing her controversial lessons through an acceptable format--seductively exposing the values of the Victorian culture. Consequently, within its vivid images and themes, Rossetti offers a revolutionary perspective which defies these confinements, as she romantically critiques the conventions and expectations of society through a narrative of forbidden female sexuality and independence.