“She has worked in a Factory,” is almost enough to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girl. What becomes of them then? Few of them ever marry fewer still ever return to their native places with reputations unimpaired. The average life, working life we mean, of the girls that come to Lowell, for instance, from Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, we have been assured, is only about three years. The bills of mortality in these factory villages are not striking, we admit, for the poor girls when they can toil no longer go home to die. the great mass wear out their health, spirits, and morals, without becoming one whit better off than when they commenced labor. Of the common operatives, few, if any, by their wages, acquire a competence. There is a dark side, moral as well as physical. They are said to be healthy, contented, and happy. The operatives are well dressed, and we are told, well paid. Excerpts Orestes Brownson, The Laboring Classes: An Article from the Boston Quarterly Review, Boston: Benjamin H. “The Lowell Offering Index,” by Judith Ranta, Center for Lowell History, University of Massachusetts Lowell Libraries. The author was probably Harriet Jane Farley, a mill girl who eventually became editor of the Lowell Offering. It is an attack on the entire wage system but particularly focuses on how factory jobs affect the mill girls: “‘She has worked in a Factory,’” Brownson argues, “is almost enough to damn to infamy the most worthy and virtuous girl.” In response, “A Factory Girl” published a defense of the mill girls in the December 1840 issue of the Lowell Offering, a journal of articles, fiction, and poetry written by and for the Lowell factory operatives. The Transcendentalist reformer Orestes Brownson first published “The Laboring Classes” in his journal, the Boston Quarterly Review, in July 1840. Others criticized the entire wage-labor factory system as a form of slavery and actively condemned and campaigned against the harsh working conditions and long hours and the increasing divisions between workers and factory owners. Many observers saw this challenge to the traditional roles of women as a threat to the American way of life. Unlike most young women of that era, they were free from parental authority, were able to earn their own money, and had broader educational opportunities. For many of the mill girls, employment brought a sense of freedom. The Lowell mills were the first hint of the industrial revolution to come in the United States, and with their success came two different views of the factories. These “operatives”-so-called because they operated the looms and other machinery-were primarily women and children from farming backgrounds. It introduced a new system of integrated manufacturing to the United States and established new patterns of employment and urban development that were soon replicated around New England and elsewhere.īy 1840, the factories in Lowell employed at some estimates more than 8,000 textile workers, commonly known as mill girls or factory girls. Lowell, Massachusetts, named in honor of Francis Cabot Lowell, was founded in the early 1820s as a planned town for the manufacture of textiles.
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