Lowell Mills The Lowell Mills were textile factories in Lowell, Massachusetts. These factories started popping up in the brink of the Industrial Revolution. These factories were very unlike many other factories that we think of because these were factories were people (mostly young women) are working in these factories, but also live on site. These young females were usually the ages 15-30 years old. This made up close to about seventy-five percent of the whole textile factory. These factories were very controversial because women were not usually working in these times. These young women decided to come to these factories to help make ends meet or try and get an education. The working quarters were very packed having usually 80 women in these small crapped rooms. This working condition would have never been able to work in today’s working factories. The living quarters where very small and where not up to standards by any means. These women where packed in like sardines and they had curfews by ten at night. These women also had very strict regulations to follow throughout the work day and many of these women did everything together. There overseers were usually men and they were pushed to work super-fast and super hard. The pay was more than they would get paid in many other places, but wasn’t very good for the hours they had to put in and the strict rules they had to obey. As time went on many of these women would see pay cuts and they would go on strikes, but these
One in every eight girls worked outside the home. The average age for women to start working was 8-12 years. Lower class women were servants, factory workers, and prostitutes while upper class women mainly worked in the home. Working women were constantly controlled by men no matter what the age. Whether it was with low wages or poor working conditions, women were treated wrong. Gayle V. Fischer documented in his article, WOMEN, “As middle-class women participated in reform movements and began campaigning for women's rights, the Lowell mill workers agitated for better pay and working conditions. These workers had come to expect a certain level of respect from the mill owners. When the owners responded to increased competition and poor business conditions with sharp reductions in wages and increases in the rents they charged in their boardinghouses, many women workers were outraged. As conditions continued to decline during the 1840s, mill owners began to turn to newly arrived immigrant women, who would accept lower pay and more work.” Fischer is arguing that women worked hard and in poor conditions. Eventually women were losing jobs and the mill owners were hiring cheaper workers. When the mill owners lowered the pay, many women workers decided to walk out, causing the mills to be in a bind due to being shorthanded. The women built local organizations as well to back up their protests. The Factory Girls’ Association formed
Woman along with the children were affected while working during the industrial revolution. During 1834 and 1836 Harriet Martineau, a British feminist and abolitionist, visited America and enthusiastically embraced the social implications of the Industrial Revolution, (DTA, 223). Martineau compared the lifestyle of women to slaves and said the United States contradicted the principles of the Declaration of Independence. She did believe though with some progress that it could become New England’s new industrial order. One of the Mill factories Martineau visited, Waltham Mill, was a prime example of the scheduled lifestyle of women mill workers. Women Mill workers of all ages worked at Waltham Mill, which I compared to a boarding school because of their strict schedules. The ladies had a time to wake up, to be at work, to eat, and to go to school. A lot of women did not mind the harsh conditions they lived and worked in because they fought for their equality of rights for a long time now.
Women working men’s jobs were not as welcomed in society as they were in factories. People held on to the belief that women should be house wives and not have to do much in the way of work. The man should provide for the family, and the women should take care of the family. Many of the women who worked were lower class and had to help provide for their families, or were the only providers for their families. Women who worked men’s jobs were looked down upon and thought to be no better than dirt. Although women working in factories were still women, men did not show them the same respect as they did a woman working as a secretary or teacher.
While reading Chapter 17: A New Industrial and Labor Order, the Gibson Girl and other class material, the concepts of gender by the end of the Gilded Age / beginning of the Progressive Era was different than previous ideas; women were not part of, nor did they contribute to the labor force before this period in history. The new economic order provided women with new opportunities in the workforce. From 1870 to 1910, women in the workplace tremendously increased, however, many of them were employed in domestic service occupations, mainly textile and garment positions. Even though women had new opportunities in the workforce and did the same work as men, women’s pay was unequal and they were paid way less. This created hostility and conflicts in and out of the workplace.
During the mid-nineteenth century, entrepreneurial textile company owners wanted to find a way to maximize profit while minimizing costs, and due to the Rhode Island system, and having to pay every working man a living wage, too much money was being wasted in paying the workers and it drove the cost of their products to go up. However, there was no law in place that said the owners of the factories must pay women a living wage, so textile companies started to recruit women farmworkers to leave the farm and come work in their factories. attempted to regulate the lives of their female workers by making them live by strict rule sets that dictated what they could or could not do throughout their day to day lives while working at the factories.
The factories were not good for the health of the workers. The first 4 talked about the conditions of the factories. It said that they were hot in the summer and cold in the winter because there were no air conditioning or heating. It also said that the owners of the factories did not care about the workers but only the money. Also, the kids that worked there had to do hard jobs and would commonly have to work in underground coal mines.The last 3 talked about the workers trying to change things. They would have what you call strikes. It was illegal and if they got caught, they could lose their job. They also asked for only 10 hours of work. They did not get it, so they would refuse to work until they changed their work hours. And in 1842, a
Although the times were tough and the pay was not that great, women wanted the opportunity to contribute to the home, or to be economically sound. They wanted freedom from others and to help themselves to items they wanted to purchase. They would go to Lowell and get employed by the mills to weave cotton and to live in a social climate.
In 1909 women from all across New York made a strike against the “garment factories of New York City” (Carson et al 1). The Women’s Trade Union League supported these fearless individuals and promoted the cause of fighting for better wages and less working hours. This strike went on for an entire three months and is better known as the “Uprising of 20,000.” The strike ultimately worked and women got “better working conditions in the garment factories” (Greenwald 1; Carson et al 1). This would not have been possible without the fearlessness and tenacity of the thousands of women and the encouragement from the Women’s Trade Union League.
There were many great inventions and changes in everyday life during the mid-1800’s. One of the largest transformations was that of the development of factories. The growth of such industry caused a great need for workers. Women were able to answer those employment pleas due to the technological developments having allowed for women to take on a greater role in society; especially so, the labor force. One business, the Lowell Mills, opened it’s doors specifically to women. At first, the people saw this opening to be profane due to a woman’s natural role in the household; providing religious and moral teachings as specifically explained in the ‘Cult of Domesticity’ document. Despite such basic views, the roles of women in society began to adapt as the needs of farmers began to decrease. With such a predicament, many women were left with little to no options; their
No matter what any other historian might say, the Industrial Revolution was a very sad and crucial time for many families of which were poor and working in factories. The gender inequality situation in the workplace relates to all of this because in this time period, most of the CEO’s / bosses of these factories or coal mines were male dominant. Females, which were often considered the weaker sex, never really had any say in what they could or couldn’t do because men were the dominant sex and had more power over women. Women in this time period had suffered from inequality because of a more powerful person’s ignorance and bias.
One of the fields of work that women stepped into during the industrial revolution were writing and being authors of various literature and articles, because they were empowered by the woman 's entrance into the work place, and inspired by the bad work conditions they were forced to work in (NWHM, 2007). Another field was direct work in the factories, women had smaller hands and arms than the men working in the factories with machinery did, so women were hired for their ability to get in between machines, if necessary, to do maintenance that men could not do because of their size. Women were hired for the reason that they would work for less pay than men would as well, because at the time of this industrial revolution, it was not seen as a big deal for women to be treated with equal wages to men, as they were new to the job field that was not staying in the home and taking care of the small children, keeping house, and relying on their husbands for bringing home money (Tilly, 1994).
This quote shows how women employed at the factories were not supported by the rest of the country, not even from other women. They were expected to help out, yet they were treated poorly when they did.
The workers in the industrial era were up against many changes that they needed to adapt to. Often times in the high Industrial age, faster machines enabled efficient production at the compromise of the worker’s safety, thus needing to adapt to a more hostile work environment. The ever-dwindling salary of workers in the factories and mills catalyzed the need to adapt to a new, poverty-stricken lifestyle. Workers who sailed from Europe in hopes of securing job in America were received with little respect in the industry, and they now needed to adapt to an American Industry that they had no experience in. These worker injustices ultimately led up to strikes and the governmental evaluation of big manufacturers such as Pullman’s industries.
The mill girls lived in these boarding houses in Biddeford Maine. They had this mother that was in charge of the boarding house. Most of the time these house wives would accomplish anything with help from the girls. They would save up their money for each other, sometimes for themselves, and the house. These women could make dresses, clothing, food, feed the chickens, and make milk and butter. These girls started working at the mills at the age of 13. These women and sometimes the girls would help pay for their brothers to go to college. Women worked as hard as men but they didn’t make as much money. The women that were in the mills didn’t get treated fairly like the men. About 800 women got recruited from the mills because they thought
True womanhood created an ideology that was very beneficial to the textile industry (Hapke, 2001) as it was based strictly on a profit driven management system, which viewed its workers as factory hands rather than domestic workers. Lowell Mills was a company that used this ideology to it’s full potential. The making of a product was broken down into specific categories so that each person had a specific task and repeated that task over and over and over again. Instead of one person making a product from start to finish, each person was given one task to perform repeatedly. For example one person would be spinning the yarn while the next worker would be weaving cloths (Hapke, 2001). This would increase productivity so that products could be manufactured at a more efficient rate that would generate more profit.