The Lowell Mill Girls were young female workers who came to work in industrial corporations in Lowell, Massachusetts, during the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The workers initially recruited by the corporations were daughters of propertied New England farmers, typically between the ages of 15 and 35.[1] By 1840, the height of the Industrial Revolution, the textile mills had recruited over 8,000 women, who came to make up nearly three-quarters of the mill workforce, at a very slow rate, most were forced to work faster than they could.
Lowell is a city in the U.S. Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Located in Middlesex County, Lowell was a county seat until Massachusetts disbanded county government in 1999. With an estimated population of 109,945 in 2014, it is the fourth-largest city in Massachusetts, and the second-largest in the Boston metropolitan statistical area. The city is also part of a smaller Massachusetts statistical area called Greater Lowell, as well as New England's Merrimack Valley region.
Massachusetts, officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It borders on the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island to the south, New Hampshire and Vermont to the north, and New York to the west. The state is named after the Massachusett tribe, which once inhabited the east side of the area, and is one of the original thirteen states. The capital of Massachusetts is Boston, which is also the most populous city in New England. Over 80% of Massachusetts's population lives in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, a region influential upon American history, academia, and industry. Originally dependent on agriculture, fishing and trade, Massachusetts was transformed into a manufacturing center during the Industrial Revolution. During the 20th century, Massachusetts's economy shifted from manufacturing to services. Modern Massachusetts is a global leader in biotechnology, engineering, higher education, finance, and maritime trade.
The Industrial Revolution involved a shift in the United States from manual labor-based industry to more technical and machine-based manufacturing which greatly increased the overall production and economic growth of the United States, signifying a shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy widely accepted to have been a result of Samuel Slater's introduction of British Industrial methods in textile manufacturing to the United States, and necessitated by the War of 1812.
During the early period, women came to the mills of their own accord, for various reasons: to help a brother pay for college, for the educational opportunities offered in Lowell, or to earn supplementary income. Francis Cabot Lowell specifically emphasized the importance of providing housing and a form of education to mirror the boarding schools that were emerging in the 19th century. He also wanted to provide an environment that sharply contrasted the poor conditions of the British Mills. While their wages were only half of what men were paid, many women able to attain economic independence for the first time, free from controlling fathers and husbands. On average, the Lowell Mill Girls earned between three and four dollars per week. The cost of boarding ranged between seventy-five cents and $1.25, leaving a portion of their pay to themselves. As a result, while factory life would soon come to be viewed as oppressive, it enabled these women to challenge gender stereotypes. Women were also hired because some factory owners, such as Lowell, were less inclined to hire children for this lesser pay.[2]
As the nature of the new "factory system" became clear, however, many women joined the broader American labor movement, to protest the dramatic social changes of the Industrial Revolution. While they decried the deteriorating factory conditions, worker unrest in the 1840s was directed mainly against the loss of control over economic life. This loss of control, which came with the dependence on the corporations for a wage, was experienced as an attack on their dignity and independence. Though they lost strike after strike, Labor historian Philip Foner noted, observed, “they succeeded in raising serious questions about woman’s so-called ‘place’.”[3]
The labor history of the United States describes the history of organized labor, US labor law, and more general history of working people, in the United States. Beginning in the 1930s, unions became important components of the Democratic Party. However, some historians have not understood why no Labor Party emerged in the United States, in contrast to Western Europe.
In 1845, after a number of protests and strikes, many operatives came together to form the first union of working women in the United States, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. The Association adopted a newspaper called the Voice of Industry, in which workers published sharp critiques of the new industrialism. The Voice stood in sharp contrast to other literary magazines published by female operatives, such as the Lowell Offering, which painted a sanguine picture of life in the mills.
The Voice of Industry was a worker-run newspaper published between 1845–1848, at the height of the American Industrial Revolution. The Voice was centrally concerned with the dramatic social changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, as workers came to depend on corporations for a wage.
The Lowell Offering was a monthly periodical collected contributed works of poetry and non-fiction by the female textile workers of the Lowell, Massachusetts textile mills of the early American industrial revolution. It began in 1840 and lasted until 1845.
In 1813, businessman Francis Cabot Lowell formed a company, the Boston Manufacturing Company, and built a textile mill next to the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts. Unlike the earlier Rhode Island System, where only carding and spinning were done in a factory while the weaving was often put out to neighboring farms to be done by hand, the Waltham mill was the first integrated mill in the United States, transforming raw cotton into cotton cloth in one building.[4]
The Boston Manufacturing Company was a business that operated the first factory in America. It was organized in 1813 by Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Boston merchant, in partnership a group of investors known as The Boston Associates, for the manufacture of cotton textiles. It built the first integrated spinning and weaving factory in the world at Waltham, Massachusetts, using water power. They used plans for a power loom that he smuggled out of England as well as trade secrets from the earlier horse-powered Beverly Cotton Manufactory, of Beverly, Massachusetts, of 1788. This was the largest factory in the U.S., with a workforce of about 300. It was a very efficient, highly profitable mill that, with the aid of the Tariff of 1816, competed effectively with British textiles at a time when many smaller operations were being forced out of business. While the Rhode Island System that followed was famously employed by Samuel Slater, the Boston Associates improved upon it with the "Waltham System". The idea was successfully copied at Lowell, Massachusetts and elsewhere in New England. Many rural towns now had their own textile mills.
The Charles River is an 80-mile-long (129 km) long river in eastern Massachusetts. From its source in Hopkinton the river flows in a northeasterly direction, traveling through 23 cities and towns before reaching the Atlantic Ocean at Boston. The Native-American name for the Charles River was Quinobequin, meaning "meandering".
Waltham is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, and was an early center for the labor movement as well as a major contributor to the American Industrial Revolution. The original home of the Boston Manufacturing Company, the city was a prototype for 19th century industrial city planning, spawning what became known as the Waltham-Lowell system of labor and production. The city is now a center for research and higher education, home to Brandeis University and Bentley University. The population was 60,636 at the census in 2010.
In 1821, Francis C. Lowell's business associates, looking to expand the Waltham textile operations, purchased land around the Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River in East Chelmsford. Incorporated as the Town of Lowell in 1826, by 1840, the textile mills employed almost 8,000 workers — mostly women between the ages of 15 and 35.[5][6]
Pawtucket Falls is a waterfall on the Merrimack River at Lowell, Massachusetts. The waterfall and rapids below it drop a total of 32 feet in a little under a mile, and was an important fishing ground for the Pennacook Indians in pre-colonial times.
The Merrimack River is a 117-mile-long (188 km) river in the northeastern United States. It rises at the confluence of the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers in Franklin, New Hampshire, flows southward into Massachusetts, and then flows northeast until it empties into the Atlantic Ocean at Newburyport. From Pawtucket Falls in Lowell, Massachusetts, onward, the Massachusetts–New Hampshire border is roughly calculated as the line three miles north of the river.
The "City of Spindles", as Lowell came to be known, quickly became the center of the Industrial Revolution in America. New, large scale machinery, which had come to dominate the production of cloth by 1840, was being rapidly developed in lockstep with the equally new ways of organizing workers for mass production. Together, these mutually reinforcing technological and social changes produced staggering increases: between 1840 and 1860, the number of spindles in use went from 2.25 million to almost 5.25 million; bales of cotton used from 300,000 to nearly 1 million, and the number of workers from 72,000 to nearly 122,000.[7]
This tremendous growth translated directly into large profits for the textile corporations: between 1846 and 1850, for instance, the dividends of the Boston-based investors, the group of textile companies that founded Lowell, averaged 14% per year. Most corporations recorded similarly high profits during this period.
The social position of the factory girls had been degraded considerably in France and England. In her autobiography, Harriet Hanson Robinson (who worked in the Lowell mills from 1834–1848) suggests that "It was to overcome this prejudice that such high wages had been offered to women that they might be induced to become mill girls, in spite of the opprobrium that still clung to this degrading occupation.…" [8]
Factory conditions
The Lowell System combined large-scale mechanization with an attempt to improve the stature of its female workforce and workers. A few girls who came with their mothers or older sisters were as young as ten years old, some were middle-aged, but the average age was about 24.[6] Usually hired for contracts of one year (the average stay was about four years), new employees were given assorted tasks as spare hands and paid a fixed daily wage while more experienced loom operators would be paid by the piece. They were paired with more experienced women, who trained them in the ways of the factory.[5]
Conditions in the Lowell mills were severe by modern American standards. Employees worked from 5:00 am until 7:00 pm, for an average 73 hours per week.[5][6] Each room usually had 80 women working at machines, with two male overseers managing the operation. The noise of the machines was described by one worker as "something frightful and infernal", and although the rooms were hot, windows were often kept closed during the summer so that conditions for thread work remained optimal. The air, meanwhile, was filled with particles of thread and cloth.[9]
Charles Dickens, who visited in 1842, remarked favorably on the conditions: "I cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me a painful impression; not one young girl whom, assuming it to be matter of necessity that she should gain her daily bread by the labour of her hands, I would have removed from those works if I had had the power." [10] However, there was concern among many workers that foreign visitors were being presented with a sanitized view of the mills, by textile corporations who were trading on the image of the 'literary operative' to mask the grim realities of factory life. "Very pretty picture," wrote an operative named Juliana in the Voice of Industry, responding to a rosy account of life and learning in the mills, "but we who work in the factory know the sober reality to be quite another thing altogether." The "sober reality" was twelve to fourteen hours of dreary, exhausting work, which many workers experienced as hostile to intellectual development. [11]
Living quarters
The investors or factory owners built hundreds of boarding houses near the mills, where textile workers lived year-round. A curfew of 10:00 pm was common, and men were generally not allowed inside. About 26 women lived in each boarding house, with up to six sharing a bedroom.[5] One worker described her quarters as "a small, comfortless, half-ventilated apartment containing some half a dozen occupants".[12] Life in these boarding houses was typically strict. The houses were often run by widows who kept a close eye on the workers and made church attendance mandatory for all of the girls. [13]
Trips away from the boarding house were uncommon; the Lowell girls worked and ate together. However, half-days and short paid vacations were possible due to the nature of the piece-work; one girl would work the machines of another in addition to her own such that no wages would be lost. These close quarters fostered community as well as resentment. Newcomers were mentored by older women in areas such as dress, speech, behavior, and the general ways of the community. The women became very close with one another due to the extensive time they spent together both during work and after work when they would engage in cultural activities, such as music and literature. [14]
Workers often recruited their friends or relatives to the factories, creating a familial atmosphere among many of the rank and file.[5] The Lowell girls were expected to attend church and demonstrate morals befitting proper society. The 1848 Handbook to Lowell noted that the company would "not employ anyone who is habitually absent from public worship on the Sabbath, or known to be guilty of immorality".[15]
As for many young women, the allure of Lowell was in the opportunities afforded for further study and learning. Most had already completed some measure of formal education and were resolutely bent on self-improvement. Upon their arrival, they found a vibrant, lively working-class intellectual culture: workers read voraciously in Lowell's city library and reading rooms and subscribed to the large, informal "circulating libraries" which trafficked in novels. Many even pursued literary composition. Defying factory rules, operatives would affix verses to their spinning frames, "to train their memories", and pin-up mathematical problems in the rooms where they worked. In the evenings, many enrolled in courses offered by the mills and attended public lectures at the Lyceum, a theatre built at company expense (offering 25 lectures per season for 25 cents). The Voice of Industry is alive with notices for upcoming lectures, courses, and meetings on topics ranging from astronomy to music. ("Lectures and Learning", Voice of Industry)
The corporations happily publicized the efforts of these "literary mill girls", boasting that they were the "most superior class of factory operative", impressing foreign visitors. But this masked the bitter opposition of many workers to the 12–14 hours of exhausting, monotonous work, which they saw was corrosive to their desire to learn. As one operative asked in theVoice, "who, after thirteen hours of steady application to monotonous work, can sit down and apply her mind to deep and long-continued thought?" Another Lowell operative expressed a similar view: "I well remember the chagrin I often felt when attending lectures, to find myself unable to keep awake...I am sure few possessed a more ardent desire for knowledge than I did, but such was the effect of the long hour system, that my chief delight was, after the evening meal, to place my aching feet in an easy position, and read a novel."[16]
The Lowell Offering
Cover of The Lowell Offering, Series 1, Number 1 (1840)
In October 1840, the Reverend Abel Charles Thomas of the First Universalist Church organized a monthly publication by and for the Lowell girls. As the magazine grew in popularity, women contributed poems, ballads, essays, and fiction – often using their characters to report on conditions and situations in their lives.[17]
The "Offering"s contents were by turns serious and farcical. In a letter in the first issue, "A Letter about Old Maids", the author suggested that "sisters, spinsters, lay-nuns, & c" were an essential component of God's "wise design".[18] Later issues – particularly in the wake of labor unrest in the factories – included an article about the value of organizing and an essay about suicide among the Lowell girls.[19]
Strikes of 1834 and 1836
The initial effort of the investors and managers to recruit female textile workers brought generous wages for the time (three to five dollars per week), but with the economic depression of the early 1830s, the Board of Directors decided to and proposed a reduction in wages. This, in turn, led to organized "turn-outs" or strikes.
In February 1834, the Board of Directors of Lowell's textile mills requested a 15% wage reduction, to go into effect on March 1. After a series of meetings, the female textile workers organized a "turn-out" or strike. The women involved in "turn-out" immediately withdrew their savings, causing "a run" on two local banks.[20]
The strike failed and within days the protesters had all returned to work at reduced pay or left town, but the "turn-out" or strike was an indication of the determination among the Lowell female textile workers to take labor action. This dismayed the agents of the factories, who portrayed the turnout as a betrayal of femininity. William Austin, agent of the Lawrence Manufacturing Company, wrote to his Board of Directors, "notwithstanding the friendly and disinterested advice which has been on all proper occassions[sic] communicated to the girls of the Lawrence mills a spirit of evil omen … has prevailed, and overcome the judgment and discretion of too many".[5]
Again, in response to a severe economic depression and the high costs of living, in January 1836, the Board of Directors of Lowell's textile mills absorbed an increase in the textile workers' rent to help in the crisis faced by the company boarding house keepers. As the economic calamity continued in October 1836, the Directors proposed an additional rent hike to be paid by the textile workers living in the company boarding houses.[21] The female textile workers responded immediately in protest by forming the Factory Girls' Association and organizing a "turn-out" or strike. Harriet Hanson Robinson, an eleven-year-old doffer at the time of the strike, recalled in her memoirs: "One of the girls stood on a pump and gave vent to the feelings of her companions in a neat speech, declaring that it was their duty to resist all attempts at cutting down the wages. This was the first time a woman had spoken in public in Lowell, and the event caused surprise and consternation among her audience."[6]
This "turn-out" or strike attracted over 1,500 workers – nearly twice the number two years previously - causing Lowell's textile mills to run far below capacity.[5] Unlike the "turn-out" or strike in 1834, in 1836 there was enormous community support for the striking female textile workers. The proposed rent hike was seen as a violation of the written contract between the employers and the employees. The "turn-out" persisted for weeks and eventually the Board of Directors of Lowell's textile mills rescinded the rent hike. Although the "turn-out" was a success, the weakness of the system was evident, and worsened further in the Panic of 1837.
Lowell Female Labor Reform Association
1836 Constitution of the Lowell Factory Girls Association
The sense of community that arose from working and living together contributed directly to the energy and growth of the first union of women workers, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. Started by 12 operatives in January 1845, its membership grew to 500 within six months, and continued to expand rapidly. The Association was run completely by the women themselves: they elected their own officers and held their own meetings; they helped organize the city's female workers, and set up branches in other mill towns. They organized fairs, parties, and social gatherings. Unlike many middle-class women activists, the operatives found considerable support from working-class men who welcomed them into their reform organizations and advocated for their treatment as equals.
One of its first actions was to send petitions signed by thousands of textile workers to the Massachusetts General Court demanding a ten-hour work day. In response, the Massachusetts Legislature established a committee chaired by William Schouler, Representative from Lowell, to investigate and hold public hearings, during which workers testified about conditions in the factories and the physical demands of their twelve-hour days. These were the first investigations into labor conditions by a governmental body in the United States.[22] The 1845 Legislative Committee determined that it was not state legislature's responsibility to control the hours of work. The LFLRA called its chairman, William Schouler, a "tool"[5] and worked to defeat him in his next campaign for the State Legislature.[5] A complex election[23] Schouler lost to another Whig candidate over the issue of railroads. The impact of working men [Democrats] and working women [non-voting] was very limited. The next year Schouler was re-elected to the State Legislature.[24]
The Lowell female textile workers continued to petition the Massachusetts Legislature and legislative committee hearings became an annual event. Although the initial push for a ten-hour workday was unsuccessful, the LFLRA continued to grow, affiliating with the New England Workingmen's Association and publishing articles in that organization's Voice of Industry, a pro-labor newspaper.[5] This direct pressure forced the Board of Directors of Lowell's textile mills to reduce the workday by 30 minutes in 1847. The FLRA's organizing efforts spilled over into other nearby towns.[5] In 1847, New Hampshire became the first state to pass a law for a ten-hour workday, although there was no enforcement and workers were often requested to work longer days. By 1848, the LFLRA dissolved as a labor reform organization. Lowell textile workers continued to petition and pressure for improved working conditions,[5] and in 1853, the Lowell corporations reduced the workday to eleven hours.
The New England textile industry was rapidly expanding in the 1850s and 1860s. Unable to recruit enough Yankee women to fill all the new jobs, to supplement the workforce textile managers turned to survivors of the Great Irish Famine who had recently immigrated to the United States in large numbers. During the Civil War, many of Lowell's cotton mills closed, unable to acquire bales of raw cotton from the South. After the war, the textile mills reopened, recruiting French Canadian men and women. Although large numbers of Irish and French Canadian immigrants moved to Lowell to work in the textile mills, Yankee women still dominated the workforce until the mid-1880s.[25]
Political character of labor activity
The Lowell girls' organizing efforts were notable not only for the "unfeminine" participation of women, but also for the political framework used to appeal to the public. Framing their struggle for shorter work days and better pay as a matter of rights and personal dignity, they sought to place themselves in the larger context of the American Revolution. During the 1834 "turn-out" or strike – they warned that "the oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us,"[5] the women included a poem which read:
Let oppression shrug her shoulders, And a haughty tyrant frown, And little upstart Ignorance, In mockery look down. Yet I value not the feeble threats Of Tories in disguise, While the flag of Independence O'er our noble nation flies.[26]
In the 1836 strike, this theme returned in a protest song:
Oh! isn't it a pity, such a pretty girl as I Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die? Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave, For I'm so fond of liberty, That I cannot be a slave.[26]
The most striking example of this political overtone can be found in a series of tracts published by the Female Labor Reform Association entitled Factory Tracts. In the first of these, subtitled "Factory Life As It Is", the author proclaims "that our rights cannot be trampled upon with impunity; that we WILL not longer submit to that arbitrary power which has for the last ten years been so abundantly exercised over us."[12]
This conceptualization of labor activity as philosophically linked with the American project in democracy has been instrumental for other labor organizing campaigns, as noted frequently by MIT professor and social critic Noam Chomsky,[27] who has cited this extended quote from the Lowell Mill Girls on the topic of wage slavery:
When you sell your product, you retain your person. But when you sell your labour, you sell yourself, losing the rights of free men and becoming vassals of mammoth establishments of a monied aristocracy that threatens annihilation to anyone who questions their right to enslave and oppress.
Those who work in the mills ought to own them, not have the status of machines ruled by private despots who are entrenching monarchic principles on democratic soil as they drive downwards freedom and rights, civilization, health, morals and intellectuality in the new commercial feudalism.[28]
The Lawrence textile strike, also known as the Bread and Roses strike, was a strike of immigrant workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912 led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Prompted by a two-hour pay cut corresponding to a new law shortening the workweek for women, the strike spread rapidly through the town, growing to more than twenty thousand workers and involving nearly every mill in Lawrence. Starting January 1, 1912, the Massachusetts government started to enforce a law that allowed women to work a maximum of 54 hours, rather than 56 hours. Ten days later, they found out that pay had been reduced along with the cut in hours.
The factory system is a method of manufacturing using machinery and division of labour. Because of the high capital cost of machinery and factory buildings, factories were typically privately owned by wealthy individuals who employed the operative labour. Use of machinery with the division of labour reduced the required skill level of workers and also increased the output per worker.
The Waltham-Lowell system was a labor and production model employed during the rise of the American textile industry in the United States, particularly in New England, amid the larger backdrop of rapid expansion of the Industrial Revolution the early 19th century.
In labor disputes, a walkout is a labor strike, the act of employees collectively leaving the workplace as an act of protest.
The New York shirtwaist strike of 1909, also known as the Uprising of the 20,000, was a labor strike primarily involving Jewish women working in New York shirtwaist factories. It was the largest strike by female American workers up to that date. Led by Clara Lemlich and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and supported by the National Women's Trade Union League of America (NWTUL), the strike began in November 1909.
The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company was a textile manufacturer which founded Manchester, New Hampshire. From modest beginnings in near wilderness, it grew throughout the 19th century into the largest cotton textile plant in the world. At its peak, Amoskeag was unrivaled both for the quality and quantity of its products. But with great size came an inability to adapt. In the early 20th century, the business failed to adapt to changing economic and social conditions.
Sarah George Bagley was a labor leader in New England during the 1840s; an advocate of shorter workdays for factory operatives and mechanics, she campaigned to make ten hours of labor per day the maximum in Massachusetts.
Lowell Mills refers to the 19th-century mills that operated in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, which was named after Francis Cabot Lowell; he introduced a new manufacturing system called the "Lowell System", also known as the "Waltham-Lowell System".
Life in Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution underwent rapid social and economic changes due to the developments of mechanized working methods based, in part, on the factory system and the steam engine. As a result, work became more regimented and disciplined, and moved outside the home. Large segments of the rural population migrated to the cities causing dramatic lifestyle changes.
William Schouler was an American journalist, politician and Adjutant General of Massachusetts during the American Civil War.
The 1835 Paterson textile strike took place in Paterson, New Jersey, involved more than 2,000 workers from 20 textile mills across the city. The strikers, many of whom were children and of Irish descent, were seeking a reduction in daily working hours from thirteen and a half hours to eleven hours. Support from other workers in Paterson and nearby cities allowed the strikers to sustain their efforts for two weeks. Employers refused to negotiate with the workers, and were able to break the strike by unilaterally declaring a reduction in work hours to twelve hours daily during the week and nine hours on Saturdays. Many leaders of the strike and their family were blacklisted by employers in Paterson after it ended.
The 1926 Passaic textile strike was a work stoppage by over 15,000 woolen mill workers in and around Passaic, New Jersey, over wage issues in several factories in the vicinity. Conducted in its initial phase by a "United Front Committee" organized by the Trade Union Educational League of the Workers (Communist) Party, the strike began on January 25, 1926, and officially ended only on March 1, 1927, when the final mill being picketed signed a contract with the striking workers. It was the first Communist-led work stoppage in the United States. The event was memorialized by a seven reel silent movie intended to generate sympathy and funds for the striking workers.
Harriet Jane Farley was an American writer and abolitionist, editor of the Lowell Offering from 1842-1845, and editor of the New England Offering from 1847–1850.
Harriet Jane Hanson Robinson, who worked as a bobbin doffer in a Massachusetts cotton mill as a child, was involved in a worker's strike, became a poet and author and played an important role in the women's suffrage movement in the United States.
The Cigar makers strike of New York lasted from Mid-October 1877 until Mid-February 1878. Ten thousand workers walked out at the height of the strike, demanding better wages, shorter hours and better working conditions, especially in the tenement manufacturing locations. The strike was supported by the Cigar Makers International Union of America, local chapter 144.
The 1928 New Bedford textile strike was a mass work stoppage of approximately 30,000 machinery operatives in several of the large cotton mills located in New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA. The strike, which ran for several months during the spring and summer of 1928, is remembered for the prominent role played by the Workers (Communist) Party of America in mobilizing the immigrant workers of the region.
The National Federation of Women Workers (NFWW) was a trade union in the United Kingdom active between 1906 and 1921 when it merged with the GMB. It was established by Scottish suffragist Mary Macarthur, on the basis of being a general trade union "open to all women in unorganised trades or who were not admitted to their appropriate trade union." Some of the initial aims of the union were to campaign against sweated industries and for a legal minimum wage for women.
↑ Dublin, Thomas. "Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.
↑ Farley, Harriet (1844). "Editorial: Two Suicides". Lowell Offering. Series 4, No. 9. Online at Primary Sources: Workshops in American History. Retrieved on August 27, 2007.
Cook, Sylvia Jenkins. "'Oh Dear! How the Factory Girls Do Rig Up!': Lowell's Self-Fashioning Workingwomen," New England Quarterly (2010) 83#2 pp.219–249 in JSTOR
Dublin, Thomas. "Lowell Millhands" in Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (1994) pp 77–118.
istory 16 (1975): 99-116. Available online through Lemelson Center, Smithsonian.
Mrozowski, Stephen A. et al. eds. Living on the Boott: Historical Archeology at the Boott Mills Boardinghouses, Lowell, Massachusetts (University of Massachusetts Press, 1996)
Ranta, Judith A. Women and Children of the Mills: An Annotated Guide to Nineteenth-Century American Textile Factory Literature (Greenwood Press, 1999),
Zonderman, David A. Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815-1850 (Oxford University Press, 1992)
Primary sources
Eisler, Benita, ed. The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1840-1945) (1997) excerpt and text search
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