Woman's History Month: Harriet Hanson Robinson
A group of Boston capitalists built a major textile manufacturing center in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the second quarter of the 19th century. The first factories recruited women from rural New England as their labor force. These young women, far from home, lived in rows of boardinghouses adjacent to the growing number of mills. The industrial production of textiles was highly profitable,and the number of factories in Lowell and other mill towns increased. More mills led to overproduction, which led to a drop in prices and profits. Mill owners reduced wages and speeded up the pace of work. The young female operatives organized to protest these wage cuts in 1834 and 1836. Harriet Hanson Robinson was one of those factory operatives; she began work in Lowell at the age of ten, later becoming an author and advocate of women’s suffrage. In 1898 she published Loom and Spindle, a memoir of her Lowell experiences, where she recounted the strike of 1836. - Editor's Commentary: by Harriet Hanson Robinson, 1836
At age ten, Robinson went to work in the mills. Her mother needed the extra income and Robinson wanted to help out. She was sent to work as a doffer—a worker who took full bobbins off the spinning frame and replaced them with empty ones. The work was fairly easy; doffers were needed only fifteen minutes out of every hour. "The rest of the time," she later wrote, "was their own, and when the overseer was kind, they were allowed to read, knit, or even to go outside the mill-yard and play."
When Robinson was eleven and working as a doffer, workers struck because of a proposed pay cut that would allow mill owners to pay more to the boardinghouse managers. This time, Robinson was directly involved in the strike, leading a room full of girls into the march. She wrote: "I, who began to think they would not go out, after all their talk, became impatient, and started on ahead, saying, with childish bravado, 'I don't care what you do, I am going to turn out,' and was followed by the others." This time, thousands—one-quarter of Lowell's working population—marched in the streets. This turnout, which lasted a month, produced some effects; several of the mills reversed the wage cut. Only later did Robinson realize that her action hurt her mother, who, as a boardinghouse matron, could have used the extra income.
When she was fifteen, Robinson took two years off from working in the mills to attend Lowell High School.
Mills offered women the opportunity to make their own way in life. Becoming wage earners for the first time empowered these women with a new sense of confidence. Even the large numbers of women who worked in the mills to finance their brothers' education came away from the experience more confident and self-assured.
As early as 1841, when Robinson still worked in the mills, workers were complaining about the inhuman conditions, claiming they were treated like machines. The piece below, titled "The Spirit of Discontent," was published in The Offering: "I am going home, where I shall not be obliged to rise so early in the morning, nor be dragged about by the factory bell, nor confined in a close noisy room from morning to night. I shall not stay here…. Up before day, at the clang of the bell,—and out of the mill by the clang of the bell—into the mill, and at work in obedience to that ding-dong of a bell—just as though we were so many living machines."
https://online.smc.edu/
Eyewitness to History: The Lowell Girls Go Out on Strike (1836)
As years passed, mills sped up production and gave workers increased work loads. Wages dropped and working conditions worsened. Reporters described mill hands as working endlessly and "when they can toil no longer, they go home to die." Housing became cramped as more and more workers moved to mill towns. In one home, reported the Lowell Courier, 120 people lived under the same roof; in another case, 22 people made their home in a basement.
Now, workers, with the support of the public, fought for a shorter working day (ten hours) and better wages. By the mid-to late 1800s, mill girls were replaced by immigrants—Irish, Italian, and Portuguese—who were willing to work for lower wages. As the twentieth-century approached, mill towns like Lowell, Lawrence, and Holyoke teemed with mill workers, many of them immigrant men. Housing became scarce and overcrowded. Cramped conditions, improper air circulation, and unclean surroundings caused outbreaks of tuberculosis, cholera, and typhoid. One out of every three spinners, many under the age of twenty-five, would die before completing ten years in the factory. It was a far cry from the dismal round of life in these mill towns to the pleasant, spirited days that Robinson wrote about.
Source: Harriet Hanson Robinson, Loom and Spindle or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (New York, T. Y. Crowell, 1898)
