In “Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills,” author Thomas Dublin gives the reader insight into the working life and its elements in the early industrial revolution by using the story of the Lowell Mill girls. It was a time when America was undergoing the transformation from an agricultural based country to a powerful industrialized nation.
Unlike today’s stereotypes of men holding the more strenuous factory jobs, in that day, women occupied them. Because most of the women were between the ages of 15 and 30, the majority of them were unmarried and just now leaving their homes. The factory managers knew this, and as a result, boarding houses were created specifically for these women. The majority of the Lowell workers lived in them, therefore, they were almost constantly in the company of their coworkers. This caused a strong sense of worker community. In their free time, many simply spent their time with their roommates and other boarding house tenants. This was the beginning of a chain reaction.
In the Lowell factories, work was not very easy. In fact, it was quiet dangerous. The women did not just have one task; they held many. They may have held one certain duty, but for many different machines. In addition, because women had so much to do and worked such long days, they often became extremely fatigued. Both of these factors heightened the health risks of the factory work.
To the women’s standards, at times, many accepted their pay as adequate because it paid for their living quarters and they still had some money left for saving. Unfortunately for them,
the factories were extremely efficient, therefore they overproduced, causing the value of the fabric they made to decrease. The managers then decided to lower wages. Obviously, this made the women angry. This is where the benefits of their sense of community come into play. They would come to depend on each other to reach their goals.
The women would call special groups and meetings to discuss how to best solve the wage decrease problems. They would approach the managers and relay to them the general dislike of the wage cut, and then they would plead for restoration of normal wages. Obviously, the majority of the time, the men did not care to cooperate. Therefore, the women would perform organized strikes. They would do this by organizing marches and protests, and by refusing to attend work. They would stay out of work for months. Still, the managers did not give in. As a result, some women would be angry enough to quit and return back to their homes. Others would unhappily return back to their underpaid jobs.
Factory work in the early industrial revolution was not easy. The women were seriously underrepresented. When managers decided wages needed to be cut, they were simply cut. It was not all to an end, though. What the women did was courageous, especially in a time when women were still extremely oppressed. The women intelligently organized groups and fought for what they sought in attempt to solve their working problems. They created what could be called rough models of later labor unions. Although life was hard for laborers, they acted in ways that were new and innovative. They paved they way for industrial changes to come that would eventually identify America as the most powerful industrial nation in the world.
