In 1815, most of the goods used by an American family were either
made in the home or obtained from a local craftsperson. One of the first
steps in the shift to the factory system was cottage labor, in which unfinished materials were distributed to workers (usually women) in their
homes, to be completed and returned to the manufacturer. This method
changed in the early nineteenth century, due in large part to the efforts
of wealthy Boston businessman Francis Cabot Lowell (1775–1817).
In 1810, Lowell had visited England’s textile
mills (cloth-making factories). He was
impressed with British technology, particularly
an automated weaving machine called the power
loom (a frame or machine used to weave thread
or yarn into cloth) that was not available in the
United States. Back in Massachusetts, Lowell
was able to create his own version of a working
power loom with the help of a highly skilled
mechanic. He then began to study other
processes of textile production to determine how
to carry out large-scale production at low cost.
Textile mechanic Samuel Slater (1768–1835)
had already successfully mechanized the spinning, or yarn-making, process, and other businesspeople had followed his example, creating
the early factories in New England.
Knowing he would need large amounts of
money to create a factory, in 1812 Lowell formed an association of wealthy investors, the Boston Associates. Two
years later, the company had built the water-powered mill Lowell had
envisioned. For the first time in the United States, raw bales of cotton
could be transformed into bolts of cloth under one roof. The production
process became known as the Waltham-Lowell system, named after the
Massachusetts towns in which the four-story brick mills resided.
The Lowell Machines
The Boston Associates hired the best machinists they could find to build
the advanced textile machinery that filled the company’s mills.
Waterwheels, wheels that rotate due to the force of moving water, powered the mills; the rotation of the wheel is then used to power a factory
or machine. Belts ran up from the wheels to all floors to run the
machines. Cotton, delivered to the mill in bales, traveled through the
entire building, going through a different part of the manufacturing
process in each room until exiting as finished cloth.
The machines in the Lowell textile mills only made one kind of
cloth, and they were easy to operate without much training. The operators fed the threads into the machine and then allowed it to do the work,
stopping the process only if threads broke or there was a malfunction. It
was not easy to be a mill worker, though. For the total mill operation to
run smoothly, all the machines had to be operating at the same time and
at a steady speed. Factory work allowed for little independent action.
Hours were long, and the work was repetitive.
The factory town
Lowell died in 1817, but the Boston Associates went on to build a complete factory town along the powerful Merrimack River in
Massachusetts, naming it Lowell in his honor. They built more mills on
the Merrimack in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Manchester, New
Hampshire. Soon the largest waterwheel in the nation was built on the
Merrimack, supplying power to a dozen large factories.
The new textile industry prospered. In 1832, 88 of the 106 largest
American corporations were textile firms. By 1836, the Lowell mills
employed six thousand workers. By 1848, the city of Lowell had a population of about twenty thousand and was the largest industrial center in
America. Its mills produced fifty thousand miles of cotton cloth each year.
The Lowell girls
Lowell had envisioned an ideal workforce for his mills—the unmarried
daughters of New England farm families. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, many young women were eager to work in the mills,
viewing it as a chance to be independent or to provide income for their
families. The “Lowell girls,” as they were called, usually ranged in age
from about sixteen to thirty. Most worked two or three years at the mill
before returning home to marry and start a family. By 1831, women
made up almost forty thousand of the fifty-eight thousand factory workers in the textile industry.
The women who operated the machines in the Lowell mills earned
$2.40 to $3.20 a week plus room and board. The Boston Associates tried
to attract the young women to work for them by providing decent work and living conditions. They built factories that were clean and well lit.
Understanding that single women living on their own feared for their
safety and avoided circumstances that would stain their reputations, they
established the country’s first planned industrial communities, setting up
rows of boardinghouses near the factories for their workers. The company paid responsible older women to run these boardinghouses and to
enforce strict discipline on the residents, imposing curfews, requiring
church attendance, and demanding chaperones for male visitors.
The Lowell mills demanded a twelve- to fourteen-hour workday.
Factory bells announced times for leaving and entering the plant, and
the employees were fined when they were late or broke other rules. The
work did not demand great physical strength, but it did require constant
attention.
The Lowell Offering
Many of the Lowell girls were eager to experience independence from
family, and they made the most of their time away from home. It was
common for young mill operators to spend their evening hours participating in reading groups, attending night school, going to lectures, or
just reading on their own.
In October 1840, some of the women from the mills got together to
produce and publish a sixteen-page journal called the Lowell Offering,
the nation’s first journal to be written solely by women. The Offering,
which sold for about 6 cents a copy, published poems, articles, and stories contributed by mill women. In all, twenty-eight volumes of the journal were published, and it was hailed worldwide.
Workers rebel
The success of the Lowell mills encouraged other industrialists. Soon
many new textile mills were producing cloth, and by the late 1830s the
supply of cloth on the market had become greater than the demand for
it. The Boston Associates made cost reductions at the expense of the
workers, who were forced to tend more looms and spindles at once and
to operate them at a faster speed. In 1836, with profits down, the Lowell
managers actually reduced workers’ wages and raised their boarding fees.
Two thousand women walked off their jobs in protest. The company
fired the leaders of the strike but called off the pay reductions.
In 1837, the workers established the Lowell Female Labor Reform
Association (LFLRA) and petitioned the Massachusetts state legislature
to limit the workday to ten hours. No action was taken in response to
their protest, but it signaled the end of the young women’s work force at
the mills. The Boston Associates soon started to replace them with poor
immigrants who were willing to tolerate harsher conditions and lower
pay. By 1860, one-half of Lowell’s mill workers were impoverished Irish immigrants. (See Irish Immigration.)