Thomas Dublin, New England Farm Women Respond

¶ … Thomas Dublin, New England farm women respond conditions work textile mills? Reference: Read

Communal Organization

In order to effectively analyze the way in which New England farm women responded to the conditions of work in the textile mills, particularly those existing in Lowell, Massachusetts, it is first prudent to examine exactly what those conditions are, and how they affected these young women laborers. It should be noted that in many cases, the women recruited to work within these factory systems were obtaining their first formal employment, since many of them grew up on neighboring farms and chose the life of a factory workers as a way out of the rural monotony they had known all of their lives. Initially then, regardless of what the conditions were in the factory system, they were agreeable to many female laborers who were able to send money home to their families on farms and who were able to gain some sense of independence and autonomy by laboring within the textile industry.

By almost all accounts, the conditions in which these women labored were decidedly harsh and certainly exacting by modern standards of labor. Work days frequently exceeded 10 hours a day, while laborers were often paid in direct accordance to how much they were able to produce throughout the course of their nearly interminable shifts. Working at the textile mills became the sole focus of these young ladies' lives, as the following quotation readily underscores.

Furthermore, the work schedule was such that women had little opportunity to interact with those not living in company dwellings. They worked, in these years, an average of 73 hours a week. Their work day ended at 7:00 or 7:30 PM, and in the hours between supper and the 10:00 PM curfew imposed by management on residents of company boardinghouses, there was little time… (Dublin, 1975)

This quotation is indicative of the lengthy periods of labor these women endured while earning a living for the first time. Such time consuming work schedules, in which women were engaged in highly repetitive procedures and forms of work, was frequently exacerbated by the living conditions provided for the employees, who, as the preceding quotation suggests, were most often were housed in quarter either onsite of the working facilities or readily close nearby.

It is safe to assume that the factory owners who employed these women and quartered them in boardinghouses did not spend a lot of time or effort on providing any forms of luxury (or too much of comfort) in providing living conditions for their employees. Women were relegated to tiny quarters, that were considerably cramped due to the large numbers of women forced to occupy a single room as the following quotation demonstrates.

Women in the boardinghouses lived in close quarters, a factor that also played a role in the growth of community. A typical boarding house accommodated 25 young women, generally crowded four to eight in a bedroom. (8) There was little possibility of privacy within the dwelling, and pressure to conform to group standards was very strong... (Dublin, 1975)

This quotation is notable for two reasons. The first is that it confirms the fact that not only were the working conditions in which women labored within the textile mills of New England not very desirable, but the living conditions were also not desirable. These two elements reinforced a conformity to "group standards," however, that would be essential to the way women responded to these conditions, particularly when their wages were cut, which was one of the primary impetuses that spawned the mill workers of Lowell's forming of a union and its first official strike in 1836 (Brinkley, 2008).

This strike, as well as successive ones in 1836 and similar protests throughout the 1840s for a 10-hour work day, is endemic of Thomas Dublin's explanation of how New England farm women responded to the poor conditions in the textile mills. They did so by forming a tight-knit community that was concerned with the welfare of the collective, and not the individual. This notion is reinforced by the close quarters in which the women were forced to live, and was also reinforced by the large amounts of time they had to endure together on the job. All of this time together enacted a sense and spirit of community, that was initially manifested in palpable terms during strike of 1836, in which at least 800 men stopped working to demand that their current wages be continued (and not cut), that all of the workers in the mill conform to the standards of solidarity that was proposed in which, essentially, all of the women would take care of each other (Dublin, 1975).

This strike is significant for a couple of reasons. The first is that it was virtually unheard of for women to come together and refuse the will of a man (most of the factory owners, of course, were men). The second is that the strike barely lasted a weekend, for the simple fact that more women did not contribute to the efforts proposed by it. This latter fact, of course, would be decidedly rectified during the subsequent strike in 1836, in which well over 1,500 female laborers participated. There were several advancements in the 1836 strike that easily topped the 1834 one, most noticeably that the 1836 strike lasted months as compared to the couple of days' duration of the 1834. Furthermore, the level of organization demonstrated in the second strike was unrivaled by the previous one. The Factory Girls Association took specific measures to cripple the operations of the mills, as the following quotation explains.

Strikers, according to one mill agent, were able to halt production to a greater extent than numbers alone could explain… He attributed this difficulty to the strikers' "tactics:" - this was in many instances no doubt the result of calculation and contrivance. After the original turn-out they [the operatives] would assail a particular room -- as for instance, all the warpers, or all the warp spinners, or all the speeder and stretcher girls, and this would close the mill as effectually as if all the girls in the mill had left." (Dublin, 1975)