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The Lowell mill girls were young female workers who came to work in textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts during the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The workers initially recruited by the corporations were daughters of New England farmers, typically between the ages of 15 and 35. [ 1 ]
Boston Manufacturing Co., Waltham, Massachusetts The Waltham-Lowell system was a labor and production model employed during the rise of the textile industry in the United States, particularly in New England, during the rapid expansion of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century.
Overproduction during the 1830s caused the price of finished cloth to drop and the mills' financial situation was exacerbated by a minor depression in 1834 and the Panic of 1837. In 1834, the mills cut wages by 25%, which led the girls to respond by staging an unsuccessful strike and organizing a labor union called the Factory Girls Association.
The mill owners recruited young Yankee farm girls from the surrounding area to come work the machines at Waltham. The mill girls, as they came to be known, lived in boarding houses provided by the company and were supervised by older women, and were subject to strict codes of conduct. They worked approximately eighty hours per week.
The Lowell Offering was a monthly periodical collected contributed works of poetry and fiction by the female textile workers (young women [age 15–35] known as the Lowell Mill Girls) of the Lowell, Massachusetts textile mills of the early American Industrial Revolution. It began in 1840 and lasted until 1845.
Established in 1978 a few years after Lowell Heritage State Park, it is operated by the National Park Service and comprises a group of different sites in and around the city of Lowell related to the era of textile manufacturing in the city during the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution created growing demand for child labor in the mills and factories, since children were easier to supervise than adults and good at monotonous, repetitive tasks that often required little physical strength, but where small bodies and nimble fingers were an advantage.
Sarah George Bagley (April 19, 1806 [1] [dubious – discuss] – January 15, 1889) was an American 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.