JSTOR= WOMEN, WORK, AND THE FAMILY:FEMALE OPERATIVES IN THE LOWELL MILLS, 1830-1860

Thomas Dublin

In 1830-60 women in the US increasingly stepped out of the confines of their homes, to find
employment. New England became a hub for textile manufacturing along major rivers
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine with a pre-dominantly female labor force. By taking
these new jobs women chose not only to work outside their homes, but also to leave their families
and to live in a radically different environment. While in the mill towns they became part of an urban
working-class community.

the Nature and the transformation of the mill operative community in Lowell, Massachusetts, the
leading textile center in the nation during this period.

In the 1830s, the mill workforce consisted almost exclusively of young, single, native-born women.
These female operatives came to form a close-knit community and the growth of community
contributed, in turn, to the rise of collective labor [Link] 1845 the growth of an immigrant
family workforce undermined the Yankee community and the labor movement it had nurtured. The
transformation of the operative community in Lowell and the simultaneous decline in labor unrest
offer important evidence of the impact of women's changing family roles on labor organization and
protest under early industrial capitalism.

The female operatives in Lowell in the mid-1830s formed a community based on bonds of mutual
dependence. Their experiences in Lowell were not simply similar or parallel to one another; they
were inextricably intertwined. Women worked together in the mills with experienced operatives
teaching newcomers work skills; in addition they lived together in company-owned boarding houses
adjacent to the mills. Further-more, the women were conscious of the existence of community and
articulated this consciousness in their writings.1 Community was both an objective and a subjective
reality in the lives of female operatives.

Young women recruited from northern New England predominated in the workforce of the early
Lowell mills. In July 1836, for example, 74 percent of the workforce of the Hamilton Manufacturing
Company in Lowell was female and 96 [Link] than four-fifths of these women
were between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Almost three-fourths of female operatives at Hamilton
resided in company boarding houses while in the [Link] a quarter of the female operatives
resided in private housing, the proportion living with their families was considerably smaller. Only
one-ninth of female employed at Hamilton in July 1836 lived at home with their families. The
absence of significant numbers of workers living in families contributed to the importance of the
operative peer group. Sharing work in the mills 72 hours a week and living in close quarters in
Women were not only separated from their families while working in the mills, but were relatively
isolated from men as well. The female-male division of labor insured that women and men had little
contact within the mills. Men held all supervisory positions and worked in a number of skilled
departments; women were confined principally to machine-tending jobs. Women and men had little
contact outside the formal overseer-operative relation. Patterns of residence further reinforced this
separation. Married men lived in company tenements; single men, in all-male boarding houses; and
single women, in all-female boarding houses. Even in institutions and activities open to both sexes-
for instance, churches and lyceum lectures-women comprised the vast majority. In 1830, women
comprised 63 percent of the population in Lowell. They made up more than 70 percent of those in
the primary working population between 15 and 29 years of [Link] at work and in
housing,coupled with the predominance of women in early Lowell, contributed to the growth of a
distinct female operative community.
The central institution in the female community was the corporation boarding house. Relationships
among women which arose within the mills were reinforced in a more relaxed setting. The boarding
house, with an average of twenty-five female boarders sleeping four to six in a bedroom, was above
all a collective living situation. The boarding house was also the center for the social life of
operatives. After morethan twelve hours a day in the mills, women spent most of their remaining
hours in their boarding houses. In this setting they ate meals, rested, talked, sewed, wrote letters,
and read books and magazines. From within this circle, they found friends who accompanied them to
shops, to evening lectures, or to church events. On Sundays or holidays they often went out together
for walks along the canals or into the nearby countryside. The community of operatives, in sum,
developed in a setting in which women worked and lived together twenty-four hours a day. The
boarding house provided the social context in which newcomers to Lowell made their first
adjustment to urban, industrial life. Women generally did not come to Lowell entirely on their own.
Usually they came because they knew someone-an older sister,cousin, or friend-who worked in
Lowell. A newcomer was usually directed to a specific address, and her first contact with fellow
operatives generally came in the boarding house, not in the [Link] her arrival at the company
boarding house, a newcomer felt the influence of the community of operatives. Harriet Robinson,
an operative and the daughter of a boarding house keeper, described the socialization process in her
autobiography, Loom and Spindle:

Their [newcomers'] dialect was also very peculiar. On the broken English and Scotch of their spoke a
language almost unintelligible. But the severe discipline and ridicule which met them was as good as
a school education, and they were soon taught the "city way of speaking."Their dress was also
peculiar, and was of the plainest homespun, cut in such an old-fashioned Their only head-covering
was a shawl, which was pinned under the chin; but after the first pay-day a 'shaker' (or'scooter')
sunbonnet usually replaced the primitive head-gear of their rural [Link] was an unusual and strong-
willed individual who could work and live among her fellow operatives and not conform, at least
outwardly, to the customs and values of this larger [Link] addition to the pressure to conform
to group patterns of speech and dress, the women enforced an unwritten code of moral conduct.
Henry Miles, a minister in Lowell, described the way in which the community pressured those who
deviated from accepted moral conduct:A girl, suspected of immoralities, or serious improprieties, at
once loses caste. Her fellow boarders will at once leave the house, if the keeper does not dismiss the
offender. In self-protection, therefore, the patron is obliged to put the offender away. Nor will her
former companions walk withher, or work with her; till at length, finding herself everywhere talked
about, and pointed at, andshunned, she is obliged to relieve her fellow-operatives of a presence
which they feel brings [Link] should not conclude, however, that women always enforced a
moral code agreeable to Lowell's clergy, or to mill agents and overseers, for that matter. The kind
ofpeer pressure imposed on moral transgressors may also have been applied during labor struggles
to women who did not participate in strikes.

The ten-hour petition campaigns of the 1840s were similarly aided by the existence of a tightly knit
community of operatives living in dense neighborhoods of boarding houses. they probably had to
conform to group norms, or attitudes toward the ten-hour day.

The strength of this female community was revealed in the rise of labor protest in

early Lowell. In 1834 and 1836 large numbers of women operatives struck to protest

wage cuts. Between 1843 and 1848 women operatives were among the most vocal advo-

cates of a reduction in work hours. The early strikes-or "turn-outs" as they were called
at the time-were above all strikes by women. Newspaper accounts specifically identi-

fied the strikers and their leaders as women.12 Company correspondence made the

point vividly when one mill agent wrote that 386 women and 3 men-out of a work

force of 1300-were absent from the mills under his charge.13 Women also dominated

the Ten-Hour Movement, comprising three-fourths of petition signers in 1845.14 They

organized as well the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, which spearheaded the

Ten-Hour Movement in Lowell and worked actively to organize similar operatives' asso-

ciations in other mill towns.15

The company boarding houses were the focal points of female labor protest in this

period. Boarding house residents predominated among strikers in the mid-1830s. Of

women who participated in the turnout at the Hamilton Company in October 1836,

more than 95 percent lived in boarding houses. Among female boarding house resi-

dents, 28 percent went on strike; among those living at home, only 12 percent did so.16

In other words, women living in boarding houses were more than twice as likely as

those living at home to take part in the strike. Similarly, the ten-hour petition cam-

paigns of the 1840s were promoted by numerous meetings held in company boarding

houses. In these meetings, organizers from the Female Labor Reform Association re-

cruited new members and secured additional signatures for their petitions to the state

legislature. The boarding houses thus provided both the participants in and the orga-

nizational structure of the labor movement in Lowell in these years.

Although these protests did not culminate in union organization the strikes were

nevertheless collective actions. The mass departure of operatives to their rural homes

was not simply the sum of hundreds of individual decisions of operatives who preferred

to leave Lowell rather than submit to wage cuts. The words and actions of operatives

make this point clear. In February 1834, eight hundred striking women paraded about

Lowell and endorsed the following demands at a mass outdoor rally:

Resolved, That we will not go back into the mills to work unless our wages are continued...

as they have been.

Resolved, That none of us will go back, unless they receive us all as one.

Resolved, That if any have not money enough to carry them home, they shall be supplied.18

In October 1836, women formed committees within each of the mills to provide strike
assistance for those in need.19 Employers acknowledged the organization and tactical

skill of the operatives. One mill agent wrote that although some operatives were willing

to work, "it has been impossible to give employment to many who remained." He at

attributed the difficulty to the women's tactics: "This was in many instances no doubt

the result of calculation and contrivance. After the original turn-out, they [the opera-

tives] 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 effectu-

ally as if all the girls in the mills had left."20 The demand for amnesty, the concern for

the welfare of fellow operatives, and the effort to bring out workers in key departments

are all indications of the organized, collective nature of these strikes.

In their protests female operatives gave expression to new values and attitudes which

were clearly the product of their industrial experience. In 1834, for example, one strike

leader gave a "flaming Mary Woolstonecroft [sic] speech on the rights of women and the

the iniquities of the 'monied aristocracy.' "21 Some operatives came to see a relation

between their treatment as workers and the dominant bourgeois paternalism that

affected all women. This understanding was expressed in an open letter to a state legis-

lator who had opposed the enactment of a ten-hour law:

Bad as is the condition of so many women, it would be much worse if they had nothing but your

boasted protection to rely upon; but they have at last learnt the lesson which a bitter experience

teaches, that not to those who style themselves their "natural protectors" are they to look for the

needful help, but to the strong and resolute of their own sex.22

33

Female Operatives in the Lowell Mills, 1830-1860

Women had learned to rely on one another in their daily lives and so came to depend

on each other in their labor struggles as well.

The conditions that gave rise to the close-knit community among female operatives,

however, did not persist unchanged in these years. The three decades before the Civil

War was a period of rapid growth and change in Lowell. Between 1836 and 1850,

for instance, the assets of the textile corporations almost doubled, while the number

of employees increased from 6,100 to 11,400.23 With the expansion of the mills, the

population of the city grew from 17,000 in 1836 to 33,000 in 1850. After 1845 the
mills attracted increasing numbers of immigrants, particularly the Irish. The 1850s

saw the transformation of the labor system which had persisted in Lowell since the

1820s and the undermining of the close-knit female community which had developed

during these years.

The earlier operative community was undermined by two interrelated factors: the

changing make-up of the mill work force and the growing dispersal of operatives' hous-

ing. The proportion of foreign-born employed at the Hamilton Company in Lowell

rose sharply, starting at only 4 percent in 1836 and reaching 62 percent in 1860. Three-

fourths of all immigrants working at Hamilton were Irish; by 1860 the Irish formed the

largest single ethnic group in the company's mills, comprising 47 percent of the work

force.24

The declining importance of company boarding houses also undermined the female

operative community. In 1836 almost three-fourths of operatives at Hamilton had re-

sided in company housing. By 1860, this proportion had declined to one-third.25

Increasing numbers of workers lived in private boarding houses or at home with their

families. The new residence pattern resulted primarily from the actions of the textile

corporations. In the 1840s they did not construct additional housing to keep pace

with the expansion of the mill labor force. In addition, they sold off undeveloped

lands to private developers. Finally, they ceased enforcing the company regulation

that required operatives to reside in company housing. Without an adequate stock

of company housing, newcomers came to rely on the growing supply of private tene-

ment housing. The dispersal of housing led to a disjunction of work and living settings

for operatives. The new residence pattern removed an important element in the shared

experiences of female operatives.

What occurred in Lowell in the 1850s, however, was not so much the decline of

community, but rather its reconstitution along new lines. As the composition and

residence patterns of the mill work force changed, the locus of the operative commu-

nity shifted. There remained a dwindling group of Yankee women living in company

boarding houses, and by 1860 the predominant operative community was found among

Irish immigrant families.

The Irish operative community differed from its Yankee predecessor in several im-
portant respects. The Irish were not exclusively a female community. As they entered

the mill work force between 1836 and 1860, the proportion of males employed at the

Hamilton Company increased from 15 to 30 percent.26 Immigrant males were concen-

trated primarily in the mulespinning and weaving departments. The influx of immi-

34

Thomas Dublin

grant families into Lowell brought large numbers of men and boys willing to work at

wages comparable to those of females. The textile mills took advantage of this new

supply of labor and hired increasing numbers of males to perform work formerly done

by women.

Unlike the earlier Yankee operatives, large numbers of Irish came to Lowell with

their families. In 1836 only 11 percent of females employed at Hamilton had resided

at home. For a comparable sample of Irish female millhands in 1860, almost one-half

lived with their families. After 1850 a family-labor system supplanted the earlier one

based on the labor of single women. The transformation was by no means complete

in 1860, and large numbers of single women-both native-born and immigrant-continued

to come to Lowell on their own to work in the mills. But the decisive trend between

1836 and 1860 was the increase in the proportion of female operatives living at home

with their families at the expense of the women residing in company boarding houses.27

In order to examine the family relationships of female millhands and the structure

of their families I drew a one-in-ten systematic sample from the 1860 federal manuscript

census of Lowell. Selecting every tenth millhand enumerated in the census I generated

a sample of 761 female and 329 male operatives. I recorded for each of these sample

members personal data-age, nativity, sex, occupation being the most important-and

for females only I recorded additional information on the composition of their house-

holds and, where present, families.28 Of the 761 females in the sample, 266-thirty-

five percent-were living with their families. The remainder of this analysis will focus

on these families of female millhands.

Immigrant women were much more likely to be living at home than were Yankees.

More than 48 percent of the foreign-born in the 1860 Female Millhand Sample lived

at home. For native-born the comparable proportion was only 23 percent. In other
words, relatively twice as many immigrants as Yankees resided with their families

while working in the mills.

The most striking fact about the families of female millhands is that more than

half-138 of 266-were headed by females. The proportion of female-headed house-

holds was the same among native-born and immigrants, suggesting that class rather than

ethnicity was primarily responsible for the observed pattern of family composition.

Two interpretations may account for the high proportion of female-headed households

among these families. First, it is possible that widows may have moved to Lowell to

take advantage of a labor system that offered employment primarily to women and

children.29 On the other hand, a labor system offering steadier employment to women

and children than to men may have undermined the economic position and authority

of adult males in working-class families, thus leading to high rates of desertion. Only

by tracing the histories of families over time-by linking successive manuscript censuses

-will it be possible to determine the bases of the high proportion of female-headed

households among operatives in Lowell.

Whether female- or male-headed, the families of millhands were dependent on the

employment of several family members. In the 266 families of the 1860 Female Mill-

hand Sample more than 70 percent of all family members were recorded by census enu-

35

Female Operatives in the Lowell Mills, 1830-1860

merators as employed. There were few elderly and few young children in these fami-

lies-the children were generally in their 'teens and twenties and parents in their

their thirties and forties. The proportion in the family working varied with the earn-

ing capacity of the household head. In female-headed households 85 percent of fam-

ily members were listed as employed; for male-headed, the corresponding proportion

was 63 percent. These were clearly the families of workers-families forced by the

low wages of parents to rely on the earnings of children to provide a subsistence.

Three-fourths-or 205 of 266-of all female millhands in the sample living at home

were children. I describe them as children not so much because of their age-they

were twenty years old on the average-but because they resided in the households of

their parents.30 In these 205 families there were on the average four children, making
a total of somewhat more than 800 children. This population consisted of the female

millhands drawn from the sample and their siblings. These children were well integrated

into the Lowell labor system: three-fourths of them were employed, and 93 percent

of those so recorded were millhands. Judging from the ages of children in school and

of those working in the mills, it is apparent that most began working at thirteen or four-

teen years of age. Of 40 fifteen-year-olds enumerated in these families 39 were

listed as employed; only one attended school. On the average, the oldest children in

these families were twenty-two years old, suggesting that these children worked a min-

imum of eight years while residing at home. Given an average spacing of nine years

between youngest and eldest, one may conclude that for at least seventeen years these

families could draw on the income of children to supplement adult earnings.31

The dependence of mill families on the earnings of their children is further under-

scored by two factors: the ages of working children and the occupations of parents.

Although the census does not differentiate between different types of millhands-

that is, between weavers, spinners, bobbin girls, and so on-one can infer from census

data that most of the children held regular positions in the mills. As noted above,

the oldest child in these families averaged twenty-two years of age; the youngest em-

ployed in the mills, seventeen. These ages are well above those of bobbin girls, lap

boys, or back and front boys, who were low-paid and tended to be between ten

and fifteen years of age. The employed children in these families probably earned

regular adult wages which in 1860 averaged $0.57 per day.32

The parents of the female millhands were concentrated in two particularly low-

paid occupations. The majority of male heads of these families were day laborers;

80 percent of female heads were listed as housekeepers. Given the seasonality of out-

door construction work, a forty-year-old Irish day laborer could expect to earn little

more than his seventeen-year-old daughter. His daily wage was higher, but given the

irregularity of work, his yearly earnings were likely to be only about the same as those

of millhands.33 Housekeepers earned still less, and it is even questionable whether

women so designated actually worked for wages, as census enumerators also recorded

some women separately as "domestic servants." Assuming, however, that housekeepers

did work for wages outside their homes, it is unlikely that they earned as much as adult
millhands. In these families there were, on the average, three children and one parent

36

Thomas Dublin

listed as employed in June 1860. Given the comparative wage levels described here, it

is likely that children earned about three-fourths of the income of these families.

It is important to bear in mind that the conclusion regarding the dependence of mill

families on the earnings of their children is based on the 1860 Female Millhand Sample

described above. Obviously there were families in Lowell without any female mem-

bers in the mills who would not be included in the sample considered here. This sam-

ple is by no means a random sample of Lowell families. Still it offers a view of working-

class immigrant families attracted to Lowell and to the mills.

The picture of the family labor system that emerges from these data is one of fam-

ily members functioning as a unit to provide for family needs. In young families with

no or few children, often both husband and wife worked, and as children grew up they

soon became important contributors to the family income. The earnings of children

were particularly important because half of the families had no male parent living in

the household. Even in two-parent families, however, it is likely that at one stage of

the family cycle children earned almost 75 percent of the family income. The low

wages and irregularity of day laboring jobs for Irish adult males made the earnings of

children crucial to the family living standard.

The dependent position of female millhands living at home with their parents and

the importance of their earnings to the subsistence of their families must have had a

dampening effect on labor protest in the 1850s. Two decades earlier Yankee women

lived on their own in Lowell in a community consisting of female operatives. If they

contributed to the support of distant families they clearly chose to do so. When a

Yankee operative "turned out" in 1834 or 1836 she had a rural home and family to

which she could return. When an Irish operative living at home decided to strike or to

to sign a ten-hour petition, she had to consider her parents' reaction and the loss of

family income which her action might entail.

Although I do not have comparable data on the family relationships of male millhands

in 1860, I would suggest that men were affected quite differently by the changes in
the Lowell labor force. First, the pool of male operatives increased during this period,

while the number of females declined slightly. Second, it is likely that a significantly

higher proportion of single males than females lived away from their families in com-

pany or private boarding houses. Furthermore, more males than females headed their

own households. In other words, fewer males than females lived with their families as

dependent children.

With increasing numbers of male operatives in the mill work force and with changing

housing patterns and family relations undermining the close-knit community among

women operatives, it is not altogether surprising that men increasingly came to domi-

nate the labor movement in Lowell in the 1850s. The Ten Hour Movement of the 1840s

was transformed from a female-dominated educational and agitational campaign into

a male-dominated political movement closely tied to electoral politics. As ward com-

mittees in the Democratic and Free Soil parties took an increasing part in the ten-hour

struggle, the role of female operatives declined accordingly. After 1850 women in

Lowell never again played such a dominant role in the labor movement.

37

Female Operatives in the Lowell Mills, 1830-1860

Whether this pattern prevailed in later years and in other industrial communities re-

mains unknown. The relationship between family membership and protest should be

examined in more varied ethnic and industrial settings before any firm conclusions are

reached. Further research into the history of working women in other mill towns and

industrial centers should offer evidence bearing on the conclusions reach.

the Lowell Mill Girls were young women employed in an innovative system of
labor in textile mills centered in Lowell, Massachusetts during the early 19th
century.
Employing women in a factory was novel to the point of being revolutionary. The
system of labor in the Lowell mills became widely admired because the young
women were housed in an environment that was not only safe but reputed to be
culturally advantageous.
The young women were encouraged to engage in educational pursuits while not
working and even contributed articles to a magazine, The Lowell Offering.