The Women Mill Workers of Lowell, Massachusetts: A Model for Capitalist Industrial Organization
"In vain do I try to soar in fancy and imagination above the dull reality around me but beyond the roof of the factory I cannot rise." (anonymous mill worker)
 The first decades of the nineteenth century were a critical time for labor in the United States. The country was still predominantly agricultural in rhetoric and reality, a nation of merchants, yeoman farmers, indentured servants and slaves. Then came the beginnings of the industrial revolution and the workplace was about to be organized in a very different way. How that organization would be defined became questions to be answered in all early factory cites, and nowhere more than in Lowell, Massachusetts where an experiment in a human settlement of women mill workers contained all the seeds of oppressive industrial production.
The textile manufacturers of the Northeast who expressed an interest in creating a benign model for organizing the new industrial workplace made several deliberate choices when they built their mills in Lowell. First they wanted a small rural community to avoid the urban proletariat they saw developing in England; they wanted a non-permanent workforce less likely to assert itself; and they wanted women who they thought would be more controllable than men. It was billed as an alternative to class conflict.
 At first the boardinghouse system and cultural environment seemed positive. Visitors to the community, even the famous writer Charles Dickens and the feminist author Harriet Martineau, were impressed. Lectures, poetry readings, and a literary journal, The Lowell Offering, provided an atmosphere of education and enlightenment. Dickens was particularly taken with what the journal said about the previously disparaged abilities of the working class. Martineau praised the minds of the workers and credited the employers for the moral uplifting of the young women.
 But inside the mill, the conditions were deadly. As the demands of profit took precedence over the ideal of a harmonious community of happy workers, the women were assigned increasing numbers of looms to oversee. The noise insider the factory was deafening. The practice of threading bobbins by sucking the thread through the needle left cotton particles in the young workers' lungs. The hours were long and the work dangerous. More and more women were assigned to fewer rooms in the boarding houses and they lived under greater scrutiny by the company.
In 1834 and 1836, the desperate women went out on strike. Both attempts were unsuccessful and ultimately the defeated mill workers were replaced by immigrant labor, primarily Irish and German men. The women then joined together in the Female Labor Reform Association founded by activist Sarah Bagley who led the group in a lobbying campaign to force the state legislature to pass a ten-hour day bill. The campaign failed and it wouldn't be until 1873 that Massachusetts would approve a ten-hour workday.
By the 1840s, the Lowell workers' protest movement fell victim to the effects of the 1837 depression and the demoralization of the women themselves who were starved back to work. In spite of some attempts to ally with women mill workers in Pennsylvania who were also fighting for the ten-hour day, the women remained isolated. The growing feminists movement which found its voice in the 1848 Seneca Falls declaration of women's rights made little effort to reach out to the working class mill women. It was not until the late 1800s that middle class women's organizations and white male unions acknowledged to any extent the problems facing their working class women comrades. Only the short-lived Knights of Labor made any attempt to bring women into its ranks.
The architects of American capitalism knew what they were doing. All the tactics that were to prove successful in dividing the working class and breaking strikes, reducing wages and increasing unsafe working conditions were evident in the life and death of the Lowell experiment. Critics of the factory system warned of the disastrous results for workers if this model were to be followed. But when profits drive production, it is the only model that makes sense.
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