Women Workers in New EnglandBy Annie Marion MacLean, Ph. D.(Professor of Sociology in Adelphi College. From “Wage-Earning Women.”)
By Annie Marion MacLean, Ph. D.
(Professor of Sociology in Adelphi College. From “Wage-Earning Women.”)
It was in New England that women and girls first went out in large numbers to work with their husbands and fathers and brothers in the mill. They followed the industries from the fireside to the factory. It was a natural movement stimulated in many cases by necessity. At that time public opinion frowned on the idle girl, and work was considered a crowning virtue; so the factory girl was not commiserated but commended. Things have changed in the last century, and now we find most people of humanitarian instincts looking with regret at the spectacle of young girls marching to the mills. The procession is a long one in the old New England towns, and it is growing longer with the years....
When Charles Dickens came to America, it was to Lowell he went to see the cotton-mills in operation, and it was of those mills he wrote his glowing picture of factory life for women. “They look like human beings,” he said, “not like beasts of burden.” If he were to come to us to-day to see the cotton workers, he would, in all probability, be taken to Fall River first and asked to behold the product of the evolution of two generations. He would see no beautiful window boxes, no smiling girls making poetry as they worked, or moving about with songs on their lips. Life is grim in the Fall River mills, and the women come perilously near having the mien of “beasts of burden.” The semi-idyllic conditions of the earlyNew England cotton-mill have given way to a system brutalized by greed and the exigencies of modern industry.