Loom and Spindle
Excerpts from Loom and Spindle: or, Life among the Early Mill Girls
By Harriet Hanson Robinson
Originally published by T. Y. Cromwell in 1898
Revised edition published by Hawaii Press Pacific, 1976
During the early nineteenth century, the country's first factories were being established in New England. In 1814 Francis Cabot Lowell (1775–1817) built the first complete cotton factory—with both spinning and weaving processes in one building—in Waltham, Massachusetts. By 1823, after Lowell's death, his business associates had built larger mills in Lowell, along the Merrimack River. The mills used power looms that required workers with quick hands for smooth operation. The mill workforces were made up mainly of young women, many from the farms of New England. Bright, eager, and willing to work for less money than men, the "Lowell girls," as they came to be called, filled the mill owners' needs and became the first industrial workforce in the United States.
Mill work was appealing to many young women. The biggest attraction was that it paid more than women could make elsewhere. In the Lowell mills in the 1830s women earned $2.40 to $3.20 a week plus room and board. This amount was one-half to one-third the wages paid to men for similar work, but it was still more than double the money a woman would receive working as a domestic servant or seamstress.
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