The Lowell Girls: Women Workers in the American Industrial Revolution

The Lowell girls, the young women who worked in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1830s and 1840s, were among the most distinctive groups of industrial workers in the American Industrial Revolution.

The Origins of the Lowell System

The Lowell system was developed by a group of Boston merchants led by Francis Cabot Lowell, who built the first integrated cotton manufacturing operation in the United States in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814. The article on Francis Cabot Lowell and the Lowell system describes Lowell’s role in this development in more detail.

The Boston Associates needed workers to staff the new mills, and they decided to recruit young women from the surrounding New England farms. The young women, who became known as the “Lowell girls,” were typically between 15 and 30 years old, and they were attracted to Lowell by the opportunity to earn money, to live independently, and to take part in the cultural and intellectual life of the city.

The Life of the Lowell Girls

The life of the Lowell girls was a mixture of factory work and the program of moral and intellectual improvement that the mill companies provided. The girls worked in the mills for about twelve hours a day, six days a week, operating the spinning and weaving machines under the supervision of male overseers.

Outside the mills, the Lowell girls lived in company-owned boarding houses, with strict rules of behavior. The companies supported a wide range of cultural and educational activities, including lectures, concerts, and a circulating library. The Lowell Offering, a literary magazine published by the women workers, was one of the first publications of its kind in the United States.

The Strikes of the Lowell Girls

The Lowell girls were not passive objects of paternalism. They organized a number of strikes and protests in the 1830s and 1840s, including the famous strike of 1836, which was a protest against a wage cut, and the protests of 1843-1844, which were organized by the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association.

The Decline of the Lowell System

The Lowell system began to decline in the 1840s and 1850s, as the conditions of work in the mills deteriorated and the women workers began to be replaced by cheaper labor. The Irish immigrants, who began to arrive in large numbers in the wake of the Irish Famine of the 1840s, were willing to work for lower wages than the Lowell girls.

The Long-Term Legacy of the Lowell Girls

The long-term legacy of the Lowell girls is still being felt today. The Lowell system was an important early experiment in the relationship between industry, labor, and the community, and it established a tradition of paternalism and welfare provision in the American workplace that has had a lasting influence.

The Continuing Question

The unresolved question about the Lowell girls is the same one raised in the Lowell-mills article: whether the famous 1820s-1840s period was a genuine “paternalistic” experiment in industrial relations, or whether it was a brief exception that was already ending by the time the standard accounts were written. The traditional answer, going back to the 1840s’ Lowell Offering magazine and given its modern form in the work of Thomas Dublin, is that the early Lowell system was a real improvement on the alternative: the wages were high, the working conditions were supervised, and the cultural institutions (the Lyceum, the periodical, the boarding-house regime) gave the mill girls an unusual degree of public voice. The revisionist answer, developed in the work of feminist historian Claudia Goldin and given a more pointed form in the recent literature on the Irish-immigrant workforce, is that the early Lowell system was an exception that depended on a particular labor-market condition (the absence of cheap immigrant labor), and that the moment the Irish famine immigrants arrived in the 1840s, the system was reorganized around the new cheap labor. The interesting current question, raised in the work of economic historian Goldin and developed in the recent comparative literature on paternalistic factory systems, is whether the Lowell model was a viable long-term alternative to the Irish-immigrant model that actually developed, or whether it was always going to be undercut by the next wave of cheap labor. The honest answer, given the comparative data, is probably: the Lowell model was a viable experiment in a closed labor market, but not in an open one, and the long-term history of the global textile industry has been the history of successive experiments in paternalistic factory communities being undercut by the next wave of cheap labor.

See also

• women in textile mills
• women’s roles in the Industrial Revolution
• overview of the social impact of the Industrial Revolution
• overview of the American Industrial Revolution

Selected Sources

• Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (1930).
• Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (1995).
• Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (1979).
• Mary Blewett, Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780–1910 (1988).