What did wage labor bring to the first generation of female workers in the United States?

In the Merrimack Textile Museum in Massachusetts, USA, there is a schedule of the Lowell textile mill in 1853, which clearly reads:

Spring and Summer (March 20 to September 19):

Breakfast 6:00, work 6:30, lunch 12:00, continue work 12:45, end work 6:30;

Autumn and winter (September 20 to March 19):

Breakfast 6:30, work 7:00, lunch 12:30, continue work 1:15, end 7:00.

If this timeline isn't enough to make you feel urgent, here's a "ringing table":

Spring and Summer:

The morning bell first pass is 4:30, the second pass is 5:30, and the third time is 6:20

Lunch bell first pass (come out to eat bell) 12:00, second pass (return to work bell) 12:35

Closing bell 6:30

Autumn and Winter:

The morning bell first pass is 5:00, the second pass is 6:00, and the third time is 6:50

Lunch bell first pass (come out to eat bell) 12:30, second pass (return to work bell) 1:05

Closing time bell 7:00

As the center of the textile industry in the United States at that time, the city of Lowell in the mid-nineteenth century had nine large textile mills, employing more than 30,000 workers. These factories have a high degree of consistency in planning layout, architectural style, funding sources, management methods, etc., and implement the same timeline. It's no wonder that when many workers look back on their factory experiences years later, the most memorable thing besides the roaring sound of machines is the ubiquitous, piercing ringing.

A group of labor historians, represented by Thompson, have long confirmed how long and difficult it is to train the independent and casual peasants of the agricultural era into wage earners who accept factory discipline and time and meet the requirements of industrial production. In this regard, Lowell's factory owners were relatively fortunate because they were not employed by rebellious men. According to statistics, except for a few skilled workers such as supervisors, mechanical repairers and a few heavy manual labor positions in Lowell's cotton mills, 90% of the labor force is peasant women in the nearby area, especially young unmarried women. In the entire New England region, the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution, cotton mills employ 60,000 female workers. These women textile workers were the first American women to leave the home and engage in wage labor.

Why did Lowell's factory owners prefer to hire women rather than entire families, as was the case with the Rhode Island textile mills earlier? On the one hand, women are perceived as more docile and manageable, and on the other hand, because women have always assumed the main responsibility of spinning and weaving cloth in the household economy. From home hand-weaving to operating machine weaving in a factory, although the process is greatly refined, the working principle and process are still similar. Female workers who are arranged in different workshops are easier to familiarize, faster to get started and more efficient when facing machines such as cotton cleaners, carding machines, drawing frames, yarn rolling machines, power looms, bleaching machines, and dyeing machines.

However, while hiring women, the Lowell factory also involved itself in a vortex of public opinion about the "virtues of women." At the beginning of the nineteenth century, news from the British Industrial Revolution often made headlines in the American press, and the plight of British workers and the social problems it brought were also the focus of heated discussions in American society. Boston businessman Nathan Appleton, one of the founders of Lowell's textile mills, later recalled the factory's founding years: "The intellectual and moral degradation of workers in Europe's manufacturing cities is notorious. Therefore, at that time, everyone had a conscious consciousness and wanted to avoid the old European road as much as possible. "In order to alleviate society's moral anxiety about women's wage labor, the Lowell factory carefully designed a complete patriarchal management system from the beginning, including: setting strict work and rest times, avoiding contact with male and female workers in the workplace as much as possible, building dormitories for female workers, setting up dormitory administrators, access control and blacklist systems, building libraries and reading rooms, arranging a variety of religious and literary and artistic activities, and providing girls with several months of education every year. Not only that, the Lowell factory also offered more generous wages to female workers and provided a friendlier payment method: in addition to the weekly accommodation fee of $1.25, the average salary of female workers was basically stable at about $2 a week, with a maximum of $4, and the salary was paid in cash on time and monthly, unlike the Rhode Island textile mill in the early years, which paid wages by issuing shopping tokens. The labor intensity of the Lowell factory was also lower than in Britain at the same time: it was 12 hours a day at first, increased to 12.5 hours in the thirties, and fell to 11 hours in the fifties. All these purposes are to correct the shortcomings of wage labor, so that factories can replace the role of male heads of heads, become supervisors, protectors, and educators of female workers, and become defenders of social order and good customs.

The introduction of patriarchal management at the Lowell factory caused a strong social response. It was praised by a large number of social reformers, religious figures, political and business and cultural elites, as models of morality and industrialization. In contrast to the old world, an exceptionalist mood emerges. They confidently declared that "the functioning of the European industrial system required a great deal of misery, depravity, and barbarism, which constituted one of the greatest scandals of its time", and Lowell's existence fully proved that the United States would not repeat the mistakes of the past, that wage labor would not undermine the virtues of women, and that industrialization and the harmonious order of republicanism were compatible. Many European celebrities who were concerned about industrialization and moral issues also came to admire it. In the early forties of the nineteenth century, the famous writer Charles Dickens visited Lowell. Tree-lined factories with clear windows, neatly dressed and well-behaved female workers brought great surprises to his somewhat bland trip to the United States, especially female workers, subverting his perception of the social status and abilities of the working class. He couldn't help but sigh that the Lowell factory and the British factory, "one is heaven and the other is hell." Also full of praise was James S. Buckingham, a British lawmaker. He asserted: "Lowell is one of the most remarkable places in the world, and I don't believe there can be a second manufacturing city like Lowell in the world – where female workers are morally pure, gentle and decent, with little suffering from overwork or ill health; The whole city is in order, and there is little suffering and crime. At the same time, however, there are many people who disagree with Lowell's patriarchal management. They were convinced that industrialization was essentially a conspiracy aimed at subverting freedom and equality, and that the result must be a society of rich and poor, hierarchical and morally corrupt; The use of regulatory, educational, and moral improvement methods to cure the ills of industrialization is doomed to be futile; There was no essential difference between the Lowell women and the English workers, and the Lowell factory was not a model at all, but an ominous omen, a terrible curse.

So, what do the female workers themselves who are in the center of the whirlpool of public opinion think?

From the large amount of material that has been preserved, it can be seen that, like public opinion, there are clear differences of opinion among women workers. One group agrees with the patriarchal management of the factory, and from the standpoint of the person concerned, tries to prove to the outside world that factory life has improved their education and cultivated their virtues. With the support of the factory management, the women formed several "promotion groups" to learn to write novels, poems and critical articles. Some groups have also started their own publications, including the Operator Magazine (

Operatives’ Magazine

), Lowell Dedication (

Lowell Offering

), New England Dedication (

New England Offering

and so on, the most influential of which is "Lowell's Dedication". At the beginning of its publication, the journal stated that its purpose was to show up and refute the doubts of the outside world, "break through unfair prejudices, prove that Lowell women work as a class of wisdom and virtue", "factory life not only did not damage their virtues", but "increased their wisdom and strengthened their sense of morality", "so that their whole character has been enhanced and improved".

One of the main thrusts of the early Lowell Dedication was a polemic with Orestes A. Brownson, a prominent labor reformer in New England at the time. Bronson had previously written denouncing the wage labor system for trampling on individual dignity and corrupting social morality, while the polemical strategy of women workers was to distinguish themselves from "wage earners" in general, emphasizing their gender identity and the family role of motherhood as a wife and mother—"Lowell women workers generally came from quiet countryside, grew up under the supervision of puritan families, and returned to the family to become the wives of free-willed yeomanry in New England and the mothers of the pillars of the future republic." Lowell Dedication also frequently featured novels about "Factory Girl." In the novel, the reasons why the girls come to work in the factory are either the death of both parents, or the early death of their husbands, or to help the family pay off loans, or to help their brothers save school fees, anyway, it is never to satisfy personal desires or fight for personal independence. In the view of these women workers, wage work in factories does not harm but helps to fulfil their family responsibilities as women; The meaning of factory life is to make them better women. In their minds, gender status is more important than that of wage earners, and family responsibilities are more worthy of pursuit than personal economic independence.

On the other hand, women workers always talk about the oppressive nature of wage labor. They did not approve of the patriarchal management of the factory, emphasized that female workers were not only women, but also laborers, and they were opposed to the interests of capitalists and factory owners, and accused Lowell of losing neutrality, siding with the oppressors, and covering up the great evil that the factory system brought to society and the world. After the mid-thirties of the nineteenth century, when factories decided to increase labor intensity, lower wages, and increase accommodation expenses under the pressure of debt and competition, these women workers also resolutely took to the streets to participate in the raging tide of labor reform at that time, using petitions, demonstrations, strikes and other methods to fight for their own rights.

"Lowell's Dedication"

There are two broad discourses on the rights of women workers who have joined the protest movement. One is to downplay one's female identity and emphasize one's equality with male workers. They prided themselves as "the heirs of the spirit of 1776," compared the factory owners to the Tories who intended tyranny, and believed that their strikes and marches were consistent with the nature of the American Revolution, all in defense of freedom and independence and against slavery. Presenting themselves as "producers of wealth", they appeal to all workers: "Men and women, are you fully aware of your true worth and dignity? As the most useful and wealth-creating person in society, have you been given the social status you deserve? Calling themselves "sisters in the cause of labor reform and human rights progress," they say their grand goal is to "advance the common good of all working classes" and call on "all toiling workers" to join hands to overthrow a "society that reduces the majority to slavery" and give equal rights and true freedom to all. Another discourse of rights emphasizes gender differences, claiming that femininity makes women workers need more protection and care. They portrayed the women workers as "poor" and "gentle girls," "daughters of well-behaved New England yeomanry," and "mothers of the next generation of citizens of the Republic." They repeatedly stressed that "women workers have other responsibilities in society - wives and mothers", but "when these women workers get married, instead of becoming their husbands' helpers, they will become the husband's bane"; Even if they become mothers, they will not be able to produce the qualified citizens that the Republic needs, and the next generation of the American nation will only degenerate into "a mentally and physically weak, sick, stupid race."

In the struggle of women workers in Lowell, these two discourses of rights are used intertwined. In order to mobilize social forces to the greatest extent possible and win the support of public opinion, women workers often use these two very different words indiscriminately in the same speech or article. Unlike the women's reformers of the early twentieth century, who had a high theoretical consciousness, Lowell women workers at this time did not care how to define women's roles in the labor market, let alone argue which concept of gender justice or the line of social reform was more conducive to fighting for their own rights. They are motivated by pragmatism and value the instrumentality of the discourse of rights.

On the other hand, the intertwined use of the two rights discourses also reflects the combined influence of traditional gender concepts and new trends in political economy. For a long time, the traditional gender concept in the United States believes that due to different biological characteristics, men are more suitable for public affairs such as economics and politics, while women are more suitable for staying at home and taking on family responsibilities such as raising children and taking care of housework. In the early eighties of the twentieth century, scholars such as Linda Kolber pointed out when studying the impact of the American Revolution on women that it has long been practiced to make a fuss in traditional gender concepts and to fight for women's rights by emphasizing gender differences. It was through the republican ideology that the revolutionary elites promoted women's education by emphasizing the importance of "motherhood." From this perspective, Lowell's call for more protection and care echoes the thinking of the "Republic Mother". Since the end of the eighteenth century, a group of political economists represented by Adam Smith and David Ricardo have proposed a set of new theories aimed at explaining the operation of the capitalist economy. Based on the labor theory of value, the new theory demonstrates that labor is the source of all wealth, reveals the mechanism of capitalist profits, and thus gives workers a finer and deeper understanding of their own suffering, and also provides a supporting argument for their protests. As early as 1789, The Wealth of Nations was the first to be reprinted in Philadelphia. Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation was published in London in 1817 and reprinted in the United States only two years later. After entering the 1820s, these two masterpieces were reprinted many times in the United States and became the "bible" for workers to prove their worth. Lowell women workers were active participants in the American labor movement at the time, and they were able to skillfully use the then deeply rooted labor theory of value to denounce the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

While women engaged in wage work and fought for their own rights and interests, looking at the whole country, the more prominent phenomena are: women forming associations to actively participate in various social reform movements such as abolition, prohibition of alcohol, and humanitarianism; Women's access to education continues to expand; Women's writing activities are becoming more active; The growing number of books and magazines aimed primarily at women; and at the Senaka Falls Conference in 1848, when women imitated the language of the Declaration of Independence to complain about gender inequality and first demanded the right to vote. How should we understand that all this series of phenomena occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century? This is the central question of early American women's history research.

Since the eighties, there have been two broad approaches to the study of early American women's history. One is the typical Whig narrative, which argues that from education, to public writing, to social reform, to the proposal of suffrage, is a process of gradual awakening of women's rights consciousness from the private sphere to the political sphere. The prevailing "Republic Mothers" research paradigm, although limited to the revolutionary period, also implies a Whig prophecy because it emphasizes that the American Revolution promoted the politicization of women and opened up possibilities for women's political rights later. The alternative path is to deny monism, emphasizing the difference, complexity and fragmentation of women's activities. For example, some scholars have studied women's associations, pointing out that from the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, women's associations had many types and pluralistic traditions, and that the different associations did not have a progressive relationship oriented towards the right to vote, but had different goals, methods and orientations. Some scholars have questioned the Whig narrative, arguing that the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century did not continue the "progressive trend" of the revolutionary period, and that the combination of many factors led to a great regression in society's perception of women's rights and roles, and women were asked to withdraw from politics and return to the family.

Judging from the situation of Lowell female workers, it is clear that the latter research path is more appropriate. Because first of all, the "working class" is not their permanent identity. These New England women spent an average of only 4-5 years in textile mills. Most female workers, after saving a little money, leave the factory and return to their hometowns, get married, have children, and continue to work as housewives. With the influx of large Irish immigrants in the late nineteen-forties and the gradual reduction of the number of local women employed in textile mills, the "Lowell female worker" was no longer a widely concerned and highly controversial social issue. Take, for example, the Hamilton textile mill in Lowell. In 1836, only 3.7 percent of the factory's workers were born abroad; by 1850 that number had risen to 38.6 percent, and by 1860 that figure had risen to 61.8 percent, of which 46.9 percent were Irish immigrants. Therefore, for this generation of female workers, factory life is only a small episode in their long lives, and the significance of wage labor for their "liberation" cannot be overstated.

Lucy Larcom

Moreover, it is true that not many of this generation of Lowell women have gone on to become true feminist activists. The most famous of them was Lucy Larcom. She followed her mother to work at the Lowell factory at the age of 11, left the factory at the age of 22, followed her family to the west and settled down, and later became a famous poet and writer. She supported improved factory conditions, abolition, and women's education, but was always opposed to women's suffrage, at odds with the likes of later women's rights leader Lucy Stone. Sarah G. Bagley, a leader of the Lowell women's workers' protests, may be remembered in the American labor movement, but it is hard to find it in the women's movement. After she stepped down as president of the Lowell Women's Reform Society in 1847, she remained unknown and never again advocated for women's rights. Harriet Hanson Robinson is a rare exception. As a child, she followed her mother, a dormitory administrator, to the Lowell plant, joined the American Women's Suffrage Association in her later years, and became one of the founders of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Suffrage Association. In 1898, nearly as an old age, Robinson recalled the women's workers' march he had participated in when he was 11 years old, linking it to women's suffrage more than half a century later. "When I look back and see the long (parade) procession, I feel a sense of pride that has never been greater, second only to Massachusetts in giving women the right to vote," she wrote fondly. Robinson wanted to portray the Lowell factory as the cradle of the feminist movement, and wanted to portray herself as a natural feminist fighter, but based on various historical facts, the authenticity of this constructed individual memory should be compromised. Therefore, placing Lowell women workers in a fractured and pluralistic historical process, paying attention to their internal differences and complexities, is more helpful for us to understand their ideological concepts and action logic, and more helpful for us to evaluate the significance of wage labor to the first generation of female workers.