“Union is Power:” The Appropriation of Revolutionary Rhetoric by Lowell’s “Mill Girls,”
1834-1850
Stacey Devlin
Dr. Robert Rutherdale
HIST 3506
5 December 2011
2
Introduction
During the 1830s and 40s, changing working conditions and increasing tensions led to conflicts
between employers and employees across the industrializing areas of the United States. In this
paper I aim to investigate how female employees at the Lowell cotton mills responded to
conditions which were increasingly oppressive to them both as women and as workers. I believe
that one of the first ways in which this question can begin to be answered lies in an investigation
of the kind of rhetoric used by the Lowell “mill girls” to advance ideas about labour reform
before employers and the public. While many historians have examined the origins of the female
mill operative and the conditions of her work, and some have explored the strikes as a response
to these conditions, only a few have looked at rhetoric as an integral aspect of this response. It is
evident that the Lowell mill girls made deliberate choices about the rhetoric they used to protest
exploitation. This rhetoric linked the fight for fair treatment of workers and greater recognition
of women‟s rights to ideas of liberty, equality, independence, unity, freedom, citizenship and
democracy as defined by the experience of the American Revolution.1
Lowell’s “Mill Girls” and Conditions of Employment
Women are an integral part of the history of American commercialization and industrialization,
having been present at the beginning of the “putting out” system and composing the majority of
the workforce in some of America‟s earliest factories. The mills in Lowell, Massachusetts were
some of the first factories in America (with some of them in existence as early as 1823). By
1840, the Lowell factories employed approximately eight thousand workers.2 The early labourers
in these mills were American-born women recruited from the farm families of the surrounding
countryside. In 1836, over 85 percent of the mill operatives in Lowell were women.3 Female
workers were an obvious choice in textile mills, since fabric work had been assigned to women
before it became industrialized; in addition, women could be hired at lower rates and with fewer
consequences than men, who were needed in other occupations such as farming.4 The women
who worked at the Lowell mills were typically single and between the ages of 15 and 30 years
old.5 Most girls were employed at the mills for only a few years, after which they typically
married or found employment in other occupations such as teaching.6 Some of the girls went to
1
For perhaps the most detailed and well-known work on the Lowell mill girls, see Thomas Dublin‟s numerous books
and journal articles. Another investigation into the Lowell girls‟ rhetoric is Chad Montrie‟s “I Think Less of the
Factory than of My Native Dell” in volume 9 of Environmental History, although rather than looking at the
American Revolution, Montrie discusses the importance of Romantic notions of nature.
2
Thomas Dublin, “Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills: „The Oppressing Hand of Avarice Would
Enslave Us,‟” Labor History 16, no.1 (1975):
http://invention.smithsonian.org/centerpieces/whole_cloth/u2ei/u2materials/dublin.html.
3
Ibid.
4
Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon, and Susan Reverby, eds., America’s Working Women (New York: Random
House, 1976), 41.
5
Dublin, “Women, Work, and Protest.”
6
Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1977), 77.
3
work in Lowell to provide their impoverished families with a supplementary income. This extra
money could be used to put another relative (often male) through school or pay off a mortgage.7
The evidence suggests, however, that the majority of these women came from middle-income
families. These educated girls would go to the Lowell mills to help their family (often simply by
relieving overcrowding), but also to save for marriage, experience city life, or leave a community
that lacked economic or marital prospects.8
Work in the mills was exhausting and repetitive. Mill girls could count on working
approximately 70 hours per week in the badly ventilated, smoky, dusty, dim, oppressively loud
factories.9 The day started when the factory bells first rang at four in the morning, and workers
were dismissed at seven-thirty in the evening.10 The majority of mill employees in Lowell lived
in company-owned boarding houses. These were crowded, with four to potentially eight women
sleeping in each room.11 A doctor sent to investigate mill conditions recorded 929 deaths from
tuberculosis deaths, 665 from typhus, 483 from dysentery and 335 deaths from cholera, diseases
that Louis Taylor Merill points out reflect “unsanitary and congested living conditions.”12
Pressure from boarding house matrons and the other girls maintained rigid moral standards in
place of the traditional family head.13 In the mills themselves, female workers were supervised
by male overseers and male administration.
Despite oppressive working conditions and corporate paternalism, factory work gave women an
unprecedented opportunity to assert their economic and social independence. In many cases the
physical distance from home helped to grant this relative freedom. Although some mill girls sent
their earnings back to their homes to help with family expenses, working girls were often able to
make decisions about how their income was to be spent, how much would be sent home, and
when they would discontinue mill employment.14 Thomas Dublin‟s work on Lowell mill
operatives illuminates several ways in which they also established their own unique female
community. Newcomers as well as seasoned millhands depended on each other for support, not
only by training beginners but also by sharing work.15 The same group of women at work was
7
Louis Taylor Merill, “Mill Town on the Merrimack,” The New England Quarterly 19, no.1 (March 1946): 22,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/361204.
8
Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1995), 105.
9
Maria Frawley, “Behind the Scenes of History: Harriet Martineau and „The Lowell Offering‟,” Victorian
Periodicals Review 38, no.2: Interdisciplinary Work and Periodical Connections: An Issue in Honor of Sally H.
Mitchell (Summer 2005), 149, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20084059; also Wertheimer, We Were There, 64.
10
Wertheimer, We Were There, 65.
11
Dublin, “Women, Work, and Protest.”
12
Josiah Curtis, “Public Hygiene of Massachusetts; But More Particularly of the Cities of Boston and Lowell,”
quoted in Merill, “Mill Town,” 29.
13
Julie A. Matthaei, An Economic History of Women in America: Women’s Work, the Sexual Division of Labor, and
the Development of Capitalism (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 144.
14
Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work, 96, 101. Dublin cites the cases of two girls, Anna Mason and Lucy Ann,
who both assert control over their income (Anna by remaining employed in the mills regardless of her parents‟
wishes to return home, and Lucy Ann by deciding to save money for Oberlin college rather than relinquishing her
earnings to her father).
15
Dublin, “Women, Work, and Protest.”
4
the group that mill operatives would typically eat and sleep with at the boarding houses. There
was little to no interaction with men, further encouraging women to seek community among each
other. Friends made at work and at the boarding houses would strengthen relationships by going
to Lyceum lectures, church, and shops together. These relationships and interdependencies
created a strong and unified culture of female mill workers.16 They even organized a company
newspaper, the Lowell Offering, which gave them an opportunity to publish articles, poems,
essays and short stories. Both the new sense of independence and of collective female unity that
mill work fostered were integral to the way in which the Lowell mill girls responded to changing
conditions.
As mills began to be built across the New England states, and as more factories were established
in Lowell, overproduction became a problem. This was coupled with economic depression from
1837 to 1840. Many factory owners decreased the wages of their workers and simultaneously
increased expectations for production as part of their cost-cutting measures.17 Mill operatives,
resentful of these affronts and fed up with the conditions of their work, responded by protesting
and by refusing to work. The first strike in Lowell took place in 1834, followed by another strike
two years later. The Lowell strikes represent some of the first collective actions by industrial
workers in America, at a time when most of America‟s important trade unions and labour reform
associations had not yet been created.18 The fact that the Lowell mill operatives acted and
thought of each other in collective terms is attested to not only by their participation in these
events, but also in the concern shown towards their fellow workers; during the 1836 strike, for
example, participants took care to demand amnesty for strikers and strike leaders and
demonstrated astuteness in removing workers from key departments.19 Along with this collective
response to changing working conditions was the use of specific kinds of rhetoric. The rhetoric
that Lowell mill workers used to rally each other together and to engage with employers and
spectators was dependent upon the invocation of a mythologized concept of the American
Revolution.
The Lowell Strikes and the Rhetoric of the American Revolution
There are several reasons why the rhetoric of the American Revolution was suited to the Lowell
operatives‟ purposes. Firstly, this rhetoric had already successfully rallied large numbers of
people to the cause of liberty and freedom from British rule, making it a perfect medium for the
mill girls to appropriate to advance their ideas about their rights as workers and women. The
memory of this victory against British “oppression” was in the nineteenth century still fresh in
the social consciousness; the mill operatives were not far removed from the years of the
revolution itself, and many in their father‟s or grandfather‟s generation would have participated
16
Thomas Dublin, “Women, Work, and the Family: Female Operatives in the Lowell Mills, 1830-1860,” Feminist
Studies 3, no.1/2 (Autumn 1975), 31, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3518953.
17
Dublin, “Women, Work, and Protest;” also Wertheimer, We Were There, 67.
18
Dublin, “Women, Work and the Family,” 33.
19
Ibid.
5
in it. Factory owners were among those who shared the memory of the Revolution, making it
relevant rhetoric for the mill girls to use when trying to establish a dialogue between employees
and employers. The rhetoric employed during this time also served the girls‟ purposes by calling
for firmness, strength in unity, resistance against an oppressive authority, and initiative without
being too radical. As many historians have pointed out, the War of Independence was a
conservative revolution (at least economically speaking), with the American people perfectly
content to continue trading with the British as soon as they had asserted their political
sovereignty. In the same way, the mill girls advocated for relatively small changes like higher
wages and shorter workdays rather than the destruction of the entire capitalist system.
The language of the American Revolution allowed Lowell labour reformers to justify their
actions before both employers and a critical public. This discourse established an ideological
precedent for the mill girls‟ behaviour. The rhetoric of the Revolution linked their “radical”
actions to patriotism, justice and civic duty, ideals which were fresh in the minds and hearts of
all Americans whether or not they could understand the specific complaints of the mill workers.
In several documents and statements, mill operatives skilfully employ this discourse as a strategy
to demonstrate to both their employers and a watchful public that their collective agitation was
not only justifiable, but the only morally responsible course of action, an obligation brought
about by their lineage and their identity as loyal Americans.
At the strike of February 1834, the employers of the Lowell mills were presented with a petition
in which the intentions and goals of the workers were explained. This document is so abundant
in the language of the American Revolution that it best serves our purposes to transcribe a
portion of it here:
UNION IS POWER. – Our present object is to have union and exertion, and we
remain in possession of our own unquestionable rights. We circulate this paper,
wishing to obtain the names of all who imbibe the spirit of our patriotic ancestors,
who preferred privation to bondage and parted with all that renders life desirable –
and even life itself – to produce independence for their children. The oppressing
hand of avarice would enslave us. . . . as we are free, we would remain in possession
of what kind Providence has bestowed upon us, and remain daughters of freemen
still.20
This is a perfect example of how mill employees linked their agitation to ideas of patriotism,
liberty and justice. The operatives implicitly insist that they are not to be thought of as
troublemakers and radicals; rather, they are simply following in their fathers‟ footsteps and doing
what must be done in order to maintain their unquestionable – and God-given – rights. In the
same way as the Revolutionaries‟ resistance of British authority was noble, so too is the
resistance of the mill girls against their employers, whose “oppressing hand of avarice” threatens
20
The Man, Feb. 22, 1834, quoted in Wertheimer, We Were There, 68-69.
6
their liberty just as the Intolerable Acts violated the liberty of the thirteen colonies. At the end of
this petition, the mill girls appended a poem in which the Yankee-Tory oppositional allegory is
made even more explicit:
Let oppression shrug her shoulders,
And a haughty tyrant frown,
And little upstart Ignorance
In mockery look down.
Yet I value not the feeble threats
Of Tories in disguise,
While the flag of Independence
O‟er our noble nation flies.21
Not only does the poem liken mill owners to oppressive loyalist tyrants, but it also demonstrates
that inaction on the part of the mill workers would be an insult to everything that loyal
Americans hold dear.
During the strike itself, this rhetoric of liberty, democracy, and justice was also used to give mill
operatives unity of purpose. Some participants gave inflammatory speeches which further roused
“revolutionary” fervour – not necessarily fervour to start a revolution, but fervour based on the
memory of the one that had already been accomplished. One newspaper report reads that “one of
the leaders mounted a stump and made a flaming Mary Wollstonecraft speech on the rights of
women and the iniquities of the „monied aristocracy‟” which inspired listeners to “have their way
if they died for it.”22 Harriet Robinson‟s recollection of the strike gives us a little further insight
into this particular speech. The anonymous orator declared that it was the mill girls‟ “duty to
resist all attempts at cutting down the wages.”23 Even if the concept of the American Revolution
is not explicitly stated in this speech (and it may very well have been) the idea is still invoked of
an obligation to resist an oppressive authority, even unto death, for the sake of justice and
equality. It is not far-fetched to imagine that this kind of language would be used by strike
organizers to rally girls to “turn out” in the first place.
However, despite the force of their words, the 800 mill employees who participated were unable
to sustain the strike, and factory owners were unwilling to compromise. Only a few days later,
the mills had returned to running at nearly full capacity.24 Nevertheless workers at the Lowell
mills continued to agitate for labour reform. In 1836, with the help of the newly created – and
21
Emphasis mine. Poem concluding the 1834 Petition to Lowell Manufacturers, quoted in Catherine Lavender,
“Texts About Lowell Mill Girls,” „Liberty Rhetoric‟ and Nineteenth-Century American Women,
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/americanstudies/lavender/lowetext.html#transcript (accessed October 10,
2011).
22
Boston Transcript (1834), quoted in Lavender, “Texts About Lowell Mill Girls.”
23
Emphasis mine. Harriet Robinson, Loom and Spindle or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (New York: T.Y.
Crowell, 1898), 51, quoted in Paul Halsall, “Harriet Robinson: Lowell Mill Girls,” Modern History Sourcebook,
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/robinson-lowell.asp (accessed October 10, 2011).
24
Dublin, “Women, Work, and Protest.”
7
2500 members strong – Factory Girls‟ Association, the Lowell mill girls struck again.25 The
rhetoric of the American Revolution is repeated at this strike. Once again the employers are
likened to the avaricious British government, while the mill girls are “forced” to act in order to
prevent their enslavement. The father-daughter relationship is again established between the
fighters of the War of Independence and the factory workers, invoking the shared Yankee
heritage of most of the mill‟s female operatives. In another statement to factory owners, this time
resolving that discrimination would not be tolerated against strike leaders, the Lowell mill
operatives declared: “As our fathers resisted unto blood the lordly avarice of the British ministry,
so we, their daughters, never will wear the yoke which has been prepared for us.”26 The
corporations and the industrialization process are made to appear as if they are conspiring to
insidiously reinstate British oppression over the innocent working population of America. The
only possible response is to boldly act in the interests of liberty, as this song, chanted by the 1500
women in the 1836 strike, reveals:
Oh! Isn‟t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I
Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?
Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,
For I‟m so fond of liberty,
That I cannot be a slave.27
While other documents such as the 1834 petition presumably represent only a small number of
workers, this song is an example of revolutionary rhetoric being assumed by a large portion of
the mill girls and put into action. In all cases, whether petitions, declarations, speeches, songs, or
poems, resistance is linked to patriotism. Militant protest is made to seem like the only natural
course of action in the face of the tyranny exhibited by Tory-esque employers.
Unlike the 1834 strike, this “turn-out” caused the Lowell mills to run well below capacity for
several months.28 Yet this strike was also unsuccessful in that employers still refused to grant the
concessions that millhands demanded. This second defeat still did not discourage mill workers.
Although the depression from 1837 to 1840 brought labour organization to a temporary
standstill, steps continued to be followed to strengthen the fight for both women‟s and worker‟s
rights throughout the 1840s.29 Strikes were no longer considered a successful tactic; instead
petitions were used instead pressure the state government (the 1846 petition campaign attained
approximately 5000 signatures).30 However, referencing the American Revolution continued to
play a part in the mill girls‟ strategy. In 1845, the Lowell branch of the Female Labor Reform
Association was created to promote the ten hour day, which became the new rallying point for
25
Michael Goldberg, “Breaking New Ground, 1800-1848,” in No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United
States, edited by Nancy F. Cott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 220.
26
Wertheimer, We Were There, 71.
27
Robinson, 52, quoted in Halsall, “Harriet Robinson.”
28
Dublin, “Women, Work, and Protest.”
29
Wertheimer, We Were There, 72.
30
Dublin, “Women, Work, and Protest.”
8
mill workers.31 Article 9 of the constitution that Sarah Bagley drafted for the LFLRA repeats the
same kinds of terms used in 1834 and 1836. Although the Association claimed that its members
should refrain from turning out “until all pacific measures prove abortive,” it was still “the
imperious duty of everyone to assert and maintain that independence which our brave ancestors
bequeathed us and sealed with their blood.”32
By the 1850s, most of the militant New England farm women who had fought in the mills for
labour reform had left Lowell, either for marriage or other work.33 The Lowell Offering was
discontinued in 1849, having lost both readers and contributors.34 Further strikes in 1848 and
1853 contributed to the exodus of the original “mill girls” from the factories,35 and they were
increasingly replaced by Irish immigrants. The idea of the American Revolution was alien to an
increasing number of the Lowell workforce. By the mid-1850s, the Lowell mill girls‟ fiery
invocations of the American fight for independence existed only in the echoes of the past.
Conclusion
Lowell‟s mill girls, though in reality a complex and diverse group of women, did to some extent
unite in strikes and petitions under the banner of the American Revolution. They used this
rhetoric to present a collective image of righteous indignation towards employers and critics.
This was a brief but unique period in American history where young women found a way to
bring the issues of women‟s rights, fair treatment of workers, and even abolitionism together
with the concepts of democracy and liberty that were at the heart of the newly formed nation. An
appreciation for their skilful use of rhetoric in this period is a valuable aspect of context that can
help the historian to more fully understand the actions of Lowell‟s female labour reformers.
31
Wertheimer, We Were There, 72.
Voice of Industry, Feb. 27, 1846, quoted in Wertheimer, We Were There, 75.
33
Wertheimer, We Were There, 77.
34
Frawley, “Behind the Scenes,” 146.
35
Wertheimer, We Were There, 77.
32