Assignment
History of U.S.A : Reconstruction to New Age Politics
By : - Priya Dahiya
History honors (3rd year​)
Ques. ​Trace the contribution of Lowell women workers in developing a sense of
community and labour unionism that sparked the Ten hour movement in the 1840s.
Ans. ​For most of its history, western political theory has ignored women. From the late
colonial period through the American Revolution,women's work usually centered on the
home, but romanticizing this role as the Domestic Sphere came only in the early 19th
century, that is also the time when industrial revolution started taking place in the United
States.When the first factories were built in America in the1820s and 1830s, in places
like Lowell, Massachusetts, many of the workers were young women. In the 1830s and
40s almost half a century before the better-known mass movements for workers' rights in
the United States began, the Lowell mill women organized themselves, went on strike
and mobilized in politics when women couldn't even vote—and created the first union of
working women in American history. In 1834 and 1836 they went on strike to protest
wage cuts, and between 1843 and 1848 they mounted petition campaigns' aimed at
reducing the hours of labor in the mills,which came to be known as the “Ten hour
movement”. In the following paragraphs we will trace down the trajectory of events that
finally led to the Ten hour movement while focusing on the crucial role played by women
in creating a sense of consciousness among the workers of that time.
In the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, westward expansion and the
transportation revolution were changing the face of the new nation. The growing vitality
of American commerce in this era was symbolized by the new textile mills of Lowell.
According to ​Thomas Dublin,​ Lowell Textile Mills developed in two phases. In the first
phase (1800-1820), textile mills began to appear and labour came to work in these mills
from agricultural families. The work structure as well as culture was based on family
labor where the father worked on company farm while mother and children worked as
labourers in the mill. In the second phase according to Dublin(1820 onwards) there was
rapid movement of people into westward territory which saw many people wanting
economic independence.Due to the invention of new machines, it led to more investment
of capital profit. In order to maintain their profit margins, the mill owners began to
employ women labourers who could be paid less salaries and also could be easily
controlled. At the same time men in the families began to move away from their
families, which force women to become the bread winners of the family. A mix of
personal and familial motivations led women to leave their farming homes and take up
mill employment which permitted young women to earn their own support without
depending on their families; second, the wages permitted young women to save
something for their future. While working in textile mills, women workers gained
economic independence which gave them sense of freedom to loosen the patriarchal
control by losing parental supervision and ability to establish their own identity. These
women began to use the money they earned to become more educated, visit public places,
to express their opinions as well as enjoy the freedom of spatial movement.
As Lowell expanded and became the nation's largest textile manufacturing center, the
experiences of women operatives changed as well. The increasing number of firms in
Lowell and in other mill towns brought the pressure of competition. Overproduction
became a problem and the prices of finished cloth decreased. The high profits of the early
years declined and so did conditions for the mill operatives. Wages were reduced and the
pace of work within the mills was stepped up. Women operatives did not accept these
changes without protest. In 1834 and 1836 they went on strike to protest wage cuts.
These labor protests in early Lowell contribute to our understanding of the response of
workers to the growth of industrial capitalism in the first half of the 19th century. Thomas
Dublin states in his essay that, “​the major factor in the rise of a new consciousness
among operatives in Lowell was the development of a close-knit community among
women working in the mills.”​ There were several reasons for the development of a sense
of community or belongingness. The women of lowell mills are considered a
"community" because of the development of bonds of mutual dependence among them.
Through the system of job training, the textile corporations contributed to the
development of community among female operatives. Informal work-sharing Living
conditions also contributed to the development of community among female
operatives.The community of women operatives, in sum, developed in a setting where
women worked and lived together, twenty four hours a day. ​Group pressure to conform,
so important to the community of women in early Lowell, played a significant role in the
collective response of women to changing conditions in the mills. D
​ ublin also, points out
that the work structure, the workers' housing, and workforce homogeneity​ ​were the major
elements which contributed to the growth of community among Lowell's women
operatives​.
The first Lowell “turn-out”, or strike, took place in 1834, when owners announced a 15%
wage cut. Lowell women were angered not only by the loss of income, but also by the
threat to their vision of increased independence. They petitioned others to "discontinue
their labors until terms of reconciliation were made. Women again went on strike in
1836, this second turn-out was similar to the first in several respects yet different as there
was an increase in the scale and duration of the second one.Women displayed a much
higher degree of organization in 1836 than earlier. They formed a Factory Girls'
Association to coordinate strike activities. Though strikes were illegal in most states,
working Americans took part in many strikes and protests in the 1830s but the early
strikes proved to be brief and failed to reverse the proposed wage reductions as the
Management had enough power and resources to crush the strike​.​The first strike in
Lowell, is important not because it failed or succeeded, but simply because it took place
in an era in which women had to overcome opposition simply to work in the mills, it is
remarkable that they would further overstep the accepted middle-class bounds of female
propriety by participating in a public protest.
In 1840s Lowell mill girls turned to a novel strategy of political action. This is often seen
as a culmination of labor protest in the New England mills before the Civil War. They
organized the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association to press for reducing the
workday to 10 hours, giving way to the “Ten hour movement”. Factory workers in
Lowell were spending an average of 12.5 hours per day performing dreary, exhausting
work in onerous conditions. When the time spent going to and from the mills was
factored in, the days approached 14.5 hours. The pace of work in the mills increased
without any wage gains, millworkers came to demand a ten-hour workday, giving them
time to relax, attend meetings and lectures, and participate in the urban cultural scene
around them. These protests built on earlier strikes reveal much about the sensibility that
New England women brought to the mill experience. The Ten Hour Movement, seen in
political terms, was a logical outgrowth of the unsuccessful turn-outs of the previous
decade. Like the earlier struggles, the Ten Hour Movement was an assertion of the
dignity of operatives and an attempt to maintain that dignity under the changing
conditions of industrial capitalism.The growth of relatively permanent labor
organizations and institutions among women was a distinguishing feature of the Ten
Hour Movement of the 1840s.
In order to succeed, ten-hour workday initiatives required legislative action, making
government and the political process part of reform discussions for the first time. The
Lowell female labor association organized several petition campaigns demanding laws
that limited the workday. An important educational and organizing tool of the Lowell
Female Labor Reform Association was the ‘Voice of Industry’, a labor weekly published
in Lowell between 1845 and 1848 by the New England Workingmen's Association.
Female operatives were involved in every aspect of its publication and used the Voice to
further spread the Ten Hour Movement among women. Although earlier petition efforts
found little traction, in 1845 the Voice of Industry spearheaded a vigorous campaign that
collected over 2,000 signatures(most of them being of women) and more than double
signed on a petition in the following year—asking the Massachusetts state legislature to
reduce the working hours in the mills.This effort led to the creation of a House of
Representatives committee to investigate factory conditions, the first such committee in
the United States. The committee was led by William Schouler. The committee heard
testimony from a number of women who spoke about the dreary work and long hours in
the mills. Despite this, it opted not to intervene. Indeed, the committee’s report,
reproduced here, amounted to a full exoneration of the corporations.The Voice and the
female labor reform association reacted sharply to the report, charging that the political
process had been hijacked by the corporations, and accused the committee of distorting
the workers’ testimony. At the same time, workers in New England had varying attitudes
towards the ten hour campaigns. Some believed that they were the first step in a broader
reform movement. For others, it was an attempt to simply mitigate the negative effects of
the new economic system, the basic premise of which had already been reluctantly
accepted. Still other workers, fearing that a ten-hour system would put a limit on their
earnings, refused to lend their support to the movement.
However, the “Ten Hour Movement” did not develop suddenly; it was based on efforts of
sub-associations which came together to form labor union. The Lowell Female Labor
Reform Association was affiliated to the New England Working Men Association
(NEWMA), which encouraged equal salary to both men and women. This is also seen as
one of the distinguishing feature of Ten hour movement as unlike the earlier labor
struggles in Lowell, it involved both men and women. The two groups worked together,
and each made an important contribution to the movement in Lowell. Women had the
numbers, comprising as they did over eighty per cent of the mill workforce. Men, on the
other hand, had the votes, and since the Ten Hour Movement was a political struggle,
they played a crucial part.Although coordinating their efforts with those of working
men,women operatives organized independently within the Ten Hour Movement. For
instance, in 1845 two important petitions were sent from Lowell to the State legislature as
mentioned above, where over eighty per cent of the signers of one petition were females.
The way in which the Ten Hour Movement was carried from Lowell to other mill towns
illustrates the independent organizing of women within the larger movement. In these
labor struggles women operatives expressed a new consciousness of their rights both as
workers and as women. Such a consciousness, like the community of women itself, was
one product of Lowell's industrial revolution.
From the above discussion one can easily say that the Lowell women workers played a
significant role in the worker's reform movements of 19th century, and later period also
as they created a sense of community or belongingness which forms the basis of any
major movement. This sense of community was an outcome of a multiple factors
followed by certain events, as mentioned above. The young women of Lowell gave new
meaning to the “republican” heritage of equality and independence that had emerged
from the American Revolution. The women's ten hour movement was based on their own
sense of worth and dignity as daughters of freedmen. However their victory in short
terms, was pretty hollow but in the long term, the Lowell mill girls started something that
transformed the country. No one told them how to do it.They got fed up, joined together,
supported each other and fought for what they knew was right. They showed that
working women didn't have to put up with injustice in the workplace. From the
establishment of Lowell female labor reform association to the early protests against
shrinking wages, and later to the ten hour movement, women in this period set an
example for the workers as well as for the women who were not even allowed to work,
vote or even travel alone in that period. Therefore, their contribution to creating a sense
of community and labor unionism along with a sense of self worth among women cannot
be overlooked.
Bibliography
1. “​Give me Liberty!​ An American history” by Eric Foner
2. “​Women, work, and protest in early Lowell mills: ‘the oppressing hand of
Avarice would enslave us’”​ by Thomas Dublin
3. “​Women and early Industrial Revolution in United States​” by Thomas
Dublin