Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

grass of her native town of Dedham, and of ingeniously making this braid into a bonnet. Although scarcely more than a child, the chronicles tell that she taught others to do what she had done, and started a business by which the want of bonnets and hats for summer-wear was supplied. From using straw for head-gear, its manufacture spread to other things, and developed an industry that, in 1880, employed nearly eleven thousand operatives. Of these over seven thousand were

women.

Whether it was the active out-door life led by the American women of the eighteenth century, or the wide-awake interest circumstances obliged them to take in the concerns of the family and of men; whether the stirring times in which they moved, or the deferential attitude of men stimulated them to do things that the women of other nations were not doing, it is certain that the American women of a century ago were far in advance of their times in all things except a knowledge of light literature, which the circulating libraries of Europe placed within the reach of women there, and a scarcity of books denied them here. That this was more of a gain than loss, by giving women time to think, is shown in the energy with which they went to work in helping to build up the nation. They engaged in mercantile affairs with such success that, it is said, "many Boston fortunes owed their rise to women." The active interest taken by them in politics gave, even before the Revolution, some representative women to journalism." Out of the seventy-eight newspapers published in the colonies, sixteen were edited by women, and all but two of them championed the cause of liberty and justice. The first paper to publish the Declaration of Independence was edited and printed by a Mrs. Reid. In medicine, women confined themselves into distilling herbs into remedies which it was said "could kill or cure with any of the faculty." the practice of midwifery, history has preserved the name of a Mrs. Robinson, of New London, who continued to practice to an advanced age, and who "delivered twelve hundred mothers without losing a patient."

In

The inventive faculty, so distinctive a trait in the character of the American man, was also a gift of the American woman. How many women were inventors will never be known, as they timidly shielded their identity behind men. This is said to have been the case with the cotton-gin. Credited through all the years to Eli Whitney, modern writers claim that it was the fruit of the inventive powers of Mrs.

Nathaniel Green,* widow of Gen. Green of revolutionary fame. The story runs that Mrs. Green, a native of Rhode Island and familiar with the working of the anchor forge belonging to her husband's father, set her wits to work while visiting her Georgia plantations, to lessen the labor of cleansing the cotton. When this difficulty was solved, she permitted Mr. Whitney to claim the patent, through fear of the ridicule of her friends and loss of social position recognition of her work might have entailed.

By whomever invented, no other instrument has been so fruitful of consequences. In 1793, when the cotton-gin was made, cotton, instead of being King, was a humble garden plant, grown for home consumption in the regions from Georgia to New Jersey. When its snowy blossoms ripened, women gathered them, plucked the seeds from the fiber, and got it ready for spinning. So difficult was this process, that to remove the seed from one pound was considered a good day's work. By the operation of the cotton-gin, in the time it had taken to cleanse one pound, three hundred-weight could be got ready for market. By this, cotton was transformed at once into a valuable commercial product that required for its successful cultivation an enormous increase of land and labor. It instilled such new life into the almost dying institution of slavery that the cotton-gin may well be said to have been the foster-mother of slavery in America.

As the immediate effect of the cotton-gin in the South was to give an enormous value to the slave, its invention was followed in the North by the cotton factory. The cotton factory was the northern complement of the cotton-gin. To women it had the momentous results of transferring them from the home to the factory; of taking them out of the family farm-house to the manufacturing towns and villages, and, by making them for the first time the wage-earning competitors of men, altering their whole status in the labor market of America.

With the factory came a new epoch for women in America. The War of the Revolution and the War of 1812 had been ended long enough to induce a general feeling of security concerning the future of the republic. For a large number of people, the hard work and deprivations of the past were as a dream; peace and plenty promised to abound. Wealth came

* "Women as Inventors." Mrs. Gage, North American Review, 1883, P. 478.

flowing from all directions in a steady stream into the country through the various channels of commerce and agriculture. Numerous business enterprises were undertaken, principal among which were the factories for weaving cotton and wool into cloth. The earliest of these was built in Massachusetts, where numerous swift-flowing rivers abound, capable of being utilized for moving machinery. Through the energetic, progressive spirit of the descendants of the Puritans, it was not long before New England began to rival Old England in manufacturing the increased production of cotton grown in the United States. The first cotton mill erected in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1822, was followed so quickly by others, that by 1839 there were in Lowell ten companies incorporated with a capital of $13,000,000. These produced 2,463,000 yards of cloth per week, of which all but 91,000 were cotton. The number of operatives employed were 12,507, and in the cotton mills the majority of these were women. From the amount of capital invested and the number of operatives employed, Lowell was termed, in the period between 1840 and 1850, “the Manchester of America."

But in nothing-except that Lowell and Manchester were places filled with the hum of machinery tended by human workers for their own livelihood and the profits of otherswas there any resemblance between Manchester and Lowell. The recorded condition of the English operatives, especially women, at that time reads like a page torn from some canto of Dante's "Inferno;" while that of Lowell, pictured by women who worked as ordinary mill-hands in the Lowell factories, seems in comparison like a Utopian idyl evolved from the brain of dreamers.

According to writers, the women operatives who entered the Lowell mills came from the New England farms, not from stress of circumstances, but to get wage-money to help lift a mortgage from the family farm, or to assist some son or brother in obtaining an otherwise impossible university education. A large majority entered the mills to secure independence, or household and dress adornments. Not a few entered so as to be near circulating libraries and schools, with the opportunities for self-culture which these afforded. Coming from the agricultural class, which considered itself among the aristocracy of America,* no class distinctions were made, and the factory

"For generations," writes Johnstone, in his 'History of Connecticut,' "merchants and mechanics had been outranked by farmers."

young women were welcomed into the best social circles of Lowell. Well but simply dressed, as was the fashion of the times, they were to be seen at church, Sunday-schools, and social gatherings at the parsonages and elsewhere, receiving the same consideration as those whom circumstances had placed above the need of work. The girls themselves felt no loss of caste or diminution of self-respect. Most of them expected to marry-many did-and withdraw from the factory, and failing this, when factory work became disagreeable, to retire to the family home. The factory was an episode, not, as it later became too frequently elsewhere, the burden of this chapter in woman's life.

The factories per se were as remarkable as the women who operated them. Kept as clean as the nature of the work would admit, with plants growing in the windows trained to shade the glass, the rooms seemed redolent of the country. Fronting one side of the building were the banks and waters of the swift-flowing Merrimac, which, as it hastened on to meet the sea, turned the wheels of the machinery, ignorant as yet of steam. On the other was the bright, new village, looking, as Dickens said in 1843, “as if every kind of store had taken down its shutters for the first time and started in business yesterday." Standing on the hill was the prettiest building in the place, which was the hospital where girls when sick were tenderly cared for. Those unable to pay the weekly charge of three dollars, had it provided for them by the corporations. Seidom were the latter put to this expense, for Yankee girls had a horror of being placed under money obligations. Boarding-houses, erected by the mill-owners, were given in charge of reputable women. The charge for board in them, including the mid-day meal,-which was taken in civilized fashion at the boarding-house tables,-and washing to a certain extent, was fixed at the small sum of $1.50. Wages, counting in those of the little doffers, averaged $3.75 per week. Weavers, drawing-in girls, warpers, and spinners, who tended extra work, could earn from six to eight dollars per week. These wages, with the low price of board and the economical style of dress common in those days, enabled the mill operatives to place a large part of their earnings in the savings bank established for their use by the corporations. In 1841, one hundred thousand dollars, a sum which was a source of pride to all concerned, was deposited to the credit of the girls of Lowell.

Happy in their social position, and in the good feeling exist

ing between employers and employed, free from pecuniary care for the necessities of life and in command of some of the best luxuries, the Lowell girls reached an intellectual height unique in the history of industrial workers. When the twelve or fourteen hours that then constituted a day's work were ended, buoyant with the health of generations of out-door workers, the Lowell women were fresh enough to enjoy in various ways what was left of their evenings. In most of the boardinghouses there were pianos, the joint property of the girls. Some played, others sang. Books were read, topics discussed, and poems, stories, and essays written. These formed the pages of the "Lowell Offering," a monthly magazine composed entirely of articles by the girls. The literary merit of these articles astonished people from abroad. Harriet Martineau republished some of them in England under the title of "Mind among the Spindles," while Dickens claimed that, independent of the fact that the articles were written by girls after a long, hard day's work in factories, they "compared favorably with those of many English periodicals." In character, the stories differed from the sentimental love-tales common to women's writings of that period. Simple in style, they were mostly descriptive of human life and the beauties of nature that the girls had left behind them, and what was best in their Lowell environments. Among the contributors, who attained national reputation, were Lucy Larcom, the poet; Margaret Foley, the sculptor, and Mrs. H. H. Robinson, the author.* These women always spoke with affectionate respect of their factory experiences. Mrs. Robinson, at the International Council of Women, held at Washington in 1888, after telling how she had entered the Lowell mills as a "doffer" when a child, and remained there until she married in 1848, said: "I consider the Lowell mills my alma mater, and am as proud of them as most girls of the colleges in which they have been educated.”

When factory towns sprang up in the suburbs of the large cities of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, etc., they did so under conditions different from those of Lowell, and, of course, had other results. There was no need in these places for corporations to offer exceptional wages and treatment to women to induce them to enter the mills. Already at hand, and eager to accept any conditions, were the thousands of

* Material for the account of Lowell has been taken from Mrs. H. H. Robinson's interesting paper on Early Factory Life in New England, Dickens's American Notes, Lowell Offering, and Appleton's American Cyclopædia.

« AnteriorContinuar »