People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [136]
In Exeter, New Hampshire, women mill workers went on strike (“turned out,” in the language of that day) because the overseer was setting the clocks back to get more time from them. Their strike succeeded in exacting a promise from the company that the overseers would set their watches right.
The “Lowell system,” in which young girls would go to work in the mills and live in dormitories supervised by matrons, at first seemed beneficent, sociable, a welcome escape from household drudgery or domestic service. Lowell, Massachusetts, was the first town created for the textile mill industry; it was named after the wealthy and influential Lowell family. But the dormitories became prisonlike, controlled by rules and regulations. The supper (served after the women had risen at four in the morning and worked until seven thirty in the evening) often consisted merely of bread and gravy.
So the Lowell girls organized. They started their own newspapers. They protested against the weaving rooms, which were poorly lit, badly ventilated, impossibly hot in the summer, damp and cold in the winter. In 1834, a cut in wages led the Lowell women to strike, proclaiming: “Union is power. Our present object is to have union and exertion, and we remain in possession of our own unquestionable rights. . . .” But the threat of hiring others to replace them brought them back to work at reduced wages (the leaders were fired).
The young women, determined to do better next time, organized a Factory Girls’ Association, and 1,500 went on strike in 1836 against a raise in boardinghouse charges. Harriet Hanson was an eleven-year-old girl working in the mill. She later recalled:
I worked in a lower room where I had heard the proposed strike fully, if not vehemently, discussed. I had been an ardent listener to what was said against this attempt at “oppression” on the part of the corporation, and naturally I took sides with the strikers. When the day came on which the girls were to turn out, those in the upper rooms started first, and so many of them left that our mill was at once shut down. Then, when the girls in my room stood irresolute, uncertain what to do . . . I, who began to think they would not go out, after all their talk, became impatient, and started on ahead, saying, with childish bravado, “I don’t care what you do, I am going to turn out, whether anyone else does or not,” and I marched out, and was followed by the others.
As I looked back at the long line that followed me, I was more proud than I have ever been since. . . .
The strikers marched through the streets of Lowell, singing. They held out a month, but then their money ran out, they were evicted from the boardinghouses, and many of them went back to work. The leaders were fired, including Harriet Hanson’s widowed mother, a matron in the boardinghouse, who was blamed for her child’s going out on strike.
Resistance continued. One mill in Lowell, Herbert Gutman reports, discharged twenty-eight women for such reasons as “misconduct,” “disobedience,” “impudence,” “levity,” and “mutiny.” Meanwhile, the girls tried to hold on to thoughts about fresh air, the country, a less harried way of life. One of them recalled: “I never cared much for machinery. I could not see into their complications or feel interested in them. . . . In sweet June weather I would lean far out of the window, and try not to hear the unceasing clash of sound inside.”
In New Hampshire, five hundred men and women petitioned the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company not to cut down an elm tree to make space for another mill. They said it was “a beautiful