The Lowell Mills

The Lowell Mills Uprising: Setting the Stage for Strikes Everywhere

The Lowell Mills girls started the industrial revolution in the United States. It started something like this where Young woman was factory workers, living in crowded boarding houses, making very little in wages, and they were tired of it. These girls left their homes, families, and everything familiar to them. The revolution did not happen overnight though. The horrible working conditions and crowded living quarters helped fuel the fire that ignited into a full blown strike with a young woman taking the podium in a surprising move.

The 1820s marked the beginning of the collective resistance of women to deplorable working conditions. Women and girls were forced to work 13- and 14-hour days at low pay, operating dangerous machines in excruciatingly hot rooms. One of the first documented cases of working women's activism took place in Dover, New Hampshire, in 1828. To protest low wages and long hours, 300 to 400 girls marched out of the cotton mill factory firing off gunpowder. The first union for women only, the United Tailoresses of New York, was formed in 1825 in response to a cut in piecework rates. In 1831, 1,600 of its female members went on strike for “a just price for our labor”. In 1844 women and girls in Lowell, Massachusetts, formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association (LFLRA) to advocate for the 10-hour workday. Sarah Bagley was the organization's first president. Under her leadership, LFLRA convinced the Massachusetts legislature to conduct the first investigation into labor conditions by a governmental body in the United States. Its organizing efforts spread to nearby areas, and in 1847 New Hampshire became the first state to enact a 10-hour workday.

Lowell Mill Girls is the name that received the workers of the textile city of Lowell (Massachusetts) in19th century. The textile mills of Lowell, bridgeheads of Industrial Revolution in the United States presented the special unique for its time employing a workforce made ??up three-quarters of women aged 16 to 35 years.

To attract the female workforce to Lowell textile companies in the region had pursued a policy of high wages by the standards of the time (three to five dollars per week). But the Depression led the board mills of Lowell to announce a reduction of wages by 15% as of March 1834. The workers responded by organizing a strike and withdraw their savings from local banks where they were deposited, which caused a near panic in the two banks concerned. The ...