The Voice of Industry (1845-1847) was a labor newspaper originally published in Fitchburg and later in Lowell and Boston. Its stated aim was "to promote the great principles of universal love, charity, good-will, just, equal and productive industry among mankind." The editors of the Voice often reprinted other periodicals' essays and news items that they believed would be of interest to working men and women. In 1845, one such essay from The Harbinger, a literary and reform-minded periodical issued from the experimental Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, appeared in the Voice. Brook Farm's Charles A. Dana, who understood the plight of Lowell's working women, wrote this piece as a review of three books on Lowell, two of which he believed were far too generous in their praise of the textile corporations and factory work. Dana alludes to the slave South in condemning the Northern social and economic conditions that compelled people to toil in Lowell's textile mills.
The Harbinger: A weekly magazine published by the residents of the Brook Farm commune devoted to social and political problems, to which James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Horace Greeley contributed.
Corporations boarding house: Each mill company (corporation) owned a set of boarding houses. Living in the mill’s boarding house was a condition of employment for female works during Lowell’s early days.
… when the [factory] laborer is shut up in a close room from ten to twelve hours a day in the most monotonous and tedious of employments. This is not wrong, we shall be told; they come voluntarily and leave when they will. Voluntary! we might reply, much the worse if they do; but let us look a little at this remarkable form of human freedom. Do they from mere choice leave their fathers' dwellings, the firesides where all their friends, where too their earliest and fondest recollections cluster, for the factory and the Corporations boarding house? . . . A slave too goes voluntarily to his task, but his will is in some manner quickened by the whip of the overseer. The whip which brings laborers to Lowell is NECESSITY. They must have money; a father's debts are to be paid, and aged mother is to be supported, a brother's ambition to be aided, and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will! . . . Is any one such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand factory girls in Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it? Everybody knows that it is necessity alone, in some form or other, that takes them to Lowell and that keeps them there. Is this freedom? To our minds it is slavery quite as really as any in Turkey or Carolina. It matters little as to the fact of slavery, whether the slave be compelled to his tasks by the whip of the overseer or the wages of the Lowell Corporations. In either case it is not his own free will leading him to work, but an outward necessity that puts free will out of the question. …
What argument does the author use to support his theory of the “whip of necessity”?
Why do you think the author chooses to compare the working conditions of the Lowell operatives to slavery? Do you think this is a fair comparison – why or why not? What might be problematic about this comparison?