The Lowell Offering

The Lowell Offering, Writings by New England Mill Women (1840-1845), edited by Benita Eisler, Harper, 1977  What we know of Apple’s Chinese worker problems is not new – two hundred years ago the Yankee mill girls worked 14 hour days for $2.00 per week, standing up,  in buildings whose windows were nailed shut.  They lived in corporation-owned boarding houses where they ate hurried meals and slept 2 or 3 girls to a bed.  Their evening and Sunday time off was tightly controlled with curfews and required church attendance  But what they did have was money, a new currency that spelled for the ones who did not send their pay back home, freedom and a life more comfortable than the hardscrabble existence guaranteed them on a New England farm. The average tenure of these women was four years, and by the 1840s the influx of Irish immigrants followed by other Europeans, along with speed-ups, wage cuts, and the loss of the boarding houses, the era had ended. 

Although this collection of Mill Girl letters and stories from the Lowell textile mills is one of the few sources of real data about the Yankee mill girls who left farms behind to run the looms in the massive brick factories, except for its inclusion in Women’s Studies programs the book has been largely forgotten.   The Lowell Offering began as an irregularly published collection of Mill Girl writings in 1840, but the local minister who began publication took it to a monthly subscription magazine, thirty pages long, at six and one quarter cents per issue.  I’m sure that the mill owners saw this publication as a great public relations vehicle, but I think that to the female contributors publishing their work offered an opportunity to experiment with writing, an idea that would have perfectly fit their aspirations for education. 

 The stories were not, however, inflammatory or filled with labor/management issues.  Many of them – even at the time they appeared -  were criticized for being saccharine or idealized pictures of work and family life.  Filled with nostalgic images of maple-sugaring, farm families gathered at the kitchen table and objects like the patchwork quilt that signaled home, they are emotional renderings of what the mill workers must have felt and missed.  The golden era for the mill girls did not, like The Lowell Offering, last long – less than 20 years for the girls, and two+ years for the publication.  But the turnouts of the 1830s, the Ten Hour Movement, the attempts to create an insurance pool to cover the $3/wk cost of hospitalization, and other work issues are all connected and have roots in this publication.  Included in the list of contributors was Lucy Larcom, a young Beverly, Massachusetts girl, who, following the death at sea of her father accompanied her mother to Lowell where Lucy found mill work and her mother ran a boarding house.  Lucy wrote poems and one widely published book, A New England Girlhood; while tending her looms she pasted shreds of her favorite passages on the window.  She eventually fled the mills to seek her education, choosing not to marry, and upon her return to Massachusetts she became president of Wheaton College.  Other mill girl contributors became labor leaders, one a New York editor, while others disappeared into obscurity. 

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