Lyddie: Chapter 12 - I Will Not be a Slave

During the turnout, or strike, of 1836, mill girls marched in the streets singing “I cannot be a slave.” as shown in this sheet music.

University of Massachusetts Lowell, Center for Lowell History

Lyddie quickly becomes one of the mill’s top workers. She is given more looms to tend and is making more money than ever. Even as she works faster, she keeps a page copied from Oliver Twist taped to a loom. Lyddie’s reading skills improve. As Lyddie worries about Oliver, who is in the poorhouse, she begins to understand why her mother left their farm. If she had stayed, the whole family may have ended up in a poorhouse.

One day, Lyddie gets an unexpected letter from her mother that contains sad news: her baby sister has died, and her next youngest sister, Rachel, is very sick. Lyddie vows to work even harder and is one of the few people who doesn’t mind the speedup. Lyddie’s roommates are unhappy. After Prudence gets sick and decides to leave Lowell for good, Betsy considers signing the ten-hour petition. She says she plans to stay only until she has enough money to go West to go to college. This kind of talk makes Lyddie anxious. She worries that losing long workdays would make her dream of paying off the family’s debts farther out of reach.

Fact Check: Slave Language

Betsy says, “we are all working like black slaves.” Did mill workers use language that compared themselves to enslaved people?

What do we know?

Yes, some mill workers did. Working at the mills was clearly different from being enslaved and forced to work at whatever task one’s master and owner (the enslaver) demanded! Mill workers might need their hard-earned wages to feed, clothe, and house themselves, but they could always leave and seek other employment if they wished. They were, after all, free men, women, and children. Why, then, did some use the word “slavery” to describe their conditions? Describing their labor as being like that required of slaves was a strategy to push for better working conditions. Of course, actual enslaved or formerly enslaved people strongly disagreed with the comparison. And Southern supporters of slavery liked it, even claiming that enslaved people enjoyed better lives than northern industrial workers.

What is the evidence?

Primary Source:

Voluntary?

“…Is anyone such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand factory girls of Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it? Everybody knows that it is necessity alone, in some form or other that takes us to Lowell and keeps us there. Is this freedom? To my mind 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 task by the whip of the overseer or the wages of the Lowell Corporation…”

Voice of Industry, vol 1, no 17. September 18, 1845

Primary Source:

Factory Life As It Is

“… I refer to the female operatives of New England—the free states of our union—the boasted land of equal rights for all...but yet there are those, a host of them, too, who are in fact nothing more nor less than slaves in every sense of the word! Slaves to a system of labor which requires them to toil from five until seven o'clock, with one hour only to attend to the wants of nature, allowed—slaves to the will and requirements of the "powers that be," however they may infringe on the rights or conflict with the feelings of the operatives—slaves to ignorance—and how can it be otherwise? What time has the operative to bestow on moral, religious or intellectual culture?”

“An Operative.” Factory Life as it is,” Voice of Industry, vol. 1 no. 21. November 7, 1845

Primary Source:

Letter from a Factory-Girl to Senator Clemens

Lowell, March 6, 1850.

“Let us see whether the ‘Southern slaves are better off than the Northern operatives.’ As I have said, we have all that is necessary for health and comfort. Do the slaves have more? It is in the power of every young girl who comes here to work, if she has good health and no one but herself to provide for, to acquire every accomplishment, and get as good an education as any lady in the country. Have the slaves that privilege? By giving two weeks’ notice we can leave when we please, visit our friends, attend any school, or travel for pleasure or information...”

Clementine Averill

Robinson, Harriet Hanson. “Letter from a Factory-Girl to Senator Clemens” Published in Loom & Spindle. Kailua: Pacifica Press, 1976.

Fact Check: Life Ambition

When Lyddie first arrives at the mill, her dream is merely to earn enough money to pay off the family debt and return to the farm. As she spends time in Lowell, however, she learns about a wider world. Was it common for workers’ life ambitions to change?

What do we know?

For most of the Lowell mill girls from New England families, life in the factory town was new and exciting, but it was not a complete or overwhelming break from the familiar. Instead of occupying the primary role as daughter and sister, the women became operatives within a peer group with whom they ate, worked, and lived. The young women shared much in common, including an understanding that working in the mills was a temporary phase of their lives to be followed by marriage and raising a family. Working in the mills was a new option for many women who also could have worked as teachers or seamstresses as youth. At the same time, young people’s horizons did expand during this period. Ambition, as an ideal, began to spread after the American Revolution, and many argued that it could help the new nation. Farm families who had previously thought of themselves in more local terms were encouraged to broaden their horizons. In practice, though, the ambition to leave the farm and forge a new life was more available to young men than it was to young women.

What is the evidence?

Secondary Source:

“Young women came to the mills for a number of reasons. Mary Hall made $115 in eight months in 1834, more than enough for her to live on comfortably. Harriet Hanson Robinson moved to Lowell as a child and found upward mobility in the mills, rising into skilled positions before leaving when she married at the age of twenty-four. Sally Rice left her village of Somerset, Vermont, in 1838 and worked in mills in New York and Connecticut to make enough money to earn a dowry and get married, which she finally did in 1847. Sisters or cousins came together, while many workers came and went periodically, going to the mills when they needed money and back to the farms when they fell ill or got homesick.”

Loomis, Erik. A History of America in Ten Strikes. New York: The New Press, 2018.

Primary Source:

“[I]t is pleasing to view the interest which so many of the factory girls take in the social and religious institutions of this place, who do not call Lowell aught [nothing] but a temporary home. Many of them stay here longer than they otherwise would, because these institutions have become so dear to them, and the letters which they send hereafter they do leave, show that the interest was too strong to be easily eradicated. I have known those who left homes of comfort and competence, that they might here enjoy religious privileges which country towns would not afford them.”

“Factory Girls” in The Lowell Offering. December 1840. https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/periodicals/lo_40_12.pdf

Secondary Source:

“Mill employment represented a stage in a woman’s life cycle before marriage; this was demonstrated by the fact that the vast majority of operatives did marry after their sojourn [time] in Lowell. Of the 115 women for whom adequate data survive, 98 married … the evidence undermines any argument that sheer economic need drove large numbers of women into the Lowell mills in the period 1830-1850. At least the economic needs of the families of operatives could not have been a compelling force. Some women, perhaps the 8 percent whose fathers had died, may well have worked in the mills in order to contribute to the support of their families. The evidence strongly suggests that most young women themselves decided to work in the mills. They were generally not sent to the mills by their parents to supplement low family incomes but went of their own accord for other reasons … If clothes and a dowry provided the motivation for Mary Paul and Sally Rice to leave home and work in textile factories, a desire for education stimulated the efforts of one mill worker in Clinton, Massachusetts, in 1851”

Dublin, Thomas. Women At Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Voices from the Field

"Wage Slavery" by Dr. David Roediger, the Foundation Professor of American Studies at University of Kansas and author of The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class.

Photos & Multimedia

The female workers of Lowell sent several petitions to the state Legislature trying to get a ten-hour day in all the factories in the state, and were never successful. Their motto, however, was “Try Again!” Image courtesy of the Massachusetts State Archives

Read about issues workers were fighting for in the Voice of Industry, a newspaper written by working men and women in the mid nineteenth century.

http://industrialrevolution.org

Writing Prompts

Opinion

What is Lyddie’s opinion of the ten-hour work day? Provide reasons that are supported by facts and details.

Informative/explanatory

What were some of the reasons mill girls were leaving the factory after returning from their summer break? Include concrete details from the text.

Narrative

Betsy tells Lyddie that “time is more precious than money.” Do you agree with her statement? Why or why not? Use concrete words and phrases and sensory details.