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Lyddie: Voices from the Field - Chapter 16 Moral Turpitude

“Moral Turpitude or Female Solidarity?”

In the 1840s, Lowell’s red brick mills stretched out along the Merrimack River for a mile. Of the city’s 8,000 workers, nearly three-quarters were young women living in company-owned boarding houses like Lyddie and Diana, or in Lowell’s Irish Acre neighborhood, like Bridget. As young as 12, most came to Lowell to make money to help their family.

To persuade parents to let their young daughters leave home, authorities portrayed boarding house and mill life as not only safe, but idyllic. Paid $3 - $4 for 72 hours of work a week in the deafening mills, with a portion of their wages returned to the corporations for rent and food, Lyddie and others realized things were not so rosy.

For mill directors, company boarding houses provided a means to control female workers. But they did very little to control the behavior of mill overseers toward workers, or to improve safety conditions on the job. As a result, protest ideas bubbled up at the boarding house dinner table.

As an outlet for their anger, women published short stories, poems, and letters in the company-controlled Lowell Offering. They wrote about the noise, the heat, and frequent accidents, as well as about boarding house rent increases, wage cuts, and machinery speed-up. One letter writer complained of workers being treated like “so many living machines.”

The Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, one of the first organizations of female workers in the U.S., even delivered a petition to the Massachusetts legislature for a law shortening the legal workday to ten hours. The legislature refused.

In a December 21, 1845, letter to her father in Vermont, 15-year-old Mary Paul described how in a single day in the mill the previous week, “one girl fell down and broke her neck... The same day a man was killed by a rail car. Another had nearly all of his ribs broken. Another was nearly killed by falling down and having a bale of cotton fall on him.”

A December 11, 1846 article in The Voice of Industry, a worker newspaper edited in Lowell by former mill worker Sarah Bagley, offered this critique of factory life: “We are perfectly certain, from personal observation, that these long hours of labor in confined rooms, are very injurious to health, and we doubt whether it would be using too harsh terms to say, that the whole system is one of slow and legal assassination.”

For Lyddie, Diana, Bridget, and thousands of others, dangerous work and improper behavior from bosses was sometimes tolerated because of their financial need, .Laws against dangerous work and wrongful behavior toward working women did not yet exist. Owners routinely sided with male supervisors when accusations were made, no matter how strong the proof women provided.

The Voice of Industry carried this statement from a female mill worker to male overseers: “You boast of the protection you afford to women. Protection from what? From the rude and disorderly of your own sex? Reform men, and women will no longer need the protection you make such a parade of giving.” Women organized against dangerous work and harassment, standing up for change. However, federal laws regarding safety and against harassment did not appear until the 1970s.

For saying enough, for standing firm against Marsden when he grabbed her arm, and by supporting Bridget when he accosted her, Lyddie had crossed the line of acceptable behavior for her times, and lost her job.