Part 29

In those days neither wealth nor position afforded women an excuse for idleness. Nor did their labors cease with the home. It was considered so unbecoming to be unemployed that even hours of social enjoyment were devoted to useful occupations. During the enforcement of the non-importation acts, when, among other things, cloth and stockings were prevented from coming into this country from England, a letter written from Newport tells of a social gathering where “it was resolved that those who could spin ought to be employed in that way, and those who could not, should reel.” At a similar meeting in Boston, “a party of forty or fifty young women, calling themselves ‘Daughters of Liberty,’” amused themselves at the house of their pastor with spinning, during one day, “two hundred and thirty-two skeins of yarn, some very fine.” No woman considered herself too elegant

To guide the spindle and direct the loom,

or knit the stockings which, since stocking-frames were interdicted as articles of import, had to be made for the whole people by slow process of hand. As indicative of the simple and industrial habits of Mrs. Washington, it is related that when, in 1780, a party of the leading ladies of Morristown called upon her by appointment at her husband’s headquarters, Mrs. Washington appeared before them in a plain gown of “linsey woolsey,” and, while she entertained them with pleasant conversation, her busy fingers never ceased plying the knitting-needles.

Prior to and long after the Revolution, stocking knitting was an industry large enough to claim most of what were termed woman’s “spare moments.” With the assistance of child and slave labor, large quantities were made for sale or exchange. Legislators, to stimulate busy fingers to fresh exertions, offered bounties for their increased production. In Virginia, prizes of fifty pounds of tobacco (the currency then) were given “for every five hundred pairs of men’s and women’s stockings produced, worth from three to five shillings the pair, with the privilege of buying them at an advance of seventy-five per cent. on those prices.”

Except among a few German settlers in Pennsylvania, no attempt was made for many years to change stocking-making from a domestic into a factory industry. Until 1826 the manufacture of stockings remained woman’s almost exclusive province. Then knitting-machines were set up in several of the States, but, as if there was some peculiar fitness in this remaining woman’s department, the employees in knitting-works have always been, even down to 1889, “nearly all women and children.”

Never did women work harder than during this domestic period of labor. The slave women of the South, in addition to going through all the processes of manufacturing woolen and cotton cloth, which they afterward cut and made into garments, attended to both in and out-of-door labor. They tilled the rice fields, planted tobacco, sowed the cotton seed, and helped with the harvesting. The women in the North, though not “put into the ground,” as the early adventurers termed field-work, engaged energetically in other industries. History tells of women who helped build their own homes, wielding the ax and carrying the water to mix mortar with which to build chimneys. On the farms, it was women who raised the garden truck of vegetables and herbs, attended to poultry breeding, milked the cows, made butter and cheese, did the sewing, and performed all the household chores now classed in industrial statistics as “domestic service.”

Outside the strictly necessary occupations of manufacture, household service, clothing, and garden-work, from quite early times women in America turned their attention to speculative labor and to trade. When James the First, thinking to utilize mulberry trees that were indigenous to our soil, forwarded silkworm cocoons to America, when dazzling dreams of wealth to come from the successful culture of the silkworm were indulged in by people on both sides of the Atlantic, and when bounties of money and tobacco were offered for spun and woven silk, according to its weight and width, most of these prizes were obtained by women. The success obtained by women in feeding the worms, and reeling, spinning, and weaving the silk, caused this industry, during the varying fortunes that preceded the establishment of silk-weaving as a factory industry, to be carried on mainly by them. History has preserved the names of three women famous before the Revolution as silk-growers and weavers: Mrs. Pinckney, Grace Fisher, and Susanna Wright. While silkworm culture was a failure in spite of all the fostering care bestowed upon it, and none of the pioneers realized any of the golden visions of rivaling the productions of Spain and the Indies, the efforts made by them paved the way for future cultivation.

Along with the silk industry, another of scarcely less importance was growing up quietly in New England. This was the manufacture of straw goods, the products of which now amount to many millions annually. Straw, applied to so many purposes to-day, owes its origin as an article of manufacture to a young Massachusetts girl. In 1789 Miss Betsy Metcalf discovered the secret of bleaching and braiding the meadowgrass of her native town of Dedham, and of ingeniously making this braid into a bonnet. Although scarcely more than a child, the chronicles tell that she taught others to do what she had done, and started a business by which the want of bonnets and hats for summer-wear was supplied. From using straw for head-gear, its manufacture spread to other things, and developed an industry that, in 1880, employed nearly eleven thousand operatives. Of these over seven thousand were women.

Whether it was the active out-door life led by the American women of the eighteenth century, or the wide-awake interest circumstances obliged them to take in the concerns of the family and of men; whether the stirring times in which they moved, or the deferential attitude of men stimulated them to do things that the women of other nations were not doing, it is certain that the American women of a century ago were far in advance of their times in all things except a knowledge of light literature, which the circulating libraries of Europe placed within the reach of women there, and a scarcity of books denied them here. That this was more of a gain than loss, by giving women time to think, is shown in the energy with which they went to work in helping to build up the nation. They engaged in mercantile affairs with such success that, it is said, “many Boston fortunes owed their rise to women.” The active interest taken by them in politics gave, even before the Revolution, some representative women to journalism. Out of the seventy-eight newspapers published in the colonies, sixteen were edited by women, and all but two of them championed the cause of liberty and justice. The first paper to publish the Declaration of Independence was edited and printed by a Mrs. Reid. In medicine, women confined themselves into distilling herbs into remedies which it was said “could kill or cure with any of the faculty.” In the practice of midwifery, history has preserved the name of a Mrs. Robinson, of New London, who continued to practice to an advanced age, and who “delivered twelve hundred mothers without losing a patient.”

The inventive faculty, so distinctive a trait in the character of the American man, was also a gift of the American woman. How many women were inventors will never be known, as they timidly shielded their identity behind men. This is said to have been the case with the cotton-gin. Credited through all the years to Eli Whitney, modern writers claim that it was the fruit of the inventive powers of Mrs. Nathaniel Green,[172] widow of Gen. Green of revolutionary fame. The story runs that Mrs. Green, a native of Rhode Island and familiar with the working of the anchor forge belonging to her husband’s father, set her wits to work while visiting her Georgia plantations, to lessen the labor of cleansing the cotton. When this difficulty was solved, she permitted Mr. Whitney to claim the patent, through fear of the ridicule of her friends and loss of social position recognition of her work might have entailed.

By whomever invented, no other instrument has been so fruitful of consequences. In 1793, when the cotton-gin was made, cotton, instead of being King, was a humble garden plant, grown for home consumption in the regions from Georgia to New Jersey. When its snowy blossoms ripened, women gathered them, plucked the seeds from the fiber, and got it ready for spinning. So difficult was this process, that to remove the seed from one pound was considered a good day’s work. By the operation of the cotton-gin, in the time it had taken to cleanse one pound, three hundred-weight could be got ready for market. By this, cotton was transformed at once into a valuable commercial product that required for its successful cultivation an enormous increase of land and labor. It instilled such new life into the almost dying institution of slavery that the cotton-gin may well be said to have been the foster-mother of slavery in America.

As the immediate effect of the cotton-gin in the South was to give an enormous value to the slave, its invention was followed in the North by the cotton factory. The cotton factory was the northern complement of the cotton-gin. To women it had the momentous results of transferring them from the home to the factory; of taking them out of the family farm-house to the manufacturing towns and villages, and, by making them for the first time the wage-earning competitors of men, altering their whole status in the labor market of America.

With the factory came a new epoch for women in America. The War of the Revolution and the War of 1812 had been ended long enough to induce a general feeling of security concerning the future of the republic. For a large number of people, the hard work and deprivations of the past were as a dream; peace and plenty promised to abound. Wealth came flowing from all directions in a steady stream into the country through the various channels of commerce and agriculture. Numerous business enterprises were undertaken, principal among which were the factories for weaving cotton and wool into cloth. The earliest of these was built in Massachusetts, where numerous swift-flowing rivers abound, capable of being utilized for moving machinery. Through the energetic, progressive spirit of the descendants of the Puritans, it was not long before New England began to rival Old England in manufacturing the increased production of cotton grown in the United States. The first cotton mill erected in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1822, was followed so quickly by others, that by 1839 there were in Lowell ten companies incorporated with a capital of $13,000,000. These produced 2,463,000 yards of cloth per week, of which all but 91,000 were cotton. The number of operatives employed were 12,507, and in the cotton mills the majority of these were women. From the amount of capital invested and the number of operatives employed, Lowell was termed, in the period between 1840 and 1850, “the Manchester of America.”

But in nothing—except that Lowell and Manchester were places filled with the hum of machinery tended by human workers for their own livelihood and the profits of others—was there any resemblance between Manchester and Lowell. The recorded condition of the English operatives, especially women, at that time reads like a page torn from some canto of Dante’s “Inferno;” while that of Lowell, pictured by women who worked as ordinary mill-hands in the Lowell factories, seems in comparison like a Utopian idyl evolved from the brain of dreamers.

According to writers, the women operatives who entered the Lowell mills came from the New England farms, not from stress of circumstances, but to get wage-money to help lift a mortgage from the family farm, or to assist some son or brother in obtaining an otherwise impossible university education. A large majority entered the mills to secure independence, or household and dress adornments. Not a few entered so as to be near circulating libraries and schools, with the opportunities for self-culture which these afforded. Coming from the agricultural class, which considered itself among the aristocracy of America,[173] no class distinctions were made, and the factory young women were welcomed into the best social circles of Lowell. Well but simply dressed, as was the fashion of the times, they were to be seen at church, Sunday-schools, and social gatherings at the parsonages and elsewhere, receiving the same consideration as those whom circumstances had placed above the need of work. The girls themselves felt no loss of caste or diminution of self-respect. Most of them expected to marry—many did—and withdraw from the factory, and failing this, when factory work became disagreeable, to retire to the family home. The factory was an episode, not, as it later became too frequently elsewhere, the burden of this chapter in woman’s life.

The factories _per se_ were as remarkable as the women who operated them. Kept as clean as the nature of the work would admit, with plants growing in the windows trained to shade the glass, the rooms seemed redolent of the country. Fronting one side of the building were the banks and waters of the swift-flowing Merrimac, which, as it hastened on to meet the sea, turned the wheels of the machinery, ignorant as yet of steam. On the other was the bright, new village, looking, as Dickens said in 1843, “as if every kind of store had taken down its shutters for the first time and started in business yesterday.” Standing on the hill was the prettiest building in the place, which was the hospital where girls when sick were tenderly cared for. Those unable to pay the weekly charge of three dollars, had it provided for them by the corporations. Seldom were the latter put to this expense, for Yankee girls had a horror of being placed under money obligations. Boarding-houses, erected by the mill-owners, were given in charge of reputable women. The charge for board in them, including the mid-day meal,—which was taken in civilized fashion at the boarding-house tables,—and washing to a certain extent, was fixed at the small sum of $1.50. Wages, counting in those of the little doffers, averaged $3.75 per week. Weavers, drawing-in girls, warpers, and spinners, who tended extra work, could earn from six to eight dollars per week. These wages, with the low price of board and the economical style of dress common in those days, enabled the mill operatives to place a large part of their earnings in the savings bank established for their use by the corporations. In 1841, one hundred thousand dollars, a sum which was a source of pride to all concerned, was deposited to the credit of the girls of Lowell.

Happy in their social position, and in the good feeling existing between employers and employed, free from pecuniary care for the necessities of life and in command of some of the best luxuries, the Lowell girls reached an intellectual height unique in the history of industrial workers. When the twelve or fourteen hours that then constituted a day’s work were ended, buoyant with the health of generations of out-door workers, the Lowell women were fresh enough to enjoy in various ways what was left of their evenings. In most of the boarding-houses there were pianos, the joint property of the girls. Some played, others sang. Books were read, topics discussed, and poems, stories, and essays written. These formed the pages of the “Lowell Offering,” a monthly magazine composed entirely of articles by the girls. The literary merit of these articles astonished people from abroad. Harriet Martineau republished some of them in England under the title of “Mind among the Spindles,” while Dickens claimed that, independent of the fact that the articles were written by girls after a long, hard day’s work in factories, they “compared favorably with those of many English periodicals.” In character, the stories differed from the sentimental love-tales common to women’s writings of that period. Simple in style, they were mostly descriptive of human life and the beauties of nature that the girls had left behind them, and what was best in their Lowell environments. Among the contributors, who attained national reputation, were Lucy Larcom, the poet; Margaret Foley, the sculptor, and Mrs. H. H. Robinson, the author.[174] These women always spoke with affectionate respect of their factory experiences. Mrs. Robinson, at the International Council of Women, held at Washington in 1888, after telling how she had entered the Lowell mills as a “doffer” when a child, and remained there until she married in 1848, said: “I consider the Lowell mills my _alma mater_, and am as proud of them as most girls of the colleges in which they have been educated.”

When factory towns sprang up in the suburbs of the large cities of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, etc., they did so under conditions different from those of Lowell, and, of course, had other results. There was no need in these places for corporations to offer exceptional wages and treatment to women to induce them to enter the mills. Already at hand, and eager to accept any conditions, were the thousands of women who had been deposited on the shores of America by the tidal wave of immigration, which set in from Europe during the decade of 1845–55. For these women, who labored for bread and butter and not for knick-knacks, no effort was made, as in Lowell, to surround them with a favorable social atmosphere. How women spent their evenings, what were their pleasures or sorrows and how they lived, in a country where the necessities of life were dear, on their weekly wages of $2.63 to $4.99 per week (the average wages of factory women from 1850 to 1860), was inquired into by none. Employers and employed both felt that all responsibilities began and ended with the money given and received on pay-days.

This indifference concerning working-women was not confined to the factory, but was so general that even the National Census Report did not take the trouble to classify woman’s work separately from man’s, until it was found that in some departments of industry women exceeded men in point of numbers almost in the ratio of two to one. In the cotton factories of twenty-five States, in 1850, the number of women employed was 62,661, against 32,295 men. In 1860, the average number employed in the cotton factories was, according to official returns, 75,169 women against 46,859 men. It was computed that in the woolen goods manufactories of the six New England States, there were 29,886 men and 51,517 women employed. Hosiery, an industry belonging to women since days when Homer wrote of

The knitters in the sun, And the free maids who weave their thread with bones,

employed in 1860 almost three times as many women as men. Large numbers of women made rubber clothing. Half as many women as men were engaged in the manufacture of paper. Women filled places in bookbinderies, printing offices, and newspaper establishments. The number of women engaged in domestic service (never an exactly ascertainable quantity) formed a bulk equal to the factory population; while the ranks of needle-women were, as usual, larger than all of those industries combined, excepting domestic service. In 1850, the number of women engaged in the making of men’s and boys’ clothing alone numbered 61,500; the number of men being 35,061. In 1860, owing to the invention of the sewing-machine, these figures were partially reversed; the number of women employed was diminished and that of men increased.

The sewing-machine was one of several factors that about 1860 inaugurated for women another industrial period. From its invention by Elias Howe the sewing-machine properly belonged to 1846, but the business of making and selling them was not fairly started before 1853. Then the sales of all the manufacturers amounted to only 2529. In 1860 they had reached to about 50,000. This increase showed that the sewing-machine results must be dated from the year of its acceptance into popular favor. Mr. Howe’s invention, like all other labor-saving machines, intended to be a blessing by lightening the burdens of workers, proved a curse by taking away their accustomed pursuit from those who depended on the skill by which they drove

The patient needle through the woven threads.

Brought into competition with machines that could do more and better work in one day than was possible for six women, working twenty hours apiece, to accomplish, these had either to starve, or force their way into some other wage-earning industry. An example of how this displacement affected needle-women can be gleaned from Appleton’s Cyclopædia for 1862, which cites a single establishment in New York, employing four hundred machines and producing about ten thousand shirts a week, whose estimated savings (in wages) were about $240,000 per annum. In the same year, the following sums were saved in wage-time by the sewing-machines in the manufacturing industries:

Men’s and boys’ clothing in New York City $7,500,000 Hats and caps 462,500 Shirt bosoms 832,750

Calculating that each machine did the work of six girls, and estimating that one girl operated each machine, there were 73,290 women displaced by the machines on which these savings were made.

Contemporary with the general acceptance of the sewing-machine, and intensifying the distress of the wage-worker, was the Civil War, which, in 1860, began to decimate the ranks of men and to convert into wage-earners large numbers of women who had been wage-expenders. Delicate women in the South, reared in affluence, waited upon by slaves, were thrown, by losses of male relatives and property, among the bread-winners. Numbers of these journeyed to Northern cities to hide their poverty as well as to gain entrance into the larger field of industries the North was supposed to offer. But here they were met by thousands of other women, native to the North, who, like their sisters of the South, through the death of those who had hitherto fought the battle of life for them, were obliged to become producers in the place of being consumers.

The distress experienced by workers of this class wrought that great revolution in thought which involved the education of women. This is one of the accepted factors of the present period. At that time agitation was rife as to what should be done for the advancement of women as workers. Miss Virginia Penny, in a book called “Think and Act,”[175] advocated the entrance of women into the trades and professions that were monopolized by men. “Apprentice,” she says, “ten thousand women to watchmakers; train ten thousand for teachers to the young; make ten thousand good accountants; put ten thousand more to be deaconesses trained by Florence Nightingale; put some thousands in the electric telegraph offices all over the country; educate one thousand lecturers for mechanics’ institutes; one thousand to read the best books to the working-people; train up ten thousand to manage washing-machines, sewing-machines, etc. Then the distressed needle-woman will vanish, the decayed gentlewoman and broken-down governess cease to exist.”

Writers like Gail Hamilton in the North and Catherine Cole in the South urged the higher education of women; their right to be educated the same as man; “to enter the same pursuits, receive the same wages, occupy the same posts and professions, wield the same influence, and, in a word, be independent of man as a means of support.”