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Though Davis and Furber employed primarily men, the textile machines the factory turned out went to mills throughout New England—populated overwhelmingly by young women (average age 20 years) recruited off farms to live in boardinghouses in burgeoning towns and cities. These young women represented the first generation of an industrial working class. Considered dispensable on the farm, they went to factory towns to earn extra money for the family or, more often, to make their own way.Factory recruiters made often unrealistic promises about the paternalism of the factory owners: boardinghouses were run only by matrons approved and hired by the company, healthy meals would be provided and all workers were required to attend church. Sensitive to criticism that their factories might have a corrupting influence on young women, owners designed their mills to look like churches—with bell towers the most conspicuous feature of the new industrial cathedrals.
In "A Second Peep at Factory Life," a story written in 1845, mill worker Josephine L. Baker leads an imaginary visitor on a tour of the factory, where "the belfry, towering far above the rest, stands out in bold relief against the rosy sky."
Baker’s story appeared in the Lowell Offering, a literary magazine published by and for "mill girls." While the journal was ultimately run by the workers themselves, and published both complaints and praise of factory life, it also served to promote, in the words of one of the town’s factory owners, Lowell’s "fund of labor, well-educated and virtuous."
To be sure, the culture created in factory towns like Lowell, the largest and most prominent textile factory city in the region, had its appeals. Mill workers were paid in cash—about $3 a week—and with it were able to take advantage of such amenities as relatively stylish store-bought clothes, evening classes in such subjects as languages, music or sciences, and "mutual self-improvement" clubs where workers who liked to write could share their latest efforts. Lowell’s Lyceum Movement, an organization that sponsored speakers, was second only to Boston’s, bringing to town such luminaries as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley and John Quincy Adams.
At the same time, working conditions were far from ideal. Men and women put in 12 or more hours a day, six days a week. In the mills, workers were often injured by machinery. Cotton fibers in the air—as well as the forced humidity and airtight quarters, meant to keep fragile threads from breaking—could cause serious respiratory problems.
Workers could be dismissed without recourse for a long list of infractions that included drunkenness, "hysteria," spreading rumors, stealing, profanity, impudence, "religious frenzy" and their general deportment—even on their own time. Certainly, tardiness was not tolerated. After all, throughout the day factory bells reminded workers where they should be and what they should be doing.
In the Lowell Offering story "The Spirit of Discontent," the anonymous author has one of her characters complain: "I am going home, where I shall not be obliged to rise so early in the morning, nor be dragged about by the ringing of the bell....I object to the constant hurrying of every thing. We cannot have time to eat, drink or sleep....Up before day, at the clang of the bell—and out of the mill by the clang of the bell—into the mill, and at work, in obedience to that ding-dong of a bell—just as though we were so many living machines."
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