What were the living conditions like in Lowell Mills?

What were the living conditions like in Lowell Mills?

Life in the Lowell Mills were also less than desirable. Their hours spent at the mills a day averaged between 11 and 13 hours, and their wages seemed to get lower and lower as the amount of work they put in increased. Men were paid significantly more although women were exerting the same amount of effort.

What were the Lowell girls working conditions?

Most textile workers toiled for 12 to 14 hours a day and half a day on Saturdays; the mills were closed on Sundays. Typically, mill girls were employed for nine to ten months of the year, and many left the factories during part of the summer to visit back home.

What was daily life like for the Lowell girls?

Life for the Lowell Mill Girls Hours were long and hard – even more so than work on the farms, with a 12- to-14-hour day that began before daybreak and ended well after sunset. The younger girls were called doffers because they doffed (or removed) the heavy bobbins of thread from the machine spindles.

What was life like for mill girls?

A typical day for mill girls might include a wakeup bell and a quick first meal, followed by several hours of work, a lunch bell, and work until the evening dinner bell. After work, the girls had a few hours of relative freedom before the boarding house’s curfew.

How did conditions in Lowell change?

By 1900 competitive pressures and technological developments had dramatically changed the working conditions of Lowell millhands. In every department of the mills, fewer workers tended more machinery in 1900 than in 1840. By 1912 mill owners could demand no more than 54 hours.

What were two bad conditions for workers at the mills?

Eye inflammation, deafness, tuberculosis, cancer of the mouth and of the groin (mule-spinners cancer) could also be attributed to the working conditions in the mills. Long hours, difficult working conditions and moving machinery proved a dangerous combination.

Why did the mill owners seek female employees?

One reason that the factory owners liked to hire women was because they could pay them less. At the time, women made around half of what men made for doing the same job. Working conditions in the factories were not great. The women worked long hours from early morning to late at night.

Why did the Lowell mills prefer to hire female workers?

Employing women in a factory was novel to the point of being revolutionary. The system of labor in the Lowell mills became widely admired because the young women were housed in an environment that was not only safe but reputed to be culturally advantageous.

What did the mill girls do on their free time?

Free time could be taken up by numerous hobbies, such as writing letters to family and friends, going on walks, shopping, or pursuing creative projects. The girls would often go on outings as groups, especially to church on Sundays.

What was life like for the Lowell mill girls?

Today we can read about the lives of the Lowell Mill Girls in copies of The Lowell Offering that remind us about how early female factory workers managed in the industrialized New England society of the 1800s. Living and working with other women, they found that they could earn a living away from the farm in a planned factory community.

What were the conditions like for women working in the mills?

Beginning in 1823, with the opening of Lowell’s first factory, large numbers of young women moved to the growing city. In the mills, female workers faced long hours of toil and often grueling working conditions. Yet many female textile workers saved money and gained a measure of economic independence.

What were the working conditions for textile workers in Lowell?

Lowell’s textile corporations paid higher wages than those in other textile cities, but work was arduous and conditions were frequently unhealthy. Although the city’s corporations threatened labor reformers with firing or blacklisting, many mill girls protested wage cuts and working conditions. Female workers struck twice in the 1830s.

How did Lowell deal with the women in the boarding houses?

They had heard of the moral degradation of the women in these conditions. Lowell had attempted to offset this type of situation by maintaining a moral code that restricted men from boarding houses, dictated how women dressed, and placed curfews on when they were expected home.