Savannah Szymanski
Professor Conway
Freshman Honors Seminar
22 September 2014
The Lowell Mills were
once a vital part of the city’s economy and financial stability, therefore the
rich history offered by the Boott Cott Mills museum in Lowell provide deep
insight into Lowell’s work force and community. Amidst the informational tour
of the former mill factory, the factors that went into everyday life in the
mills were revealed with a depth previously unknown to me. Although one would
expect life in an industrial factory to be extremely difficult and at times,
life threatening, the degrees of these hardship are not always common
knowledge. The factory mills were generally composed of a majority of young
women, who traveled to the mills from low paying farm lives often referred to
as “mill girls”. However, small children also worked in the mills with lower
scale jobs. The higher level positions in the mills were exclusively filled by
men whose work was viewed as proficient and beneficial to factory production; the
owner, overseers, and other boss occupations were all explicitly male positions
as well.
The mills generally
produced textile goods, where the most dangerous textile jobs were filled by
the mill girls and at times, children. Most jobs throughout the factory were accompanied
by conditions such as possible limb loss, severe illness and often times death.
Most of these poor conditions were in response to the lack of employee safety
implemented by the owner, unsafe machinery, and detrimental fabrics being
inhaled. Smaller children often times either severely injured their ligaments
by climbing on machinery that they could not reach, or losing limbs due to the
lack of care in machine production. When observing the stories and poor
conditions that are discussed throughout the tour, it is easy to not only disapprove
of the mill life, but also pity those who had no other choice, but to work in
the mills.
Often times, Mill girls
acquired their jobs in response to needing to live their life away from their
family’s farm and or obtain a substantial amount of money to send back to their
families. Girls often saw the Mill life as their only ticket out of a
financially unstable life on the farm, where they could not only have a job and
receive money, but also have housing and a certain degree of personal safety
outside of the factory. There was a particular give and take between the
benefits and consequences of the industrial mill life, where girls sacrificed
their safety in the work place while in change gaining independence as a well
as external safety in their personal lives.
In terms of empathy and
relating the situations that mill girls would undergo to my own personal life,
frankly I am distraught. The mill life seems dramatically more positive than
life on a farm, however the consequences of limb loss, disease, and potential
death are far greater than farm life. The most strenuous job I have ever had is
an eight month cashier job at a local grocery store. Complaining about my
weekly paychecks of minimum wage and fifteen hours of work a week seems extremely
insignificant compared to the extremely disadvantageous circumstances faced by
mill girls. Living in a first world country, coming from a middle class family,
and obtaining a low scale job as a teenage is barely comparable to the life of
a young girl in a mill factory. Touring the museum and discussing the average
lives of those who worked in the mills has brought to light the extreme
differences between a mill girl and myself as well as the industrial revolution
and the society of the twenty first century .
Another topic that
arose throughout the tour was the idea of current day sweat shops in third
world countries. The idea behind the conversation was, if the conditions of
present day sweat shops are equivalent or worse than the mill factory
conditions, what should be done? Most people agreed that these factories should
be shut down immediately and the corporation in charge should end productions
through all underprivileged countries. Despite the morality in this option, I have
to disagree given the state of the populations working for these factories.
Most times these factory workers are extremely poor and can either work in the
sweat shop factories with poor conditions or resort to the streets of their
respective countries. This is a very clear reason why these sweat shops should
not be shut down, or else all the workers would be worse off in their lives. Instead,
the conditions should be improved dramatically as well as the salaries of the
workers. Although this may decrease the profit for these businesses, the lives
and welfare of these underprivileged workers will be increased and preserved
while they simultaneously remain employed.
