Boott Cott Mills Tour

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.