Lyddie, Chapter 12: Mill Work, Wage Slavery and Changing Ambitions

In chapter 12 of the novel Lyddie, Lyddie becomes one of the mill's best workers, while the talk around her turns to slavery and to leaving.

What happens in the chapter

• Lyddie is given more looms to tend and earns more money than ever. Even at her faster pace, she keeps a page copied from Oliver Twist taped to a loom, and her reading improves.
• Worrying about Oliver in his poorhouse, she begins to understand why her mother left their farm: had she stayed, the whole family might have ended up in one.
• An unexpected letter from her mother brings sad news: her baby sister has died, and her next-youngest sister, Rachel, is very sick. Lyddie vows to work harder still — she is one of the few who don't mind the speedup.
• Her roommates are unhappy. Prudence falls ill and leaves Lowell for good. Betsy considers signing the ten-hour petition, saying she will stay only until she has saved enough to go West to college. That talk makes Lyddie anxious: shorter days could put her dream of paying off the family's debts further out of reach.

Was it real? Calling mill work "slavery"

Betsy says, "we are all working like black slaves." Some mill workers did talk this way. Mill work was clearly different from slavery, in which an enslaver could force a person to any task: mill workers, however much they needed their wages for food, clothes and housing, were free men, women and children who could leave and look for other work. Comparing their labor to slavery was a strategy to push for better conditions. People who were or had been enslaved strongly disagreed with the comparison — while Southern supporters of slavery liked it, even claiming that enslaved people lived better than Northern factory workers.

The workers' own paper, the Voice of Industry, put it bluntly in 1845:

"Everybody knows that it is necessity alone, in some form or other that takes us to Lowell and keeps us there. Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery quite as really as any in Turkey or Carolina." — Voice of Industry, September 18, 1845

"…there are those, a host of them, too, who are in fact nothing more nor less than slaves in every sense of the word! Slaves to a system of labor which requires them to toil from five until seven o'clock, with one hour only to attend to the wants of nature…" — "An Operative," "Factory Life as It Is," Voice of Industry, November 7, 1845

Not every mill girl agreed. Clementine Averill answered a senator's claim that "Southern slaves are better off than the Northern operatives" in 1850:

"By giving two weeks' notice we can leave when we please, visit our friends, attend any school, or travel for pleasure or information..." — "Letter from a Factory-Girl to Senator Clemens," Lowell, March 6, 1850

Was it real? Changing ambitions

When Lyddie arrives, her dream is only to pay off the family debt and go home to the farm; in Lowell she learns about a wider world. Did workers' ambitions change? Often, yes — within limits.

For most Lowell mill girls from New England families, the factory town was new and exciting, but not a complete break: they lived, ate and worked among a peer group and shared an understanding that mill work was a temporary phase before marriage and raising a family. It was a new option for young women who might otherwise have been teachers or seamstresses. At the same time, horizons were widening: ambition as an ideal spread after the American Revolution, and farm families were encouraged to think beyond their own locality — though the chance to leave the farm and build a new life was more open to young men than to young women.

Historians fill in the picture:

• Erik Loomis describes women who came for many reasons. Mary Hall earned $115 in eight months in 1834, more than enough to live on; Harriet Hanson Robinson came to Lowell as a child and rose to skilled work before leaving to marry at 24; Sally Rice left Somerset, Vermont, in 1838 and worked in mills in New York and Connecticut to earn a dowry, marrying in 1847. Sisters and cousins came together, and many came and went — to the mills when they needed money, home when they fell ill or grew homesick.
• Thomas Dublin found mill work was a stage before marriage: of 115 women with adequate records, 98 married. Sheer family need did not drive most of them to the mills — perhaps the 8 percent whose fathers had died worked to support their families — and most decided for themselves to go, for clothes, a dowry or an education.

The Lowell Offering noted in December 1840 how attached many became to the town's social and religious life:

"Many of them stay here longer than they otherwise would, because these institutions have become so dear to them… I have known those who left homes of comfort and competence, that they might here enjoy religious privileges which country towns would not afford them." — "Factory Girls," The Lowell Offering, December 1840

More

• "Wage Slavery", an essay by Dr. David Roediger of the University of Kansas, author of The Wages of Whiteness.
• The issues workers fought for, in the pages of the Voice of Industry: industrialrevolution.org.

Sources

Based on "Lyddie: Chapter 12 - I Will Not be a Slave," from the National Park Service Books to Parks series (Lowell National Historical Park), a work of the United States government in the public domain. Quotations are from sources of 1840–1850: the Voice of Industry (1845), The Lowell Offering (1840) and Clementine Averill's 1850 letter, reprinted in Harriet Hanson Robinson's Loom and Spindle. Erik Loomis's A History of America in Ten Strikes and Thomas Dublin's Women at Work are paraphrased. Lyddie is a novel; this page summarizes the chapter. The lesson's questions and a portrait of Dr. Roediger are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.