Lyddie: Voices from the Field, Chapter 3 — What Mill Girls Wore

Written from an essay by Dr. Kassie Baron, an independent scholar of nineteenth-century American literature, for Lowell National Historical Park's series on Katherine Paterson's novel Lyddie.

Homespun

Many young, working-class women who left family farms for jobs in New England's booming textile mills arrived in Lowell dressed much like Lyddie — in homespun.

• It didn't cost them a job. Homespun was unfashionable, but people linked it with the virtues of New England's farmers: independence, a strong work ethic and respectability.
• New shoes and gloves often came soon after hiring — less for style than because standing at the looms all day and throwing the shuttle made workers' hands and feet grow bigger.

Dressing respectably

Mill girls were expected to dress modestly and cleanly, and at work simply, so nothing caught in the machines. Factory owners wanted to show that mill girls were safe and healthy: when important visitors such as President Andrew Jackson came to Lowell, the mill girls paraded in white dresses with parasols. Even Charles Dickens — Lyddie's favorite author — found them "well dressed," with "extreme cleanliness."

The fashion worry

Others fretted that the young women would spend all their wages on new clothes. With their own money, many stores nearby and no parents watching, mill girls could buy fashionable, store-bought clothes more easily than country girls — and those who dressed too well were called frivolous or immature.

Class was part of the worry. In her story "New Year at Home," Godey's Lady's Book editor Sarah Josepha Hale complained that many factory girls wore gold watches and imitations of the ornaments of the richest families' daughters — fearing working women might be mistaken for ladies. An anonymous mill girl answered in an article titled "Gold Watches": if middle-class women, who didn't need to work and had far more free time, still needed richer dress to tell them apart, "the fault must be their own."

What they really wore

Former mill girl Harriet Robinson remembered their simple dress — "no ruffles and very few ornaments." A silk dress, like the one worn by the first mill girl Lyddie meets at Cutler's Tavern, would have been a luxury for special occasions, not a dusty travel day. Some mill girls, like Lyddie, saved all they could; others treated themselves to new clothes. Either way, they worked hard for what they had.

Then as now, people assumed clothes said a lot about the wearer. From hard-working homespun to frivolous ruffles, mill girls knew what they wore mattered.

Sources

Based on "Lyddie: Voices from the Field — Chapter 03: Homespun Dress," by Dr. Kassie Baron, Lowell National Historical Park, published by the National Park Service and in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The author's photograph is not reproduced.