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The "Mill Girls" were female workers who came to work for the textile corporations in Lowell, Massachusetts, during the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The workers initially recruited by the corporations were daughters of propertied New England farmers, between the ages of 15 and 30. (There also could be "little girls" who worked there about the age of 13.) By 1840, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, the textile mills had recruited over 8,000 women, who came to make up nearly seventy-five percent of the mill workforce. During the early period, women came to the mills of their own accord, for various reasons: to help a brother pay for college, for the educational opportunities offered in Lowell, or to earn a supplementary income for themselves. While their wages were only half of what men were paid, many were able to attain economic independence for the first time, free from the controlling influence of fathers and husbands. As a result, while factory life would soon come to be experienced as oppressive, it enabled these women to challenge assumptions of female inferiority and dependence. As the nature of the new "factory system" became clear, however, many women joined the broader American labor movement, to protest the dramatic social changes being brought by the Industrial Revolution. While they decried the deteriorating factory conditions, worker unrest in the 1840s was directed mainly against the loss of control over economic life. This loss of control, which came with the dependence on the corporations for a wage, was experienced as an attack on their dignity and independence. In 1845, after a number of protests and strikes, many operatives came together to form the first union of working women in the United States, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. The Association adopted a newspaper called the ''Voice of Industry,'' in which workers published sharp critiques of the new industrialism. The ''Voice'' stood in sharp contrast to other literary magazines published by female operatives, such as the ''Lowell Offering,'' which painted a sanguine picture of life in the mills. == Industrialization of Lowell == (詳細はFrancis Cabot Lowell formed a company, the Boston Manufacturing Company and built a textile mill next to the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts. Differing from the earlier Rhode Island System, where only carding and spinning were done in a factory while the weaving was often put out to neighboring farms to be done by hand, the Waltham mill was the first integrated mill in the United States, transforming raw cotton into cotton cloth in one mill building. In 1821, Francis C. Lowell's business associates, looking to expand the Waltham textile operations, purchased land around the Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River in East Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Incorporated as the Town of Lowell in 1826, by 1840, the textile mills employed almost 8,000 workers — mostly women between the ages of 16 and 35.〔Dublin, Thomas (1975). ("Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills: 'The Oppressing Hand of Avarice Would Enslave Us'" ). ''Labor History''. Online at (Whole Cloth: Discovering Science and Technology through American History ). Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved on August 27, 2007.〕〔Robinson, Harriet (1883). ("Early Factory Labor in New England." ) Internet History Sourcebooks Project. Retrieved on August 27, 2007.〕 The "City of Spindles," as Lowell came to be known, quickly became the center of the Industrial Revolution in America. New, large scale machinery, which had come to dominate the production of cloth by 1840, was being rapidly developed in lockstep with the equally new ways of organizing workers for mass production. Together, these mutually reinforcing technological and social changes produced staggering increases: between 1840 to 1860, the number of spindles in use went from 2¼ million to almost 5¼ million; bales of cotton used from 300,000 to nearly 1 million, and the number of workers from 72,000 to nearly 122,000. This tremendous growth translated directly into large profits for the textile corporations: between 1846 and 1850, for instance, the dividends of the Boston-based investors, the group of textile companies that founded Lowell, averaged 14 percent per year. Most corporations recorded similarly high profits during this period. If any of the girls messed up or did something wrong, they were dismissed, or fired. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Lowell Mill Girls」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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