Mary
starts out optimistic and hopeful for her work in the mills in Lowell. She begs her dad to let her go so she can “earn
more to begin with than I can any where about here”. She wants to buy clothes, and she already
knows someone working at the mills. Once
she gets to the mills, however, she becomes extremely homesick. She wants her family to contact her and visit
her as soon as possible. She also starts
to realize, she may not make as much money as she thought she would, since the
cost of boarding and just getting to the mills is so high. She is still somewhat hopeful and says she
will stay at least a year, maybe longer.
As time passes though, she sees just how dangerous working at the mills
can be. Even though she is not hurt, “one
girl fell down and broke her neck which caused instant death”. She is very worried and is telling her dad
horrible things that have happened to some of the girls at the mills. She also
has much less free time and says that “I have little time to devote to writing
that I cannot write all I want to”. She
even mentions how she doubts that she will be paid, by the factory, the amount
she has earned. She also says that
others comment on her worsening health and “tell me that I am growing very poor”. She becomes very sick, and as she grows even sicker,
she is forced to leave work for six months.
After she is better, however, she cannot get her job back and her
experience in Lowell continues to worsen.
When she finally finds a new job, her work becomes increasingly
difficult. Her experience just keeps
getting drastically worse. She says that
she “never worked so hard in my life”, and that she is making very little money. About eight months later she reports okay
health, but that she is still not making a lot of money even though she is
working very hard. Coming to the Lowell
mills seemed like a great choice at first, but soon resulted in a downward
spiral of unfortunate events and problems for Mary.
Mary’s
experience represents both the success and failure of the “Lowell Experiment”. Mary and other girls endured hard work and unsafe
conditions. Often, they did not receive
the pay they earned. In this regard, the
experiment was a failure because the people working were not treated
fairly. The girls, being female and young,
were taken advantage of. Many even died due
to the dangerous conditions of the mills.
Mary describes horrific tragedies like how “one girl fell down and broke
her neck which caused instant death” and “Another had nearly all of his ribs
broken”. Another aspect of failure is
that due to being worked so hard, many workers became sick and had to leave,
but could not come back once they were better.
When Mary becomes sick for six months, she “was unable to get my old
place in the cloth room on the Suffolk or on any other corporation”. Workers were overworked and there was no system
so that a worker could still have pay or come back to work when they got better. Overall, especially for workers, the “Lowell
Experiment” as shown by Mary’s experience, was a failure.
The
factory owners, however, may still have viewed Mary’s experience as a success
of the “Lowell Experiment”. By using
girls, they got away with not paying them what they earned and still filling
all the mills with many workers. The
mills were so full that Mary finds it “very difficult for any one to get into
the mill on any corporation”. Even
though the girls knew they would not be paid enough, they just accepted
it. The owners made lots more money this
way, than if they had hired adults or young men. Also, by making them pay to stay at boarding
houses with the money they earned, the corporations and factories retained even
more money. Also, once girls were too
old or became sick, they left, and new, young girls would come and replace the
old girls. Mary is replaced when she
becomes gravely sick. The factory owners
made lots of money from using young women as mill workers, and in that regard,
the “Lowell Experiment” was a success.
Mary Stiles Paul. Letters. (Montpelier Vermont, Vermont Historical Society).
No comments:
Post a Comment