Power Loom

The invention of the power loom contributed to the first steps of civilization towards industrialization. Originally created and implemented in England during the late 18th century, Francis Cabot Lowell copies plans for the power loom and eventually builds his own mill in Waltham, Massachusetts. As the power loom was driven by water, this first mill was constructed next to a river.

The "Lowell" mills were staffed by young girls, generally in their early to late teens. The mills offered a variety of financial and spiritual motives for its employees. Although mill work often had an ill effect on health (constantly breathing in cotton fibers, moving machinery, exposure to temperature extremes), when not working employees were provided with a safe and protected environment through boarding houses and supervision. A portion of their pay was also deducted by the Church, which supplied matrons to provide religious and surrogate maternal guidance.

Many of these young girls came from a rural environment, in which sisters and daughters were destined to be married off quickly to alleviate their drain on family resources. The power loom made it possible for these girls to move into the city and out of the household without marrying. The ability to earn one's own wages also allowed a mill girl to send money home to help the family, or contribute to their own dowries for future marriage. For many of these girls, their wages were also the first time they had personal money to spend as they saw fit, introducing a new class of consumers.

The power loom made textiles widely available for the first time in history, which also created a new demand for raw resources and workers to process materials. Farm girls that moved into the city to work at these mills were often able to apply previous domestic sewing experience to a form of proto-manufacturing known as piecework. The Lowell mills (and its subsequent industrial counterparts) were located in the northern states, while the cotton producing plantations resided in the south. The demand for raw resources by northern factories made plantation farming in the south highly profitable. These plantations in turn resulted in a focus on slave dependant labor in the south, as evident in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Another side effect of young girls clustering in textile mill boarding houses is education and introduction to available literature. While on the farm, literacy for a girl would have been considered unnecessary for the execution of tasks in her gender specific sphere. Life in the city presented a new independence and freedom, in which girls were able to pursue reading and writing as they wished in their free time. Mill girls had access to circulating libraries, which made available a variety of literature including escapist, moral, and religious documents. Post-work recreation in the boarding houses often took the form of communal reading. Girls residing in the boarding houses also had opportunities to attend Lycean Lectures, a form of self-education in which guest lecturers were invited to speak on a variety of topics. Mill girls also wrote literature of their own, most notably "The Lowell Offering," a publication that ran from 1840-1845.

While the power loom introduced industrialization and allowed women a chance to enter the workforce, the bad working conditions would also fuel reformist movements (resulting in reformist writings) to improve labor legislation, which likewise would form the foundation for future abolition and suffrage movements (again resulting in relevant literature).

- Joseph Lu