Your social problem is the need for factory reform due to harsh conditions for workers.

This became a growing

concern the 19th century and reformers the Lowell Female Labor Association tried to fix the problem. Use your
textbook and the provided information to help regarding this topic. Here is a brief description of the movement:

The Lowell Female Labor Reform Association was founded in 1844 by the mill girls of Lowell, Massachusetts and
headed by Sarah Bagley. The association was one of the first American labor organizations organized by and for
women.

In the 1800's the textile mills of Lowell employed many unmarried young women from the surrounding
countryside. Families cautiously allowed their daughters to work a few years before marriage, but the working
conditions were difficult and few girls stayed long. The average mill girl stayed at her job for just three years.

Sarah Bagley became the first President of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. Bagley even testified
about the working conditions in the mills before the Massachusetts legislature. In the end, however, the LFLRA was
unable to bargain with the mill owners; so they joined with the New England Workingmen's Association. Despite
this lack of effect, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association was the first organization of working women in the
United States to try to bargain collectively for better working conditions and higher pay.

Now read the primary source document on ―Female Workers of Lowell‖ and talk about the following questions in
your group:

1. What were the conditions like for early factory workers?

2. Why do you think women especially were mistreated in the workplace?
3. What methods could women use to change the conditions of the factories?

The Harbinger, November 14, 1836

We have lately visited the cities of Lowell [MA] and Manchester [NH] and have had an opportunity
of examining the factory system more closely than before. We had distrusted the accounts which we
had heard from persons engaged in the labor reform now beginning to agitate New England. We
could scarcely credit the statements made in relation to the exhausting nature of the labor in the
mills, and to the manner in which the young women -- the operatives -- lived in their
boardinghouses, six sleeping in a room, poorly ventilated.
We went through many of the mills, talked particularly to a large number of the operatives, and ate
at their boardinghouses, on purpose to ascertain by personal inspection the facts of the case. We
assure our readers that very little information is possessed, and no correct judgments formed, by the
public at large, of our factory system, which is the first germ of the industrial or commercial
feudalism that is to spread over our land. . . .
In Lowell live between seven and eight thousand young women, who are generally daughters of
farmers of the different states of New England. Some of them are members of families that were
rich in the generation before. . . .
The operatives work thirteen hours a day in the summer time, and from daylight to dark in the
winter. At half past four in the morning the factory bell rings, and at five the girls must be in the
mills. A clerk, placed as a watch, observes those who are a few minutes behind the time, and
effectual means are taken to stimulate to punctuality. This is the morning commencement of the
industrial discipline (should we not rather say industrial tyranny?) which is established in these
associations of this moral and Christian community.
At seven the girls are allowed thirty minutes for breakfast, and at noon thirty minutes more for
dinner, except during the first quarter of the year, when the time is extended to forty-five minutes.
But within this time they must hurry to their boardinghouses and return to the factory, and that
through the hot sun or the rain or the cold. A meal eaten under such circumstances must be quite
unfavorable to digestion and health, as any medical man will inform us. After seven o'clock in the
evening the factory bell sounds the close of the day's work.
Thus thirteen hours per day of close attention and monotonous labor are extracted from the young
women in these manufactories. . . . So fatigued -- we should say, exhausted and worn out, but we
wish to speak of the system in the simplest language -- are numbers of girls that they go to bed soon
after their evening meal, and endeavor by a comparatively long sleep to resuscitate their weakened
frames for the toil of the coming day.
When capital has got 13 hours of labor daily out of a being, it can get nothing more. It would be a
poor speculation in an industrial point of view to own the operative; for the trouble and expense of
providing for times of sickness and old age would more than counterbalance the difference between
the price of wages and the expenses of board and clothing. The far greater number of fortunes
accumulated by the North in comparison with the South shows that hireling labor is more profitable
for capital than slave labor.
Now let us examine the nature of the labor itself, and the conditions under which it is performed.
Enter with us into the large rooms, when the looms are at work. The largest that we saw is in the
Amoskeag Mills at Manchester. . . . The din and clatter of these five hundred looms, under full
operation, struck us on first entering as something frightful and infernal, for it seemed such an
atrocious violation of one of the faculties of the human soul, the sense of hearing. After a while we
became somewhat used to it, and by speaking quite close to the ear of an operative and quite loud,
we could hold a conversation and make the inquiries we wished.
The girls attended upon an average three looms; many attended four, but this requires a very active
person, and the most unremitting care. However, a great many do it. Attention to two is as much as
should be demanded of an operative. This gives us some idea of the application required during the
thirteen hours of daily labor. The atmosphere of such a room cannot of course be pure; on the
contrary, it is charged with cotton filaments and dust, which, we are told, are very injurious to the
lungs.
On entering the room, although the day was warm, we remarked that the windows were down. We
asked the reason, and a young woman answered very naively, and without seeming to be in the least
aware that this privation of fresh air was anything else than perfectly natural, that "when the wind
blew, the threads did not work well." After we had been in the room for fifteen or twenty minutes,
we found ourselves, as did the persons who accompanied us, in quite a perspiration, produced by a
certain moisture which we observed in the air, as well as by the heat. . . .
The young women sleep upon an average six in a room, three beds to a room. There is no privacy,
no retirement, here. It is almost impossible to read or write alone, as the parlor is full and so many
sleep in the same chamber. A young woman remarked to us that if she had a letter to write, she did
it on the head of a bandbox, sitting on a trunk, as there was no space for a table.
So live and toil the young women of our country in the boardinghouses and manufactories which
the rich an influential of our land have built for them.