Introduction

This lesson plan examines the efforts of early American manufacturers to implement the factory system on a large-scale in the town of Lowell, Massachusetts. It can be used when teaching about the economic revolution of the post-War of 1812-period or the development of industry in the Antebellum North.

Objectives

1. To understand the idealistic goals of the industrialists who financed and built the Lowell mills.

2. To investigate how the expectations of Lowell’s founders compared to the reality of life in the textile mills for the young women who comprised the factories’ principal work force.

Pre-Class Preparation

This lesson plan requires students to examine several documents of varying length drawn from different sources on the Internet. Students should read all of the texts before coming to class. Links to the assigned documents are provided in the lesson plan. For convenience, the documents have also been collected into a single MS-WORD file, which can be printed out and distributed to students ahead of time at the teacher’s discretion.

Part 1: The Idealized Vision

The Lowell mills were as much a social experiment as they were an economic enterprise. Mill owners recruited young New England farm girls and provided housing for them in company-owned dormitories where their leisure time was as carefully supervised as their working hours. The girls were required to attend church regularly. Lending libraries, lectures, concerts, and recitals were also provided for their moral and intellectual edification. In creating Lowell, the mill owners hoped to enjoy all of the benefits that came with the factory system while avoiding the social consequences of industrialization. Above all, they wanted to avoid the creation of a permanent, degraded working class. This part of the lesson asks students to examine a series of illustrations that express something of the social vision that guided Lowell’s founders. The pictures present idealized portraits of both the factory operatives and the mills.

The illustrations have been taken from a variety of websites and books on American history. They have been organized into a PowerPoint presentation that should be shown to students in class. Alternatively, the individual PowerPoint slides can be converted into color transparencies or printed out on paper for distribution to the students.

Activity: Before starting the presentation, ask your students to jot down on paper the image that comes to mind when they hear the word “factory.” Also, advise students to pay close attention not only to the factory buildings and the women themselves, but also to the surrounding details that the artists chose to include in their pictures.

Assignment: After students have viewed the artwork, ask them to respond to some or all of the following questions--Do the pictures of the Lowell mills conform to your image of a factory? What do these illustrations seem to suggest about the relationship between the factories and the natural environment? How are the girls portrayed? Describe the setting that the girl on the cover of The Lowell Offering has been placed in. What message is the illustrator trying to convey in this drawing?

Part 2: Life in the Mills

As the first American factory town of its kind, Lowell attracted a great deal of national and international attention. Visitors flocked to Lowell to tour the town and observe what working and living conditions were like for the female mill operatives. The documents in this part of the lesson provide several different perspectives on Lowell. The first (http://www.albany.edu/history/history316/VisitorLowell1836.html) is an article from The Harbinger, one of many publications that was established in the early 1800s to support the interests of the working class. The second (http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DICKENS/dks4.html) is a chapter from American Notes, a collection of sketches by English author Charles Dickens describing his travels across the United States in 1842. Renowned as both a novelist and a journalist, Dickens had written frequently about the horrors of Britain’s industrial cities. The third document (http://www.albany.edu/faculty/gz580/His316/SecondPeepatFactoryLife.html) is an account by one of the factory workers that appeared in The Lowell Offering, a literary magazine published by the young women who worked in the mills. The final document (http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/americanstudies/lavender/graphics/spinsong.jpg) is the text of a song that was popular among the mill operatives.

Assignment: Ask students to respond to some or all of the following questions--The authors of the first three documents offer very different impressions of the mills and factory life. On what points do their accounts disagree the most? Are their any subjects on which all three writers agree? How did the female workers themselves view their situation? After examine all of these documents, do you think the founders of Lowell fulfilled their original goal of creating a benevolent industrial system that benefited factory owners and workers alike?

Suggestions for Additional Activities

This lesson plan is primarily concerned with examining what factory life was like for workers during this early stage of industrialization in the United States.  However, the topic can also be used as a springboard to explore the changing status of women in antebellum America. The decision to hire young, unmarried women to work in the Lowell mills generated a considerable amount of controversy. Critics claimed that factory work was not suited to the female sex and would leave the women tarnished for life. The mill workers vigorously disputed these charges in the pages of The Lowell Offering and wrote very eloquently on the subject of why they valued their experiences at Lowell. A good selection of their writings from this periodical and other sources can be found at http://www.albany.edu/history/history316/his316f2000.html. These documents offer an excellent basis for discussion on how factory work reshaped the social and economic boundaries of women’s lives during this time period.