Random photo.

[LH]

0

A random photo I took as I was walking around town one day.

Who is she LH? She looks very sad and troubled.

She is a "Mill girl"
I am always drawn to the tidbits of history, not the major happenings of the day but the everyday life of regular people living then.

Each mill girl knew that she was trading her work for newfound independence. Wages could be spent, in part, for self-enrichment. In the evenings, the girls could attend a Lyceum lecture presented by John Quincy Adams, Horace Greeley, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spoke on a variety of topics. Other leisure time activities included attending plays, musical events or spending time at the public library.


The girls enjoyed buying current magazines to guide them toward the latest trends in fashion. The most prominent fashion magazine of the day was Godey’s Lady's Book. The periodical’s editor, Sarah Josepha Hale, was critical of mill girls who she portrayed as donning expensive watches and dressing beyond their (low) social class rank in a concentrated attempt to emulate higher class women. The girls must have welcomed the opportunity to find more fashionable apparel than the outdated clothes they had brought from the farm. For the few mill girls who were “slaves to fashion,” most likely there were an equal number of them who preferred to save.

Many mill gills were educated and literary-minded. While books were banned from being brought into the mill itself, the girls often taped newspaper clippings or torn out pages from books to any vertical space near their work area. Reading or memorizing stanzas of poetry, must have been an enchanting diversion from their repetitive, monotonous tasks.

Among other tasks, the girls wove “negro cloth,” a coarse composite cloth containing wool. This “inferior” cloth was sent south for use in making slave’s clothing. In the midst of their weaving the girls reportedly circulated a poem written by abolitionist, John Greenleaf Whittier, which includes this stanza:

Speed on the light to those who dwell
In Slavery’s land of woe and sin,
And through the blackness of that Hell
Let Heaven’s own light break in.


As greed increased among the mill owners, so did the pressure to make each girl more productive. Now, each girl was required to take care of three or four looms instead of one. When the Yankee mill girls became unwilling to continue working under these conditions, tides of immigrants stood ready to take their places. Irish workers flooded into the country especially during the potato famine years of 1846-1848. Other immigrants from Greece, Poland, Russia, Portugal, and Colombia, and Canada

The Mill Girl statue at the Millyard Museum of Manchester, New Hampshire, created by sculptor, Antoinette Prien Schultze, is a powerful tribute to all of the fine female textile workers of the 19th century, but particularly those women who toiled at the Amoskeag Mills of Manchester, situated along the Merrimack River and dependent on its waterpower. When we look at the fabrics in nineteenth century New England quilts, we are compelled to wonder how many of them include fabrics made by mill girls.

May the achievements, courage, and self-reliance these young women set a shining example of the durability and adaptability of the “weaker sex,” and the memory of their labor and circumstances be forever recalled.




Sorry for the long story.