In speaking of this subject, Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson says,—
“I think it was the late President Walker who told me that in his judgment one-quarter of the men in Harvard College were being carried through by the special self-denial and sacrifices of women. I cannot answer for the ratio; but I can testify to having been an instance of this myself, and to having known a never-ending series of such cases of self-devotion.”
Lowell, in this respect, was indeed a remarkable town, and it might be said of it, as of Thrums in “Auld Licht Idyls,” “There are scores and scores of houses in it that have sent their sons to college (by what a struggle), some to make their way to the front in their professions, and others, perhaps, despite their broadcloth, never to be a patch upon their parents.”
The early mill-girls were religious by nature and by Puritan inheritance, true daughters of those men and women who, as some one has said, “were as devoted to education as they were to religion;” for they planted the church and the schoolhouse side by side. On entering the mill, each one was obliged to sign a “regulation paper” which required her to attend regularly some place of public worship. They were of many denominations. In one boarding-house that I knew, there were girls belonging to eight different religious sects.
In 1843, there were in Lowell fourteen regularly organized religious societies. Ten of these constituted a “Sabbath School Union,” which consisted of over five thousand scholars and teachers; three-fourths of the scholars, and a large proportion of the teachers, were mill-girls. Once a year, every Fourth of July, this “Sabbath School Union,” each section, or division, under its own sectarian banner, marched in procession to the grove on Chapel Hill, where a picnic was held, with lemonade, and long speeches by the ministers of the different churches,—speeches which the little boys and girls did not seem to think were made to be listened to.
The mill-girls went regularly to meeting and “Sabbath-school;” and every Sunday the streets of Lowell were alive with neatly dressed young women, going or returning therefrom. Their fine appearance on “the Sabbath” was often spoken of by strangers visiting Lowell.
Dr. Scoresby, in his “American Factories and their Operatives,” (with selections from The Lowell Offering,) holds up the Lowell mill-girls to their sister operatives of Bradford, England, as an example of neatness and good behavior. Indeed, it was a pretty sight to see so many wide-awake young girls in the bloom of life, clad in their holiday dresses,—
“Whose delicate feet to the Temple of God,
Seemed to move as if wings had carried them there.”
The morals of these girls were uniformly good. The regulation paper, before spoken of, required each one to be of good moral character; and if any one proved to be disreputable, she was very soon turned out of the mill. Their standard of behavior was high, and the majority kept aloof from those who were suspected of wrong-doing. They had, perhaps, less temptation than the working-girls of to-day, since they were not required to dress beyond their means, and comfortable homes were provided by their employers, where they could board cheaply. Their surroundings were pure, and the whole atmosphere of their boarding-houses was as refined as that of their own homes. They expected men to treat them with courtesy; they looked forward to becoming the wives of good men. Their attitude was that of the German Fräulein, who said, “Treat every maiden with respect, for you do not know whose wife she will be.”