And after a time, as the wages became more and more reduced, the best portion of the girls left and went to their homes, or to the other employments that were fast opening to women, until there were very few of the old guard left; and thus the status of the factory population of New England gradually became what we know it to be to-day.
Some of us took part in a political campaign, for the first time, in 1840, when William H. Harrison, the first Whig President, was elected; we went to the political meetings, sat in the gallery, heard speeches against Van Buren and the Democratic party, and helped sing the great campaign song beginning:—
“Oh have you heard the news of late?”
the refrain of which was:
“Tippecanoe and Tyler too,
Oh with them we’ll beat little Van, Van,
Van is a used-up man.”
And we named our sunbonnets “log-cabins,” and set our teacups (we drank from saucers then) in little glass tea-plates, with log-cabins impressed on the bottom. The part the Lowell mill-girls took in these and similar events serves to show how wide-awake and up to date many of these middle-century working-women were.
Among the fads of those days may be mentioned those of the “water-cure” and the “Grahamite.” The former was a theory of doctoring by means of cold water, used as packs, daily baths, and immoderate drinks. Quite a number of us adopted this practice, and one at least has not even yet wholly abandoned it.
Several members of my mother’s family adopted “Professor” Graham’s regimen, and for a few months we ate no meat, nor, as he said, “anything that had life in it.” It was claimed that this would regenerate the race; that by following a certain line of diet, a person would live longer, do better work, and be able to endure any hardship, in fact, that not what we were, but what we ate, would be the making of us. Two young men, whom I knew, made their boasts that they had “walked from Boston to Lowell on an apple.”