Loom and spindle

by Harriet Jane Hanson Robinson

No one can grow mentally, who has not time to read or to think, and whose life is a constant struggle to get enough food and clothing for himself and his family. Our working-people have their intellectual freedom, as well as the wage-question, to fight for, just as the ancestors of the early factory-operatives fought for their social and constitutional liberty. They will carry on the warfare in their own way; and if employers are wise they will try to do something practical to prevent strikes, riots, and labor-unions, which are the working-man’s weapons of defence, and so to “lock the door before the horse is stolen.”

Not long ago I was invited to speak to a company of the Lowell mill-girls, and to tell them something about my early life as a member of the guild. I was doubly willing to do this, as I was desirous of forming some estimate of the status of these successors of the early mill-girls.

About two hundred of them assembled in the pleasant parlors of the People’s Club, and listened attentively to my story. When it was over, a few of them gathered around, and asked me many questions. In turn I questioned them,—about their work, their hours of labor, their wages, and their means of improvement. When I urged them to occupy their spare time in reading and study, they seemed to understand the necessity of it, but answered sadly: “We will try; but we work so hard, we tend so much machinery, and we are so tired.” It was plainly to be seen that these operatives did not go to their labor with the jubilant feeling that the old mill-girls used to have; that their work was drudgery, done without aim and purpose; that they took little interest in it beyond the thought that it was the means of earning their daily bread. There was a tired hopelessness about them that I am sure was not often seen among the early mill-girls, and they had an underfed, prematurely old look.

The hours of labor are now less, it is true; but the operatives are obliged to do a far greater amount of work in a given time. They tend so many looms and frames that they have no time to think. They are always on the jump; and so have no opportunity to improve themselves. They are too weary to read good books, and too overworked to digest what they have read. The souls of many of these mill-girls seemed starved, and looked from their hungry eyes as if searching for mental food.

Why are they not fed? The means of education are not wanting. Public libraries are provided, and they have more leisure to read than the mill-girls of forty years ago. But they do not seem to know how to improve it. Their leisure only gives them the more time to be idle in; more time to waste in the streets, or in reading cheap novels and stories. It might almost be said that they are worse off than if they had longer hours, or did not know how to read, unless they can use to better advantage their extra time, or have the means of suitable education provided for them.

Let it not be understood that I would take from the operative or the artisan one of the chances of education. But I would have them taught how to use wisely those privileges, forced, we might almost say, on them and on their children. I would also have them taught how inwardly to digest what they are made to learn. The tools are given them; but as they are not taught how to use them, these prove but an additional weapon of defence against employers, and make them more discontented, and ready to listen to the political demagogue, or the so-called labor reformer. Then strikes ensue, which usually end, as the first Lowell one did, for the time being at least, in the success of the employer, rather than of the employee.

The solution of the labor problem is not in strikes, but, as another has said, in “bringing the question down to its simplest form, a practical carrying out of the golden rule; by the employer elevating the working-man in his own esteem by fair dealing, courteous treatment, and a constant appeal to his better side; and, on the other hand, in the working-man himself by the absence of malingering, by honest work, and a desire to further his employer’s interests; and finally, to cement the two, a fair distribution of profits.” “Not what we give, but what we share,” is a good motto for the employers. Treat your employees as you would be treated, if, by the “accident of birth,” loss of employment, or hard luck, you were in their condition. Treat them as if they, too, had something of God in them, and, like yourselves, were also His children. This is the philosophy of the labor question.

The factory population of New England is made up largely of American-born children of foreign parentage,—two-thirds it is estimated; as a rule, they are not under the strict control of the church of their parents, and they are too apt to adopt the vices and follies, rather than the good habits, of our people. It is vital to the interests of the whole community, that they should be kept under good moral influences; that they should have the sympathy, the help, of employers. They need better homes than they find in too many of our factory towns and cities, and a better social atmosphere, that they may be lifted out of their mental squalor into a higher state of thought and of feeling.

The modern system of overcrowding the mill-people is to be especially deprecated. In the old time, not more than two or three beds were put into one large bedroom, which was used only as a bedroom; but not long ago, according to an article in the Springfield Republican on “How Mill-People Live,” it appears that Mr. H. R. Walker, agent of the Chicopee Board of Health, in his official report to the board, states that he found “twelve persons living and sleeping in a suite of two rooms, and sixteen persons living and sleeping in a tenement of four rooms.” And in another block, owned by a “wealthy gentleman in that city,” he found that “thirty-eight rooms were occupied by ninety-seven men, women, and children.” Under such conditions, how can young people be brought up virtuously?

These are examples of overcrowding which I hope are not followed to any extent by the better class of manufacturing corporations; although there is reason to fear that overcrowding is getting to be the rule, rather than the exception.