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Young Women Ask Permission to Work in Lowell (with text supports)

Starting in the 1820s, a group of business owners built textile mills in New England, where for the first time, people could use machines to weave cotton into cloth. The first factories recruited women from rural New England as their labor force. Most of these young women viewed mill work as a temporary stage in live, a way to escape the limits of farm life and to earn money for themselves and to help support their families.


Source | Thomas Dublin, ed., Farm to Factory: Women’s Letters, 1830-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).
Creator | Various
Item Type | Diary/Letter
Cite This document | Various, “Young Women Ask Permission to Work in Lowell (with text supports),” SHEC: Resources for Teachers, accessed March 19, 2024, https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1824.

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