Women mill workers: Two centuries of struggle

Working-class women and gender-oppressed people have a long, proud history of struggle.

An early movement of women textile mill workers began in the 1830s in Lowell, Massachusetts. About 8,000 workers labored under terrible conditions; 13-hour days were the norm, and child labor was common. 

In 1834, after the mill owners cut their pay, the women and girls went on strike. Harriet Hanson Robinson, still a girl at the time of the strike, led the women working in a room with her in what was called a “turn-out.” She recalled: “As I looked back at the long line that followed me, I was more proud than I have ever been since at any success I may have achieved and more proud than I shall ever be again until my own beloved state gives to its women citizens the right of suffrage.” 

As an adult Robinson became an activist for women’s voting rights.

The strikers marched from mill to mill, calling on the workers to join the strike — which they did. This was an early example — perhaps the earliest in the U.S. — of what became known as the “flying squadron.”

The strikers from the different plants held a mass rally where they declared on a petition: “We will not go back into the mills to work unless our wages are continued.” (afl-cio.org)

The workers did not win their demand, but they did not give up. In 1836, they held a second strike bigger than the first, also over wages, which was again defeated. But in the 1840s, the women and girls of Lowell formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, which pressed for the 10-hour day in the mills through its newspaper, Voice of Industry. Thousands of signatures were collected on petitions raising that demand to the Massachusetts state legislature.

The movement spread to other mill towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. But the Massachusetts legislators failed to pass any workday hours legislation, and the legislation passed in New Hampshire had no mechanism for enforcing it.

The achievement of this early movement of working-class women wasn’t winning better wages or shorter hours. It was proving that even the very downtrodden could organize and fight back. 

As one mill worker put it: “They have at last learnt the lesson which a bitter experience teaches; not to those who style themselves their ‘natural protectors’ are they to look for the needful help, but to the strong and resolute of their own sex.” (afl-cio.org)

Fighting tradition continues

Since that time, women and gender-oppressed workers in the garment and textile industries have on many occasions demonstrated fierce determination and militancy. In 1909, the “Uprising of the 20,000,” a strike of garment workers in New York City, was the largest strike of primarily women workers up to that time. 

Yet despite winning better pay and shorter hours, on March 25, 1911, 146 workers died in the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist fire in downtown Manhattan. They could not escape from their burning factory, because the bosses had locked the emergency exit doors. Over 350,000 people joined the funeral march for these murdered workers, many of them teenagers.

The 1912 “Bread and Roses” strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, pushed back a pay cut imposed by the factory owners and won better working conditions. The textile strike of 1934 shut down mills from Maine to Alabama. The fictionalization of real-life union organizer Crystal Lee Sutton in the 1979 film “Norma Rae” depicted the still-deplorable conditions for Southern mill workers. 

This tradition of struggle continues today as garment workers in low-wage countries such as Bangladesh fight for justice and union rights.