In the first half of the 19th century, the employees of the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, were overwhelmingly young women from rural New England. Despite grueling working conditions and being controlled fourteen hours per day, they had one resource they never had before: each other.
In what little free time they had, the mill girls haunted the public library, formed book clubs, and attended lectures — in a manner of speaking, it was college for farm girls. They would ultimately found their own literary journal, The Lowell Offering, and it is for these writings that they would become most famous. Charles Dickens would ultimately visit in 1842 and come away with only praise. The women wrote political articles (Voice of Industry) and pamphlets, they campaigned for the ten-hour work day, founded the first union for working women, and organised two of the earliest industrial strikes in America.
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