Employments for women during the colonial period, and the development of
the factory.

For nearly a century and a half, dating from the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, the condition of laboring women was that of the same class in all struggling colonies. There were practically no women wage-earners, save in domestic service, where a home and from thirty to a hundred dollars a year was accounted wealth, the latter sum being given in a few instances to the housekeepers in great houses. Each family represented a commonwealth, and its women gave every energy to the crowding duties of a daily life filled with manifold occupations.

The farmer-for all were farmers-was often blacksmith, shoemaker, and carpenter, and more or less proficient in every trade whose offices were called for in the family life. The farmer’s wife spun and wove the cloth he wore and the linen that made his household furnishing, and was dyer and dresser, brewer and baker, seamstress, milliner, and dressmaker. The quickness, adaptiveness to new conditions, and the fertility of resource which are recognized as distinguishing the American, were born of the colonial struggle, especially of the final one which separated us forever from English rule.

The wage of the few women found in labor outside the home was gauged by that which had ruled in England. For unskilled labor, as that employed occasionally in agriculture, this had been from one shilling and sixpence for ordinary field work to two shillings a week paid in haying and harvest time. For hoeing corn or rough weeding there is record of one shilling per week, and this is the usual wage for old women. To this were added various allowances which have gradually fallen into disuse. A full record of these and of rates in general will be found in “Six Centuries of Work and Wages."

Unskilled labor during the whole colonial period-meaning by this such labor as that of the men who sawed wood, dug ditches, or mended roads, mixed mortar for the mason, carried boards to the carpenter, or cut hay in harvest time-brought a wage of seldom more than two shillings a day, fifteen shillings a week making a man the envy of his fellows, while six or seven was the utmost limit for women of the same order.

On this pittance they lived as they could. Sand did duty as carpet for the floor. The cupboard knew no china, and the table no glass. Coal and matches were unknown; they had never seen a stove. The meals of coarsest food were eaten from wooden or pewter dishes. Fresh meat was seldom eaten more than once a week. A pound of salt pork was tenpence, and corn three shillings a bushel. Clothing was as coarse as the food, and imprisonment for the slightest debt was the shadow hanging over every family where illness or any other cause had hindered earning. Boys and girls in the poorer families were employed by the owners of cattle to watch and keep them within bounds, countless troubles arising from their roaming over the unfenced fields. Andover, Mass., being from the beginning of a thrifty turn of mind, passed, soon after the founding of the town, an ordinance which still stands on the town records:-

“The Court did herupon order and decree that in every towne the chosen men are to take care of such as are sett to keep cattle, that they may be sett to some other employment withall, as spinning upon the rock, knitting and weaving tape, &c.”

Spinning-classes were also formed; the General Court of Massachusetts ordering these in 1656, this being part of the general effort to begin some form of manufactures. But fishing to load ships, and shipbuilding to carry cured fish absorbed the energies of the growing population; and these vessels brought textiles and manufactured goods from the cheapest markets everywhere and anywhere.

These “homespun” industries soon showed a tendency toward division. By 1669 much weaving was done outside the home as custom work; and there is record of one Gabriel Harris who died in 1684 leaving four looms and tacklings and a silk loom as part of the small fortune he had accumulated in this way. His six children and some hired women assisted in the work. In 1685 Joseph, the son of Roger Williams, entered in an account book now extant, a credit to “Sarah badkuk [Babcock], for weven and coaming wisted.” This work was, however, chiefly in the hands of men.

The records of Pepperell, Mass., show that many women saved their pin money, and sent out little ventures in the ships built at home and sailing to all ports with fish. These ventures included articles of clothing, embroideries, and anything that it seemed might be made to yield some return. There were also women of affairs, some of whom took charge of large industries. Thus Weeden, in his “Economic and Social History of New England,” quotes from an interesting memorandum left by Madam Martha Smith, a widow of St. George’s Manor, Long Island, which shows her practical ability. In January, 1707, “my company” killed a yearling whale, and made twenty-seven barrels of oil. The record gives her success for the year, and the tax she paid to the authorities at New York,-fifteen pounds and fifteen shillings, a twentieth part of her year’s gains.

Other women oversaw the curing of the fish; but there is no record of the wage beyond the general one which for the earliest days of the colony gives rates for women as from four to eight pence a day without food. These rates followed almost literally those of England at that time. Half of the day’s earnings were accounted an equivalent for diet, and contractors for feeding gangs in agriculture, among sailors, or wherever the system was adopted, allowed seven and one-half pence per day a head for men and women alike. Women servants received ten shillings a year wages, and an allowance of four shillings additional for clothing. The working day still remained as fixed by the law late in the fifteenth century,-from five A.M. to eight P.M., from March to September, with half an hour for breakfast, and an hour and a half for dinner.

These rates gradually altered, but for women hardly at all, the wages during the eighteenth century ranging from four to six pounds a year. The colony, however, gave opportunities unknown to the mother country, and gardening and the cultivation of small vegetables seem to have fallen much into the hands of women. They had studied the best methods for hotbeds, and grew early vegetables in these, the first record of this being in 1759.

Gloves were by this time made at home, buttons covered, and many small industries conducted, all connected with the manufacture and making up of clothing. Patriotic spinning occupied many; and the “Boston News-Letter” has it that often seventy linen-wheels were employed at one gathering. The agitation caused by the Stamp Act turned the attention of all women to the production of cloth as a domestic business. Worcester, Mass., in 1780 formed an association for the spinning and weaving of cotton, and a jenny was bought by subscription.

Prices by this time had risen, and in 1776 the Andover records mention that a Miss Holt was paid eighteen shillings for spinning seventy-two skeins, and seven shillings eleven pence for weaving nineteen yards of cloth. Women generally could spin two skeins of linen yarn a day; but there is record of one, a Miss Eleanor Fry of East Greenwich, R.I., who spun seven skeins and one knot in one day,-an amount sufficient to make twelve large lawn handkerchiefs such as were then imported from England.

Within four years another Rhode Island family of Newport are recorded in 1768 as having “manufactured nine hundred and eighty yards of woolen cloth, besides two coverlids (coverlets), and two bed-ticks, and all the stocking yarn of the family.”

The Council of East Greenwich fixed prices at that time at rates which seem purely arbitrary and are certainly incomprehensible. Thus for spinning linen or worsted, five or six skeins to the pound, the price was not to exceed sixpence per skein of fifteen knots, with finer work in proportion. Carded woollen yarn was the same per skein. Weaving plain flannel or tow or linen brought fivepence per yard; common worsted and linen, one penny a yard; and other linens in like proportion.

Silk growing and weaving had been the result of the silkworm cocoons sent over by James the First, who offered bounties of money and tobacco for spun and woven silk according to weight. Three women were famous before the Revolution as silk growers and weavers,-Mrs. Pinckney, Grace Fisher, and Susanna Wright; and at all points where the mulberry-tree was indigenous or could be made to grow, fortune was regarded as assured. The project failed; but the efforts then made paved the way for present experiment, and even better success than that already attained.

The manufacture of straw goods, amounting now to many million dollars yearly, owes its origin to a woman,-Miss Betsey Metcalf, who in 1789, when hardly more than a child, discovered the secret of bleaching and braiding the meadow grass of Dedham, her native town. Others were taught, and a regular business of supplying the want for summer hats and bonnets was organized, and has grown to its present large proportions.

At this period women widowed by the fortune of war or forced by the absence of all the male members of the family on the field, were often found in business. The mother of Thomas Perkins of Salem, one of the great American merchants, left widowed in 1778, took her husband’s place in the counting-house, managed business, despatched ships, sold merchandise, wrote letters, all with such commanding energy that the solid Hollanders wrote to her as to a man. The record of one day’s work of Mary Moody Emerson, born in 1777, reads:-

“Rose before light every morn; read Butler’s Analogy; commented on the Scriptures; read in a little book Cicero’s Letters-a few touches of Shakespeare-washed, carded, cleaned house and baked."

There is another woman no less busy, a member of the distinguished Nott family, who did work in her house and helped her boys in the fields. In midwinter, with neither money nor wool in the house, one of the boys required a new suit. The mother sheared the half-grown fleece from a sheep, and in a week had spun, wove, and made it into clothing, the sheep being protected from cold by a wrappage made of braided straw.

Details like this would be out of place here did they not serve to accent the fact of the concentration of industries under the home roof, and the necessity that existed for this. But a change was near at hand, and it dates from the first bale of cotton grown in the country.

In the early years of the eighteenth century not a manufacturing town existed in New England, and for the whole country it was much the same. A few paper-mills turned out paper hardly better in quality than that which comes to us to-day about our grocery packages. In a foundry or two iron was melted into pigs or beaten into bars and nails. Cocked hats and felts were made in one factory. Cotton was hardly known. De Bow, in his “Industrial Resources of the United States,” tells us that a little had been sent to Liverpool just before the battle of Lexington; but linen took the place of all cotton fabrics, and was spun at every hearth in New England.

In the eight bales of cotton, grown on a Georgia plantation, sent over to Liverpool in 1784, and seized at the Custom House on the ground that so much cotton could not be produced in America, but must come from some foreign country, lay the seed of a new movement in labor, in which, from the beginning, women have taken larger part than men. By 1800 cotton had proved itself a staple for the Southern States, and even the second war with England hardly hindered the planters. In 1791 two million pounds had been raised; in 1804 forty-eight million; the invention of the cotton-gin, in 1793, stimulating to the utmost the enthusiasm of the South over this new road to fortune.

It is with the birth of the cotton industry that the work and wages of women begin to take coherent shape; and the history of the new occupation divides itself roughly into three periods. The first includes the ten or fifteen years prior to 1790, and may be called the experimental period; the second covers the time from 1790 to 1811, in which the spinning-system was established and perfected; and the third the years immediately following 1814, in which came the introduction of the power loom and the growth of the modern factory system.

The experimental stage found an enthusiastic worker in the person of Tench Coxe, known often as the “Father of American Industries,” whose interest in the beginning was philanthropic rather than commercial. Bent upon employment for idle and destitute workmen, he exhibited in Philadelphia in 1775 the first spinning-jenny seen in America. He had already incorporated the “United Company of Philadelphia for Promoting American Manufactures,” and they at once secured the machine and made ready to operate it. Four hundred women were very speedily at work at hand spinning and weaving; and though the company presently turned its attention to woollen fabrics, a large proportion of women was still employed.

Till the building of the great mill at Waltham, Mass., in which every form of the improved machinery found place, spinning was the only work of the factories. All the yarn was sent out among the farmers to be woven into cloth, the current prices paid for this being from six to twelve cents a yard. American cotton was poor, and the product of a quality inferior to the coarsest and heaviest-unbleached of to-day; but experiment soon altered all this.

To manufacture the raw product in this country was a necessity. For England this had begun in 1786; but she guarded so jealously all inventions bearing upon it that none found their way to us. Our machinery was therefore of the most imperfect order, the work chiefly of two young Scotch mechanics. In 1788 a company was formed at Providence, R.I., for making “homespun cloth,” their machinery being made in part from drawings from English models. Carding and roving were all done by hand labor; and the spinning-frame, with thirty-two spindles, differed little from a common jenny, and was worked by a crank turned by hand.

Even at this stage England was determined that America should have neither machinery nor tools, and still held to the act passed in 1789 which enforced a penalty of five hundred pounds for any one who exported, or tried to export, “blocks, plates, engines, tools, or utensils used in or which are proper for the preparing or finishing of the calico, cotton, muslin, or linen printing manufacture, or any part thereof.”

Nothing could have more stimulated American invention; but there were many struggles before the thought finally came to all interested, that it might be possible to condense the whole operation with all its details under one roof,-a project soon carried out.

Thus far all had been tentative; but the building in 1790 at Pawtucket, R.I., of the first large factory with improved machinery gave the industry permanent place. Another mill was erected in the same State in 1795, and two more in Massachusetts in 1802 and 1803. In the three succeeding years ten more were built in Rhode Island and one in Connecticut, altogether fifteen in number, working about 8,000 spindles and producing in a year some 300,000 pounds of yarn. At the end of the year 1809 eighty-seven additional mills had been put up, making about 80,000 spindles in operation. Eight hundred spindles employed forty persons,-five men and thirty-five women and children.

The first authoritative record as to the progress of the manufacture, numbers employed, etc., was made in a report to the House of Representatives in the spring session of 1816. In the previous year 90,000 bales had been manufactured as against 1,000 in 1800. The capital invested was $40,000, and the relative number of males and females employed is also recorded,-

For these women spinning was the only work. Hand-looms still did all the weaving, nor was it possible to obtain any plan of the power looms,-then in use in England, and a recent invention. Another mill had been built in 1795; and thus the first definite and profitable occupation for women in this country dates back to the close of the eighteenth and the early years of the nineteenth century, the history of its phases having been written by Tench Coxe. The village tailoress had long gone from house to house, earning in the beginning but a shilling a day, and this sometimes paid in kind; and in towns a dressmaker or milliner was secure of a livelihood. But work for the many was unknown outside of household life; and thus wage rates vary with locality, and are in most cases inferential rather than matter of record.

Cotton would seem, from the beginning of manufacturing interests, to have monopolized New England; but other industries had been very early suggested. In May, 1640, the General Court of Massachusetts made an order for the encouragement by bounties of the manufacture of linen and woollen as well as cotton. In 1638 a company of Yorkshiremen came over and settled in Rowley, Mass., where they built the first fulling-mill in the United States. Fustians and the ordinary homespun cloth were woven; but few women were employed, the work being far heavier than the weaving of cotton. It was hoped that broadcloths as good as those imported could be made; but American wool proved less susceptible of high finish, though of better wearing quality than the English. Various grades of cloth, with shawls, were manufactured; but the growth of the industry was slow, and constantly hampered by heavy duties and much interference. In 1770 the entire graduating class at Harvard College were dressed in black broadcloth made in this country, the weaving of which had been done in families. Yarn was sent to these after the wool had been made ready in the mills, and the census of the United States for 1810 gives the number of yards woven in this way as 9,528,266.

What proportion of women were engaged we have no means of knowing; but the census of 1860 shows that New England had 65 per cent of the total number then at work. The cotton manufacture had but 38 per cent of males as against 62 per cent of females; while in woollen, males were 60 per cent. In New England 10,743 women were in woollen-mills; in the Middle States, 4,540; and in the South, 689. For the West no returns are given. Many more would be included in the Southern returns were it not that most of the weaving is still a home industry, this resulting from the sparseness and scattered nature of the population.

Knitting formed one of the earliest means of earning for women, the demand for hose of every description being beyond the power of the family to supply. Knitting-machines of various orders were in use on the Continent, and had been brought into England; but any attempt to employ them here was for a long time unsuccessful. Yarn was spun especially for this purpose, usually with a double thread, and in the year 1698 Martha’s Vineyard exported 9,000 pairs. The German and English settlers of Pennsylvania brought many handknitting machines with them, and were rivals of New England; but Virginia led, and the census of 1810 credits her with over half of the hand-knit pairs exported, Connecticut coming next. In Pennsylvania the women earned half a crown a pair for the long hose, and this in the opening of the eighteenth century; and the State still retains it as a household industry. The percentage for the United States of women engaged in it by the last census is 61,100.

The early stages of the industry employed very few women, the processes involving too heavy labor; and out of 159 workers in the first mills, only eight were women, these being employed in carding and fulling. According to our last census, 10,743 are employed in New England mills alone; but the proportion remains far below that of the cotton-mills, and at many points in the South and remote territories it is still a household industry in which all share.

Until well on in the nineteenth century the factory and the domestic system were still interwoven, nor had there been intelligent definition of the actual meaning of this system until Ure formulated one:-

“The factory system in technology is simply the combined operation of many orders of work-people in tending with assiduous skill a series of productive machines, continuously impelled by a central power."

A central power controlling an army of workers had been the dream of all mechanicians; and Ure formulated this also:-

“It is the idea of a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object,-all of them being subordinate to a self-regulated moving force.”

This was the result brought about by the gradual extension of the factory system. The objections made from the beginning, and still made, with such answers as experience has suggested, find place later on.