The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove

by William Moran

A Book Review by Christine Cahill

March 2009

The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove by William Moran examines the social history of the textile industry in New England. This history begins with opening of the first mill in Waltham, Massachusetts by Francis Cabot Lowell in 1814. The reader follows the rise and fall of the industry in New England and the book ends with a short chapter charting the closing of the mills in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Some of the owners simply moved the machinery to new operations in the South where they could take advantage of cheaper labor costs and few labor unions. While Mr. Moran has reporter’s eye for detail, he has an annoying proclivity for jumping backwards and forwards in his storytelling while neglecting to give the reader sufficient background about the characters involved or coherent time references. Perhaps this is a reflection of years spent as a writer and producer at CBS News. Although The Belles of New England lacks a tight structure and some coherence, Mr. Moran does a good job of telling the story of how the opening of the mills changed women’s lives in New England. He also shows the great social upheavals caused by this industrial revolution and he documents the birth of the American labor movement.

The first chapter, “A Place in the Universe,” is, essentially, an eight-page synopsis of the book. Until the advent of mechanized spinning and weaving, the manufacture of cloth was literally a cottage industry. Francis Cabot Lowell’s first mill, built on the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston, was America’s first factory to take bales of cotton and transform them into finished cloth all under one roof. Unskilled workers were needed to tend the spinning and weaving machines. At first these workers were young Yankee women from rural New England but by the 1840s, Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famines in their homeland were replacing the native born workers. When the Irish became more established in America and opportunities for other work were available to them, many French Canadians replaced Irish workers. Moran tells the reader what happened, but even in succeeding chapters, which take topics introduced in “A Place in the Universe” and expand upon them, the reader does not usually learn why certain events happened. Where did the young Yankee women go? What other opportunities did the Irish pursue? Where did the great fortunes of the early mill builders come from that allowed them to build the mills in the first place? These questions are not answered by Moran.

Where Moran excels is in painting a picture of the clattering of the machinery, the drudgery of the work and the increasing demands placed upon the workers as the mill owners came to view them as just another cog in the machine and easily replaceable.

“Plant managers nailed the windows shut to achieve the high humidity needed to keep the threads pliable so that breakage would be minimized and the looms would not have to be stopped as often for thread repairs. The humidity caused respiratory ailments, including tuberculosis and influenza.” (p. 22)

Cotton lint filled the air in the workrooms like snow in the winter. “Eventually, 70 percent of the early mill workers died of respiratory diseases.” (p.23) Farmers in Massachusetts at the time died from respiratory diseases only at a rate of 4 percent. It is not at all surprising that the first strike by American women came as early as 1824 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Eight mills in Pawtucket announced a longer workweek at the same rate of pay and women weavers walked out. The public supported women’s cause and the women won a compromise with management. (Moran does not supply any details about what the longer workweek entailed, nor does he enlighten the reader with information about the compromise reached.) The women walking out from the factories as well as speaking out about their working conditions was in direction opposition to the standards of the day. Women were expected to be docile and submissive and if wrongs needed to be addressed, it was expected that men would do it on the behalf of women, not by the women themselves. But the success in reaching a compromise in Pawtucket was atypical. Most walkouts ended badly for workers. Mill owners extended working hours, reduced wages, and packed more women into already crowded boarding houses. Many women returned to their jobs having gained nothing and strike leaders were often blackballed by management and unable to find employment in any mill in town.

Moran also documents the waves of immigrants coming to America and the racist views that confronted them in the mill towns. These immigrants often fled poverty and/or persecution in their homelands only to be looked down upon as ignorant and inferior to native-born. Efforts to organize workers were difficult because of their differences in ethnic background and traditions, as well as the many different languages spoken by the new immigrants. Mill owners often used old antagonisms from home countries to pit one ethnic group against another, causing them to be suspicious of each other and fearful of losing their jobs. Workers were treated as just cogs in the machine. Moran includes a chilling quote from Lowell mill agent, George Oliver:

I regard my work people just as I regard my machinery, so long as they can do my work for what I choose to pay them, I keep them, getting out all I can…When my machines get old and useless, I reject them and get new, and these people are part of my machinery.” (p. 160)

This view of workers was widespread among mill owners and certainly was not limited to the textile industry. Efforts to organize workers was fought by management and as the twentieth century progressed, mills shut down in the North and some relocated to the South where labor costs were much cheaper and unions were not as established.

There is considerable amount of scholarship that went into producing The Belles of New England but it is not a particularly scholarly work. The book contains an eight page bibliography and twenty pages of notes, but the notes are a simple listing of sources for quotes and do not provide any further social or historical context for the quoted material. The use of primary documents is evident in the quotes from mill workers, floor bosses, and owners. The extensive use of writings of the day, including letters, songs, poems and newsletters published by mill workers is the one of the strengths of the book. The lack of a tight structure to the book is an annoyance, but despite that problem, the book is a fairly engaging read and certainly whets the appetite for more exploration of the history of the textile industry in New England. The book is useful for background knowledge on the topic of textile mill history and early industrialization, but is too scattershot in its approach to be a useful source for students.s