“Oh! isn’t it a pity, such a pretty girl as I

Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?

Oh! I cannot be a slave, I will not be a slave,

For I’m so fond of liberty,

That I cannot be a slave.”

— First published in the Lowell Offering, author unknown.

A pre-history of women worker agitation

In the late 1830s and early 1840s, the businessman Francis Cabot Lowell set off to the rural pockets of New England (in the Northeastern United States) making entreaties to farmers in the region to send their daughters for work at his textile mill. His business pitch was a simple one — the women would receive steady pay, a place to board with their meals taken care of, a basic standard of social protections, and a more informal promise to keep the women on the moral straight and narrow.

Soon enough, the Lowell mills attracted over 8000 women workers between the age of seven and 35, working 73-hour weeks in ear-shattering, high decibel looms. Such a development did not go unnoticed amongst the intelligentsia of early industrial America, who developed a proto-feminist debate as to whether the ‘Lowell Mill Girls’ were indeed emancipated or enslaved. While such debates ensued amongst genteel society, with no less Charles Dickens weighing in, the local population of New England took an altogether different view of the Lowell workers. Initially curious about the presence of these women workers in their town, the locals swiftly descended into an atmosphere of suspicion which often took the form of propagating moral panics about the character of the women employed by Francis Cabot Lowell. It was at this time that “mill girl” became a popular class-based slur, and the word ‘spinster’, a word directly related to spinning the loom, was bandied about with much relish.

As part of their daily routine, the women workers of the Lowell Mill had a strict regimen of reading and writing after work hours — a skill that was seen as essential to building good moral character. It was thus that the women decided to launch a publication of their own, the Lowell Offering, that journaled their poetry and fiction and won the praise of some of the more serious-minded American literary figures of the time. While the journal was quite the potpourri, offering farcical ballads, formalistic poetry, and fiction, it also served as a critical vehicle in airing the many grievances the women experienced working at the mills; their working conditions, their working hours, their pay, and their sense of alienation on being displaced from their rural moorings. The journal also published the likes of Betsey Guppy Chamberlain, Abba Goddard, Lucy Larcom, and Harriet Hanson Robinson, who wrote essays on the importance of the right to freely assemble and organize, and would go on to inform the worker’s movement as well as the suffrage movement in America and the world over.

With the comfort of hindsight, it is easy to say that while the slavery of the Antebellum South produced the essential factor of production, cotton; it was the wage slavery of the North that processed the raw cotton into cloth, thus marking the beginning of the industrial epoch in America. The development of worker consciousness during this age, built on the ideas of toiling women workers, would directly inform the upheaval to come merely decades later.

Another epoch: The critical role of women in the Haymarket incident

“We are the slaves of slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Whenever wages are to be reduced the capitalist class uses women to reduce them, and if there is anything you men should do in the future it is to organize the women.”

Lucy Parsons, addressing 200 male delegates of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1905

Notions of work are often straitjacketed into a narrow, masculine vision in popular culture, discourse, and even iconography. Activism suffers the same fate, often entirely erasing the critical role women have played in the global workers’ movement. The fallout of the Haymarket incident, where workers gathered in Haymarket Square to fight for the 8-hour workday and the right to freely associate and organize, saw newspapers quick to code the uprising as a purely male affair, warning Americans of “bearded” Germans and Bohemians seeking to change the American way of life. In the tinderbox of working-class Chicago of the late 1800s, this was, at best, a gross instance of reductionism.

While 1848, often dubbed ‘the year of revolutions’, saw many politically conscious Germans seeking refuge away from their assortment of feudal states that comprised the Germanic regions of Europe, America too had the early experience of the industrial mode of life with pockets of industrial activity like the Lowell mills, as well as the blowback of the Civil War leaving an army of the disaffected — as all wars do. Such characterizations also failed to take into account the presence of singular forces like part African, part Native, and part Mexican-American activist Lucy Parsons, whose fiery speeches the Chicago police found to be “more dangerous than a thousand rioters”. It also doesn’t shed light on the unlikely camaraderies forged during this era, such as one between Lucy and Lizzie Holmes, a resolutely Midwestern seamstress who was the daughter of a rural Iowa family of radicals and free thinkers. Lizzie lived in the working-class neighborhoods of Chicago, going on walks with Lucy where she informed her of the deplorable working conditions on the shop floor.

It must be remembered that the Haymarket incident was merely a small part of a mosaic of a longer, protracted struggle for what many people in the world now consider basic worker rights. Workers were asked to assemble at Haymarket square to protest against the police excesses that saw the death of one worker the previous day. The numbers were far lower than anticipated, with only 2000 workers showing up, though both Lucy and Lizzie were part of the day’s proceedings and had led a demonstration of seamstresses earlier. The police were keen on arresting Lizzie for “inciting” the mob to drop a bomb on the police but dropped the charges on realizing that it might be hard to convict a woman. Lucy’s husband Albert was not so lucky and was convicted to death by hanging on November 11th. Both Lucy and Lizzie went on to be lifelong activists, with Lucy still addressing rallies when she was “Eighty-five, bent and nearly blind, as poor as the day she arrived there more than a half-century earlier” on the 50th anniversary of her husband’s hanging.

Many other women participated towards the goals espoused by the workers in Chicago in the 19th century. Some of them were activists, some of them were workers and unionists, and countless women contributed by cooking meals, raising children, and keeping families together. In the present, where data intelligence takes primacy over cotton in the digital economy, such historical silences and neglect come to take a more pernicious form for women who have to contend with a world that is simply not algorithmically accommodative of them. On May day, it is crucial to remember that these obscured histories must one day find their own historians in order to stem the tide.

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