Eliza Jane Cate was an unmarried woman who worked in the Lowell mills for several years and contributed a great number of moralistic essays to the New England Offering during the late 1840’s. Although Cates essays in the Offering were fictional, Cate presented realistic morals and views based on her experiences in the Lowell factories. She begins her essay “Duties and Rights of Mill Girls” with...
The machine once promised humanity greatness—or so the 19th-century train of thought went. “There is nothing in the physical order of things,” wrote Michel Chevalier, “of which our race has a better right to boast, than the mechanical inventions, by means of which man holds in check the irregular vigour, or brings forth the hidden energies, of nature. By the aid of mechanical contrivances,...
He said he wasn’t going to compare the textile factories at Lowell, Massachusetts, to the ones in his home country of England, but how could he not? After all, Charles Dickens would make it his life’s work to critique the deplorable working conditions that his fellow countrymen had to suffer through on a daily basis. “The contrast would be a strong one,” Dickens wrote in comparing Lowell to...