together and where a place of business was maintained for the purchase of the raw material and for the sale of the finished product. Most of the spinners and weavers were still employed at home and only called at the "manufactory" to get the cotton and deliver the yarn, or to get the yarn and deliver the cloth, as the case might be. It seems perfectly natural, it does not surprise us in the least, that the persons so employed were women. We have seen that all through the colonial period women who were able to spin more yarn or weave more cloth than their household needs required, sold or bartered their products. So what was more natural than that women should now sell their products to the "manufactories" that gave a new impetus to their skill? The advertisement, "weaving given out," that frequently appeared in newspapers of that period, caused no unfavorable comment; on the contrary. The early manufacturers were praised for giving employment to poor women—unfortunately also to children—who would otherwise have been a burden to the community. Societies for encouraging manufactures were formed, and spinning schools were established for the purpose of teaching women and children of poor families to become self-supporting and to develop the industries of the country. In 1787 it was reported that the "Pennsylvania Society for the Encouragement of Manufactures" employed from two to three hundred women at spinning linen yarn, and there were other similar companies in New York and in New England. Some of these early factories employed a number of women on the premises, but they still were the exceptions. The rule was that the women worked for the manufacturers without leaving their own homes. So woman was becoming a social producer, even while she still worked at home, by the aid of her old, manual tools.
Another invention, only second in importance to Watt's steam engine, marks the rise of the true factory system in America: the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Prior to the Revolutionary War, tobacco, rice and indigo had been the chief agricultural products of our South. Cotton was grown only in small quantities, mainly as a home product for home consumption. Women gathered it when ripe, plucked the seeds from the fiber, and prepared it for
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