that Lowell described by Whittier as "the wonderful city of spindles and looms and thousands of factory folk," and to whose pioneer women workers the same poet refers as "priestesses of the divinity of labor." Lowell of 1840 was very different from the Lowell of to-day. The streets were planted with trees. Its small houses were surrounded by gardens. Its factories were smaller, less somber-looking buildings than the modern mills and were sometimes adorned with flowers that the working girls themselves raised in boxes before the windows. But far more different than the city itself was the early class of operatives that labored there, the pioneer working girls who made Lowell famous. The modern factory town harbors a heterogenous population, brought together from many lands and many climes. But the early mill girls were all American, and most of them were country-bred, of healthy, vigorous New England stock. The majority of these girls were brought into the factory town, not by absolute need, but rather by the call of that larger opportunity that the mills offered. For although the doors of the factory were shut upon them for twelve hours each day, still those doors led to economic independence and to a broader, richer life than women had ever known. Therefore the finest kind of girls, girls endowed with that spirit of enterprise and self-reliance that marked their pioneer forefathers, were the first to enter the mills. Among them were daughters of well-to-do farmers, daughters of doctors and lawyers and clergymen, even. The reason why so many girls of culture and refinement were found among the early mill workers is that so few other employments were open to women. If a girl did not wish to become a domestic servant, there was practically only one other alternative beside factory labor—teaching. But this still was such a neglected profession and was so wretchedly paid that it could not be considered a means of self-support at all.
Varied and touching were the reasons given by many of the early mill girls for their going to work. Some wished to use their earnings for lifting a mortgage from the home they loved; others to lighten the burden of aged parents; others still to send ambitious young brothers through college, and not a few to satisfy their own cravings for a higher education. To win and to hold such a class of
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