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Francis Cabot Lowell created the Boston Manufacturing Company in 1813. The following year, he sold $1,000 shares of stock to raise money for his business - an early example of a public stock offering. In 1814, his company built their first mill next to the Charles River in Waltham, Massachusetts. The Waltham mill was the first textile mill in the United States to produce cloth from raw cotton in one location. Lowell died three years after building this mill, and in the 1820s his partners named their mill town on the Merrimack River Lowell, Massachusetts in his honor.the

The mill owners in Lowell started a new trend called the Lowell System in which they hired women to work in the mills. Lowell mill girls were generally young, single, and from New England farm towns. The use of women in the factories was seen as an “innovative solution”. The women were paid less then men but were given benefits. The women normally signed on to work for about a year (but some worked longer) and got paid monthly. Regulations by the companies included the women living together in boarding houses, attending Church, as well as maintain curfew and proper behavior. The women produced their own literary magazine entitled the Lowell Offering which was filled with letters, stories, and essays ^[1].

Later on the women became unhappy with their working conditions and started voicing out about mill work. On December of 1844, when five women, including Sarah Bagley, met to fight for a ten hour work day, the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association was born. The union grew in three months to 600 members in the Lowell community. Petition after petition went out to the community and other mills; the Ten Hours Movement was into full effect. In 1852 the first state law limiting women's working day to ten hours passed in Ohio. This lead to many more movements including support for women’s suffrage, equal pay for women, and strikes. The Lowell mill girls helped bring about a movement which brought about labor laws that still affect us today ^[2].

1. ^ The Illinois Labor History Society, “Factory Rules from the Handbook to Lowell, 1848” <http://www.kentlaw.edu/ilhs/lowell.html> [15 February 2007]
2. ^ Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads, (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949)