Harriet Robinson Advantages And Disadvantages

Harriet Robinson worked in the Lowell mills from 1834 to 1848, starting at the age of 10. Who than became an active abolitionist and was involved in the women’s rights movement. She wrote this autobiography, Loom and Spindle: Or, Life Among the Early Mill Girls, 1898, when she was 73 years old with the intention to entertain her readers but also to compare the political issues of the 1890s.
During the 1820s, Francis Cabot Lowell developed a new system for organizing textile factories in Massachusetts, where towns like Lowell were built around the textile factories. Factories recruited women and teenage girls to live in the town and work at the factories, as a way to guarantee that they would be safe. These “Lowell girls” were paid wages that
In order overcome this prejudice women were offered high wages so that they might be induced to become mill-girls. The laws that were related to women were that, a husband could claim his wife wherever he found her, and also her children. Woman also had no property rights and were not allowed to spend her own or use other people’s money.
There were many advantages and disadvantages to the Lowell System according to Robinson such as that doffers were not being forced for labor, they were treated with respect, and they were able to get promoted as they got older. The disadvantages would be that they had very limited rights as women, they had no say in a marital decision, and were not allowed to spend
Robinson describes how a widow is able to be left without the “share of her husband’s property” and a father could also write out “his will without reference to his daughter’s share of the inheritance” (Robinson, Loom and Spindle 7). Men could also just claim women as their wife “wherever he found her, and also the children she was trying to shield from his influence” which does not give a woman a say if they do want to get married to the man, which then led to them “depriving his wife of all her wages, month after month,” in other words they could get married and the women just not get payed for the work that they do because the man would just take it for himself (Robinson, Loom and Spindle 7). Lastly, society considered women as a “ward, an appendage, a relict” so if a woman did not choose to marry or become a widow after separating or losing her husband “she had no choice but to enter one of the few employments that were open to her, or to become a burden on the charity of some relative” (Robinson, Loom and Spindle 8). In the end women were often unwelcome to society, and lead joyless unsatisfied lives, but the cotton-factory was great for women, because they were able to earn money, and are able to spend for themselves and could satisfy their desires without