Women of the Mills

Blog Post # 2: Attitudes Towards Women:

Up until the first Industrial Revolution, attitudes towards women had always been the same. Generations upon generations passed down a then commonly known yet utterly false belief that women were second-class citizens. They were thought to be useless outside of the kitchen, and many had this idea that their main purpose was to reproduce. But, the Industrial Revolution offered opportunity for women to change those attitudes. Through the encouragement for women to join the workforce they were given a voice, and given a chance to be independent from men. Although the Industrial Revolution didn't make any huge improvements to the way they were treated, it was a starting point for many women's rights activists, and foundation of the women's rights movement.

As mill-work was the first time women were actually encouraged to join the workforce, of course many jumped at the opportunity. But there was a price to pay for this new treatment. Although women working was a sign that society had finally started to consider them as equal, it also left a lot of opportunity for men to treat them as harshly as they had before. They knew that women would put up with bad treatment because of their new dependence on their jobs to support themselves. With this knowledge, they provided little pay and unfit working and living conditions for the women, knowing they would put up with it because they needed jobs.

There were benefits to mill work too, but they are sparse compared to the cons of working in a mill.
Even though mill work received little pay, it still was a way for a woman to provide money for herself and family. Learning the trade of millworker was also beneficial for women later on in life because it gave them a way to make money as a seamstress and be independent if they never married and needed to provide for themselves.

The treatment women received in the mills really just emphasized that although men and society still thought of them as lower, they were no longer considered to be as completely useless as they had
previously been. Through the Industrial Revolution women found that because they were a part of the workforce they had a voice, and they started to actually stand up for themselves. When their pay was cut they protested and went to strike; standing up for themselves and their rights as citizens. These protests and strikes started the idea that women weren't going to put up with unfair treatment the way they always had, and events like that from the Lowell Experiment were the foundation for the women's rights movement.

My Experiences as a Curator and Spectator

This past week, I have been working on a mock museum curation project about the Industrial Revolution with my group. Our particular exhibit focused around the progression of the weaving industry and factories throughout the revolution. Things started simple with the basic cottager businesses — which consisted of someone weaving at their house to use for profit— and evolved into efficient textile mills and factories which mass-produced weaved products and eventually caused the cottagers to go out of business.

For this project, we had to do many things to prepare before our exhibit would be displayed, and one of the most important things for us to do was analyze our sources. As part of our analysis, we all worked together to figure out what each source intended to show viewers and what authors of each source wanted the audience to take away from their work. This process took the longest, but was the most important part of the project. Analysis is such an important part of the curation process because, to be a curator, you need to know what you're presenting to others. If you don't know exactly what each piece in your exhibit is, how can you even make a claim that the pieces of work featured are important enough to display? Through our analysis we made sure we all understood the significance of each piece, and that really helped us with the creation of the exhibit as a whole.

Our exhibit is called, "Spinning into the Future; A Woven Destiny", and it included six pieces/ sources total. We came up with our title after our analysis, because through our analyzing we realized that each piece had to do with the evolution of the weaving industry. The sources were about Cottagers, the effect weaving factories had on Cottagers, John Almonds Hand Loom, the basic loom, and textile mills. The layout of our pieces is important because it shows the progression of the weaving industry from simple Cottagers to highly functioning mills.

The thing I most want people to take away from our exhibit is the idea that everything had to do with progress in the Industrial Revolution, and I hope that our layout helps contribute to that idea, along with the placards.

Here is a picture of our exhibit:

The four exhibits I got to observe were all very well done, and I was able to extract valuable information about the Industrial Revolution from each one.

The first exhibit I saw, "Hot Stuff: How the Steam Engine Fired Up the Industrial Revolution" explored the idea of steam engines and their impact on transportation. From the placards, I was able to gather that over time steam engines and canals became the main method of transportation, and because they were so advanced and foreign to people, many were skeptical of them. There were two poems included in the project, both having to do with new transportation, and those really helped me grasp just how revolutionary the steam engine was for people. Below, I have included a picture of a diagram of how a steam engine works. I found it really interesting and I never would have known this was the way a steam engine worked had it not been included in the project.

The second exhibit I observed was, “All Work, No Play; A Look at Child Labor during the Industrial Revolution”. The curators did a great job of organizing their project in an effective and creative way, making it easy for observers to obtain the information about child labor during the Industrial Revolution. I had always known that working conditions for children were terrible, but I had no idea that they would go so far as to strap children in leather harnesses and force them to pull things like mules.(See picture below) The group did a great job providing examples of child labor, such as how children were forced to work on unsafe machines because they were small and able to fit on top of things easily. I also really liked how they included information on the Factory Act of 1833 which was a document that prevented young kids from working in dangerous factories, and made it illegal for children to work for more than 12 hours a day and 69 hours a week.

"Cotton or Freedom? You decide:" provided great insight into how the cotton industry worked and how slaves were affected. The curators gave a great explanation of how slavery played a part in the Industrial Revolution, and I found out that the entire concept was able to come full circle; slavery produced cotton, cotton produced money, money produced factories, and factories produced slavery, which is what it started with. There was a chart that showed the increase in slave population which I found to be a really helpful and great addition because it gave me a way to physically see how as the slave population grew. (See picture below)

The final exhibit I visited was "The Dark Side of the Industrial Revolution", and it really opened my eyes. It explored the positive and negative effects of the industrial revolution, focusing on how as the revolution grew, so did the levels of pollution. While it was great that new inventions were made and production was increasing, so was pollution, and soon enough, English cities were covered with thick black smoke. There was one picture I included below because I thought it really emphasized the idea of pollution, and with the gray sky it gives me a good idea of just how bad it was.

I really enjoyed this process of curating and spectating. Through looking through other group's projects, I saw that there were a lot of ideas other groups used that we had used in our exhibit, while there were also a lot of cool methods of organization I wished we had used in ours. Over all, I was really impressed with all of the exhibits and I feel I've learned a great deal about the industrial revolution from the walk through and also through the work I did with my group to create our own exhibit.