Yet workers she interviews tell her you soon get used to it. The other drawback is the times the machinery malfunctions, causing the line to be shut down until the problem is corrected and the botched job restored to normal. There's no pay during these frequent lapses in production. When the four to six machines each is responsible for are running smoothly the women on the looms can sit down, but there's too much noise for conversation. The next worker, who may be French-Canadian, Irish, Polish, Greek, Armenian, or Russian, quite likely will not speak your language anyway.
Wages depend on the textiles being produced.
Impossibly dire as all this sounds to us, and it would get worse before it improved, mill jobs had been a liberating force for women, especially in the early days of the mills. Women were sought because of their manual dexterity and they flocked to the mill towns, many seeking an excape from the stiffling insularity of backcountry farms. They were housed in quite neat, sanitary, and safe dormitories and often exposed to educational lectures. Domestic work paid women a quarter of a man's wages. In the factories and mills they might earn up to half.