Waterbury evening Democrat., 1889-01-23
YANKEE MILL GIRLa
The Kind of Young Women Who Watched
 the Looms Forty Years Ago.

the Looms Forty Years Ago.
 When, at the beginning of the century, tho cotton business arose 1t afforded the girls of New England the first opportunity to find occupation outside their homes sufficiently important to affect the destiny of any large number of them. They rushed into the new opening not dreaming that they were pre- sipitatiHg their sex into the maelstrom of modern industry, or that they were merely the advance guard of great army of female workers, whose disadvantageous attitude towards economic forces is one of the most fruitful sources of suffering in our social body.
 It was not the stupid girl who in that early day broke away from the monotony of farm life, or the still worse helplessness of exist ence with parents too poor to be farmers. It was the bright, eager young women who went to the mills to earn money and free themselves from the semi-servitude engen- dered by dependence on relatives. The story has often been told of the Lowell factory girls who published paper, and in time settled to no meaner avocation than that of author or social reformer.
 There are legends also of generation of Yankee mill girls who sent to Preston S. Brooks the suggestive tribute of thirty pieces of silver, after his assault upon Charles Sum- her. But the careers concerning which these stories are related belong to g late period In the history of the Americans connection with the manual part of cotton manufacture, and some of them were exceptionally striking. Still, such incidents indicate something which it is important to understand, and that is that the nice girls of New England for many years became miA operatives. Of course, do not mean that such labor was over aristocratic, but that it passed certain social sanction which it does not now com- mand. A consideration of the average for tunes of the native help leads to the same conclusion.
 The mill girl had worldly superiors then as the dressmaker, the typewriter, the tele- graph operator, the common school teacher, has now, but she was from exactly the samo stock and was herself just the same sort of girl as are the ones who now follow these diff ferent vacations She maintained her dig nifty while in the mill, and if she left it before she grew old it was because she wanted to leave it-usually because some man wisely wanted to marry her. Her marriage was generally sensible, and sometimes brilliant In studying the traditions of the whole period, one finds occasional hints of that romance which attaches to all history, as amid tho homely details one catches now and then a glimpse of ideal beauty, and comes upon the trace of some girl whose loveliness attracted d Iale Qu1te Q1uerenG rom that or her village comrades. It is happily due to the purity of New England ethics that this fate Is more often found to be joyful than sad.
 suppose it would be impossible to obtain statistics which would tell us much either of the life of the Americans who were opera tives or of the after fate of their descendants But every person who has been long familiar with the native residents in the older manu- featuring towns Is necessarily acquainted with many family histories, which reveal the essential features of that former time, when factories were small and owners and workers were often not only neighbors but friends They were all subjected to the ancient New England village tradition of substantial equality. They were of one blood, they held to one religion, and called each other very generally by their Christian names. 'Of that early time," writes a lady now more than so years old, "Ihave many reconections, when the wife of MT. S-me the wives of overseers, not only in her church work or at prayer meetings, but in social equality."- Atlantic Monthly.