When Amanda Fox arrived in Lowell, Massachusetts, sometime in the 1840s, she joined a female workforce in what was then the center of the American textile industry. But she didn’t work in the factories as one of the famed “mill girls.” She was a boarding-house keeper, one of dozens of women whose domestic work—performed on an industrial scale—helped make Lowell a “model” industrial city.
About twenty years before Fox arrived, a conglomerate of textile corporations took over farm settlements and tribal territory along the Merrimack River northwest of Boston to build a city of large mills. The mills employed hundreds of young women who worked as weavers and spinners and bobbin girls (collectively referred to as “operatives”). While the workforce changed over decades, the original corporations operated in Lowell for roughly a century before migrating to the South in the 1920s and 1930s. The enormous concentration of workers who came to Lowell without their families required a unique system of housing accommodations. Boarding houses, run by an older generation of women, offered the answer.
As historian Wendy Gamber shows, boarding houses in nineteenth-century New England weren’t new—in fact, a large portion of the population lived in them—but the system at Lowell was a relatively novel take on the idea. Since there was essentially no housing stock at the time, boarding houses were built into the design of the city and were owned by the corporations where their tenants toiled. These neat rows of brick townhomes were situated close enough to the mills for the workers to be able to march down for their meals and be back at work within a thirty-minute window. The houses also provided a measure of protection for the young women away from home and assumed to be in danger of succumbing to urban corruption. The primary responsibility of the keeper was to support the factory work schedule (typically a twelve-to-fourteen-hour day) by providing the operatives with meals during their breaks and making sure all residents were in by a ten o’clock curfew. They did the regular washing of bed and kitchen linens and kept the house in order.
Often their duties extended far beyond that, however. The Hamilton Manufacturing Company’s regulations for keepers, for example, show that they were also expected to manage the conduct of their residents, report any misbehavior or lapses in church attendance, and maintain the yards and sidewalks of their houses.
Unlike the factory operatives, the keepers weren’t employees of the corporations; in fact, their relationship with the corporations was somewhat convoluted. While the corporations owned the houses, the keepers had to buy all furnishings. And the corporations didn’t pay keepers wages; rather, they deducted rent from the operatives’ wages and gave that over to the keepers.
Lowell was something of a point of fascination in its heyday. Not only did it offer the novelty of throngs of young women at work but administrators at the corporations organized a vast array of evening lectures and cultural activities meant to educate and entertain the women in their leisure time. Famous writers like Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe all came to see the women who tended their looms by day and studiously took notes at lectures in the evening. The poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier worked in Lowell himself for a time as editor of the Middlesex Standard and wrote his impressions of the city in his 1845 The Stranger in Lowell. Inevitably, the mill girls got most of the attention in these accounts. And since Lowell has become a historic site in its own right, historians have mostly echoed the fascinations of Lowell’s contemporary visitors. Scholars have addressed mill girls’ fashions, their literary magazine The Lowell Offering, their relationship to nature, and their relationship to slavery, among other subjects. At the same time, archival collections have meticulously preserved their letters, diaries, and other ephemera for researchers to explore. At Lowell National Historical Park, the mill girl is the de facto mascot.
It’s not that the boarding houses were ignored in the flurry of attention. Both contemporary visitors and historians typically mention something of the boarding-house system. In his American Notes, Dickens comments, with some surprise, that most boarding houses featured middle-class accoutrements such as pianos and that the mill owners were careful not to allow any keepers “whose characters have not undergone the most searching and thorough inquiry.” Henry Miles, superintendent of the Lowell Mills, reiterates this, writing in 1845 that “as to the character of [the] boarding-house keepers themselves, on no point is the superintendent more particular than on this.” And of course, the keepers featured in many of the stories of factory life that appeared in The Lowell Offering, though they tended to be background characters with whom new arrivals met to secure a room and a job in the corporation.
In historical accounts, the boarding houses are significant insofar as they served a purpose for the mill girls. Thomas Dublin writes, for instance, that boarding houses were “the center for social life of operatives…they ate meals, rested, talked, sewed, wrote letters and read books and magazines.” He also notes the importance of the boarding houses as a site of labor organization for strikes in 1834 and 1836. Dublin’s sole mention of the keeper, however, comes in a quote from Henry Miles that suggests her role in managing the moral conduct of residents. Another Lowell historian, Mary C. Beaudry, has written quite a bit on boarding houses, though her focus is primarily on archaeological evidence and what it reveals about the housing system’s relationship to principles of corporate paternalism or how keepers’ food buying and storage habits affected the health of the factory workers.
More to Explore
Pullman Women at Work: From Gilded Age to Atomic Age
Since boarding houses feature frequently in accounts chiefly interested in documenting the lives of the mill girls, we tend to think we know almost as much about the keepers as we do about operatives. But when you start to look for specifics, it becomes clear that the former are almost absent from the historical record. There are no letters or daily journals or account books that might offer a first-person perspective of the keeper experience. We can only piece together what their lives might have been like based on what others have said about them.
Take Amanda Fox. Most of what we know about her comes from public records as well as Beaudry’s research into the Boott Mills—and that information is largely tangential to her experience as a keeper. We know she was born in nearby Dracut, apparently the only child to her parents, Amasa and Lois Peabody. She married Joseph Fox in 1831 and had three children, all of whom she outlived. Shortly after Joseph’s death in 1843, she shows up in the Lowell Directory, and she runs a boarding house for the Boott Mills for more than thirty years. Some of the details we can glean of her life beg important questions. Beaudry lists the inhabitants of each house and shows that Fox had a few residents closer to her own age who stayed far longer than the handful of years factory operatives typically spent at the mills. What was her relationship with these women? What could a first-person document from Fox tell us about the relationships between a keeper and her residents more broadly?
Fox was in Lowell during the only documented time of unrest among the keepers in 1845, when the corporations lowered the amount keepers got from operatives’ wages. The decrease made it difficult to meet expenses, and the keepers seemed to have launched an organized response. The Voice of Industry, a pro-labor newspaper published in Lowell, reported on an “exciting meeting” at City Hall to discuss the matter. Fox may have been there; none of the women who spoke up at the meeting were identified. Certainly, Fox and the other keepers would have written letters about the situation. The article also indicates that there were handbills posted around the city in advance of the meeting to publicize it. What could these kinds of artifacts tell us about how the keepers saw themselves as a labor force?
We get a little more insight from a letterbook, currently held in the collections at the Center for Lowell History, that belonged to J. G. Marshall, the paymaster for the Boott Mills in the late nineteenth century. Many of the letters to the keepers are short messages warning about a resident who needed to be removed from her house because she’d taken a job with a different corporation or asking a keeper to come to his office with no indication of why. We see in these letters the power dynamics between the corporations and the keepers. While the keepers essentially ran their own businesses and owned all the furniture and other items in the houses, the corporations owned the buildings themselves and could order keepers out at any time. A letter addressed to a Mrs. R. W. Davis informs her that the corporation is moving to convert some boarding houses to “private tenements,” and that hers will be given to a “Mrs. Bixby.” Mrs. Davis will need to move out by the first of April. Several other letters repeat the request, and one indicates that a keeper asked for a later move-out date. She was denied.
S. Lizzie Kittredge received multiple letters. In one, dated August 12, 1889, Marshall accuses Kittredge of allowing a former operative to stay in her house for six months after she left her employment at the Boott Mills. It appears this wasn’t the first time Kittredge had violated this rule, because Marshall warns that “any further violation of these rules will cause you to forfeit your tenement.” Kittredge received two more letters, dated the next day and including the names of other boarders staying with her against the corporation’s rules.
The Kittredge house seems to have been a rowdy place. In a different letter, Marshall asks Kittredge to “dismiss Frank Leonard from [her] house and furnish no further meals to him, after having used language in the street in front of your premises unbecoming a gentleman.” Another from March 1891, this time sent to Kittredge’s husband, indicates “frequent complaints have come…lately about the noise & disturbance at your house nights” and that “no notice or report has been made” to the counting house, as keepers were apparently instructed to do. Marshall repeated his threat to take the house away, and consequently Mrs. Kittredge’s position as keeper, if the “cases of drunkenness and disturbances” continue. We don’t know how Kittredge responded to these letters or how much longer she remained a keeper. At least by 1910, census records show her living with her husband and their son’s family in Arlington, Massachusetts.
While we may not have primary sources that give us direct access to the keepers’ lives, reading through the sources that orbit around them reveals how much their work wasn’t merely adjacent to the industrial system but integral to it. If the mill girls were doing what had been the domestic work of weaving at an industrial scale, so too were the keepers who cooked and cleaned for a house of up to forty residents, much larger than any family. And just like the mill girls, they found that their place in Lowell gave them a rare kind of independence and economic opportunity while also raising social concerns about their moral character. The industrialization of their work gets overlooked now perhaps because it was overlooked in their own time, but considering them as a parallel workforce in the history of labor at Lowell offers new insights into the history of the Industrial Revolution writ large.
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
.jpg){kind=link}