Mill Dbq

Words: 675
Pages: 3

At the turn of the 19th century, manufacturing processes and new machines were taking the United States by storm. During the late 1700s, many Americans moved into cities and urban areas, moving from their farms. By the 1820s, mills were a prominent part of the Northeast economy, but there weren’t enough men to work the jobs. Factory owners decides to employ the help of young women eager to break the norm of a two sphere world. Though they may have thought they were making progress, working in the mills was social regression for the mill girls because of brutal working conditions and because they had no life outside the mill.

The mill girls were exposed to many barbaric working conditions while working at the mills, including many dangers,
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In the early 1800s, Emily Nutter was a mill girl who moved from her family farm to the Lowell Mills. She compared her life on the farm compared to life in the mill. In the T chart she shows that in the mill, she only had 1 hour of free time every day, and the rest was spent sleeping, eating, or working (Document D). This shows how restricting the mill was on the social lives of mill girls. Not only did they get only one hour of free time, but the mill girls rarely spent this time out of the boarding houses. Having no time to have a social life is not social progress for the mill girls, and when they had free time, it too was restricted. Furthermore, though most of the women spent their one hour of free time in the apartments provided by the mill, they were not allowed to have guests (Document E). The women could have no contact with the outside world, except for the one hour they had per day minus the time it took them to travel to and from their destination. Finally, the mill girls had to work so much that they got very little sleep. According to Emily Nutter, the mill girls woke up at 4:00 a.m. every morning and from there straight to work. Mill work was not progress for women because getting very little sleep can be very dangerous for people’s health, especially for young people. All in all, because of unsafe and ruthless work conditions and time consuming