During the next few years many women’s strikes are recorded among cotton operatives, but most of them, though conducted with spirit and intelligence, seemed to have ended none too happily for the workers.  It is nevertheless probable that the possibility that these rebellious ones might strike often acted as a check upon the cotton lords and their mill managers.  Indeed the strikes at Lowell, Massachusetts, of 1834 and 1836 involved so large a number of operatives (up to 2,500 girls at one time), and these were so brave and daring in their public demands for the right of personal liberty and just treatment that the entire press of the country gave publicity to the matter, although the orthodox newspapers were mostly shocked at the “wicked misrepresentations” of the ringleaders in this industrial rebellion.

The 1836 strike at the Lowell mills throws a curious light upon the habits of those days.  Something analogous to the “living-in” system was in force.  In 1825 when the Lowell mills were first opened, the companies who owned the mills provided boarding-houses for their girl operatives, and the boarding-house keepers had in their lease to agree to charge them not more than $1.25 per week. (Their wages are said to have rarely exceeded $2.50 per week.) But in these thirteen years the cost of living had risen, and at this rate for board the boarding-house keepers could no longer make ends meet, and many were ruined.  The mill-owners, seeing what desperate plight these women were in, agreed to deduct from the weekly rent a sum equivalent to twelve cents per boarder, and they also authorized the housekeepers to charge each girl twelve cents more.  This raised the total income of the housekeepers to practically one dollar and fifty cents per head.  As there was no talk of raising wages in proportion, this arrangement was equivalent to a cut of twelve cents per week and the girls rebelled and went out on strike to the number of twenty-five hundred.  In all probability, however, it was not only the enforced lessening of their wages, but some of the many irritating conditions as well that always attend any plan of living-in, whether the employe be a mill girl, a department-store clerk or a domestic servant, that goaded the girls on, for we hear of “dictation not only as to what they shall eat and drink and wherewithal they shall be clothed, but when they shall eat, drink and sleep.”

The strikers paraded through the streets of Lowell, singing,

  Oh, isn’t it a pity that such a pretty girl as I
  Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die? 
  Oh!  I cannot be a slave,
  For I’m so fond of liberty
  That I cannot be a slave.

The girls appealed to the memories, still green, of the War of Independence.

“As our fathers resisted unto blood the lordly avarice of the British ministry, so we, their daughters, never will wear the yoke which has been prepared for us.”