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 power. Immigration from foreign countries was still slight, and the great majority of native men were successfully employed in agriculture. So the transition of women from home to factory began immediately with the establishment of the factory system.

The earliest available statistics on this subject may be found in a report on cotton manufacture in the United States, published in 1816. This report shows us that the cotton mills at that time employed only 10,000 men, against 66,000 women and female children. In 1831 it was shown that in the garment factories of Boston, out of 17,000 employees, more than 13,000 were women, and in Lowell alone 32 cotton mills employed 5,685 women and only 862 men. The first complete cotton mill at Waltham employed 138 weavers, all of them women, and three young girls whose names have been remembered—Sallie Winters, Mary Healy and Hannah Borden—were the first persons to operate power looms in Fall River. In fact, weaving was regarded as being within the province of women to such an extent that the first men weavers were viewed with amusement and were subjected to ridicule as men performing woman's work. The hue and cry raised during the early days of the woman movement that women were invading occupations traditionally belonging to men, appears ridiculous when we consider how many occupations men have invaded that traditionally belonged to women. The male spinner and weaver were followed by the male cook and baker, the male maker of pickles, jams and preserves, the male soap and candle maker, the male dress-maker and milliner even. As I have already stated, it was the industrial transformation that obliterated the former distinctions between man's work and woman's work. Neither men nor women were to blame for invading each other's occupations, but the inexorable laws of industrial development.

But let us return to the early days of the factories and to the early women workers! Three young girls, as we have seen, operated the first power looms in Fall River, one of the foremost factory towns of present-day