Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - From Fireside to Factory (c. 1916).djvu/30

 The story of one of these, Hannah Borden, has been recorded by several contemporary writers. I will briefly repeat it here because it is characteristic of the beginnings of factory labor and of the pioneer factory women. Hannah Borden was born in that period of transition when the first "manufactories" were being established, but when industry was still, in the main, a domestic function. Hannah's parental home was still equipped with those ancient household necessities, a spinning-wheel and a hand-loom, and Hannah learned to operate them at an age at which modern little girls begin to learn their three R's. When she was eight years old she had woven her first yard of cloth on the hand-loom, and by the time she was twelve she was an accomplished weaver. Yet this child worker did not come from the working class. There was no working class in the modern sense before the establishment of the factory system. Hannah's father was, in fact, a well-to-do man, who owned stock in one of the early "manufactories" in his native town, Fall River. When the new inventions began to transform the processes of manufacture, this particular mill at once introduced power-looms, and the stockholder, Mr. Borden, remembering his daughter's skill at weaving, procured a place for Hannah in the mill. So this little pioneer wage-worker, at the age of fourteen, left her old hand-loom, that had become useless, and went to operate the first power-loom in the "manufactory," together with Mary Healy and Sallie Winters. Hannah worked hard and long. Her working day was longer than that of any modern factory worker. She began at sunrise, taking only half an hour for breakfast and another half hour for lunch, and kept on working until seven or half past seven in the evening, weaving by candle light during the winter months. Her wages were higher than the wages of the hired woman had been under the domestic system. While the latter's wage had been from two to three dollars a month and board, Hannah earned from $2.75 to $3.25 a week. Though Hannah's hours seem outrageously long and her wages seem outrageously low, measured by modern standards, it must be observed that Hannah and her contemporaries had some striking advantages over modern factory girls. There was no speeding system in Hannah's day. The