Nineteenth-century illustration of two female textile mill workers at a loom. (Image: Lowell National Historical Park.)
In 1836 the mill girls turned out—went on strike—to protest a cut in wages without any reduction in the 12-hour days they worked and the increase in the number of machines they tended in noisy, humid, lint-filled rooms. They soon returned to work, faring no better than a previous strike two years before. But these daughters of New England would fight on, lobbying into the 1840s for a ten-hour day even though they lacked the vote. Inheritors of the American Revolution, they understood their rights. As citizens and wage laborers, they were in a position to publicly advocate, something denied the enslaved that produced the cotton they wove into cloth.
Recruitment poster for textile mill workers. (Image: Lowell National Historical Park.)
Now, acting under the auspices of Donald Trump’s Executive Order 3431, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” the Department of the Interior has targeted the histories of waged workers alongside the histories of other groups that do not, in the administration’s narrow view, speak to America’s triumphant story of progress.
At the Lowell National Historical Park, as early as the end of Trump’s first term, the activism of the early mill girls in Lowell’s story disappeared with the removal of short films mentioning their strikes. The video introduction to the park, “Lowell: The Continuing Revolution,” still appears online but is no longer shown in the visitor’s center. This piece not only chronicled the mill girls’ collective action but celebrated the city’s vibrant immigrant communities and discussed the pollution of rivers from industrial waste.
The video “And that’s how we did it in the mill,” based on oral histories that documented the experiences and resilience of immigrant women who replaced the farm girls when the manufacturers sought a cheaper and more precarious workforce, is also no longer available through NPS channels. This video featured interviews with women from Ireland, Greece, Poland, and elsewhere who began their work in the textile factories as child laborers in the 1930s and 1940s and stayed on the job until the mills, which began moving their operations to the South decades before, finally closed in the 1950s. We learn through their own telling that to make ends meet some became wage-earning mothers, bringing their babies to a child-minder before dawn. Viewers hear that the hours worked in the factories could be as long as those worked in the fields in their countries of origin, but in newly arduous ways without the chance to be outside. The workers featured in the video discuss how they could not get ahead, even if their jobs made it possible to have food on the table and clothes on their backs.