ned, 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."

With this and many similar appeals they heartened one another. But
before the close of October, 1836, the strike was broken and the
girls were back at work on the employers' terms. Still an echo of the
struggle is heard in the following month at the Annual Convention
of the National Trades Union, where the Committee on Female Labor
recommended that "they [the women operatives] should immediately adopt
energetic measures, in the construction of societies to support each
other."

Almost every difficulty that the working-woman has to face today had
its an