edded to the best among the other
sex. No Lowell factory could turn out a larger or more interesting army
of young and virtuous girls than some of the establishments here in
which the sewing-machine is driven by steam.

Then, as regards numbers, this city has a female manufacturing
population to which that of the largest manufacturing towns in New
England can bear no comparison. To particularize.

The book-binderies reckon three thousand in their various
establishments, who fold and sew the sheets, and work the
ruling-machines. I have seen in one of these establishments a collection
of young women whose manners and deportment could not be excelled in any
assembly of their fashionable and wealthy sisters: the proprietor never
came in among them without removing his hat. As the work they do is
light and cleanly, so the dress of the workers is neat and tidy. These
earn two dollars and upward per week. Some hundreds of others are
employed in printing-offices, feeding the paper to book-presses: these
are able to earn more. Another class are employed in coloring maps and
prints, and among these are some who exhibit taste and skill fitted to a
much higher department of the arts. Thus the business of publishing, in
nearly all its branches, is largely aided by the labor of intelligent
women,--and it might be still more so, if they were taught the truly
feminine, as well as intellectual art, of type-setting.

Thousands among us are engaged in binding shoes, some by machinery, and
some by hand; but the wages they receive are miserably small. The
clothing-stores employ some six thousand, but also paying so little that
every tailor's working-woman seeks the earliest opportunity of changing
her employment for something better. The hat-trimmers probably number
two thousand, while the cap-makers constitute a numerous body, whose
wages average three dollars per week. Several hundred educated girls,
possessed of a fine taste, are employed in making artificial flowers.
The establishments in which umbrellas and parasols are made depend
almost exclusively on the labor of women, while the millinery and
straw-goods branches owe most of their prosperity and merit to the
handiwork of female taste and skill. There are many who work for the
dentists, manufacturing artificial teeth. Even at the repulsive business
of cigar-making, in a close, unwholesome atmosphere continually loaded
with tobacco-fumes, there are many hundred women who earn bread