In the nineteenth-century mill towns of Preston, England; Lowell, Massachusetts; and Paisley, Scotland, there were specific demands for migrant and female labor, and potential employers provided the necessary respectable conditions in order to attract them. Using individual accounts, this innovative and comparative study examines the migrants' lives by addressing their reasons for migration, their relationship to their families, the roles they played in the cities to which they moved, and the dangers they met as a result of their youth, gender, and separation from family. Gordon details both the similarities and differences in the women's migration experiences, and somewhat surprisingly concludes that they became financially independent, rather than primarily contributors to a family economy.

Discusses the history of the first mill in the United States to use machines to turn raw cotton into finished cloth, the women who worked in the mill, and how the innovations in the textile industry brought on the Industrial Revolution.

True stories of love, laughter and loss from inside Lancashire's cotton mills. With tales from reluctant Audrey and mischievous Maureen to high-spirited Doris and dedicated Marjorie, The Mill Girls is an evocative story of hardship and friendship when cotton was still king. Through the eyes of four northern mill girls, we are offered a fascinating glimpse into the lives of ordinary women who rallied together, nattered over the beamers and, despite the hard working conditions, weaved, packed and laughed to keep the cotton mills spinning. The Mill Girls is a moving story of an era long gone and provides a captivating insight into a lost way of life.

Focuses on the lives of Lucy Larcom, Harriet Hanson Robinson, and Sarah G. Bagley, who survived the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, to become dynamic and ideal nineteenth-century women.

A ten-year-old bobbin girl working in a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1830s, must make a difficult decision--will she participate in the first workers' strike in Lowell?