new to all of them, and some girls who in later life became famous women owed much of their early inspiration and encouragement to that working girls' club. Among the members of the Improvement Circle who later achieved fame were Lucy Larcom, a poetess; Margaret Foley, a sculptress; and Harriet Robinson, an authoress.
The intellectual life of the Improvement Circle led directly to that other remarkable achievement of the Lowell mill girls, the publication of the Lowell Offering. This magazine was written, edited and published by the mill girls themselves. "Many of the pieces that were printed there," says Harriet Robinson, "were thought out amid the hum of the wheels, while the skillful fingers and well-trained eyes of the writers tended the loom or the frame." So remarkable were many of these articles that a collection of them was reprinted in England under the title, "Mind Among the Spindles," and Dickens said of them that they "compared favorably with those of many English periodicals." In some of the articles burning questions of the day were discussed. The movement for the abolition of slavery had many enthusiastic adherents among the mill girls and brought forth many expressions in prose and in verse from their pens. Problems that still remain unsolved were also touched upon. Thus Hariot F. Curtis, one of the ablest contributors to the Lowell Offering and one of the founders of the Improvement Circle, in a series of articles propounded the theory of equal pay for equal work, years before there was any organized movement for the equal rights of women. The early history of Lowell has been ably and interestingly recorded in "Loom and Spindle" by Harriet H. Robinson, who herself began life as a Lowell mill girl and became a well-known literary woman and a pioneer suffragist. At a woman's convention she once referred to the factory where she had worked as her "alma mater."
This aspect of early Lowell and the other budding factory towns soon changed when the rising tide of immigration began to flood the labor market. While at first the demand for factory hands had exceeded the supply, conditions now were reversed, and the immediate result was a reduction in wages and a general lowering of the standard
32
