portion of their new surroundings, and showed their employers and overseers that same docility and submissiveness that they had been accustomed to show their fathers, brothers and husbands; that same docility and submissiveness that they had been taught to cultivate as an essential, womanly virtue.
But there were other and even stronger reasons than their innate submissiveness that prevented the early women workers frum endeavoring to better their condition by any organized effort. These reasons were: their middle class character, their extreme youth, and the very temporary nature of their employment. The factory girls of the early nineteenth century were not working girls in the modern sense of the term. In fact, while most men were successfully employed in agriculture and the great mass of women were successfully employed at home, there was no clearly defined working class. The pioneer women workers came from the middle class. They were the daughters of farmers and professional men, and it sometimes happened that their fathers or other male relatives or friends owned stock in the very mills in which they worked. It would have been unnatural for these girls to antagonize the class from which they had sprung, among which they had their friends and associates, and to which they expected to return, particularly after marriage. There were some mature women among the early mill workers, but the overwhelming majority were extremely young. No child labor laws existed in those days, and so we find many little girls entering the mills at ten, at nine and even at eight years of age. Not one of the pioneer women in industry remained at factory work for the greater part of her life. To practically all the factory was only an episode in life; to many only a brief episode.
Very young girls from small towns and from the country, healthy, light-hearted and ambitious, with parental homes to return to and with prospects of early marriage—such was the type of mill girls before the rapid increase of population produced a permanent class of wage-workers. It is not surprising that organization and concerted action for the purpose of improving conditions were practically impossible among this type of workers. But notwith-
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