When Amanda Fox arrived in Lowell, Massachusetts, sometime in the 1840s, she joined a female workforce in what was then the center of the American textile industry. But she didn’t work in the factories as one of the famed “mill girls.” She was a boarding-house keeper, one of dozens of women whose domestic work—performed on an industrial scale—helped make Lowell a “model” industrial city.
About twenty years before Fox arrived, a conglomerate of textile corporations took over farm settlements and tribal territory along the Merrimack River northwest of Boston to build a city of large mills. The mills employed hundreds of young women who worked as weavers and spinners and bobbin girls (collectively referred to as “operatives”). While the workforce changed over decades, the original corporations operated in Lowell for roughly a century before migrating to the South in the 1920s and 1930s. The enormous concentration of workers who came to Lowell without their families required a unique system of housing accommodations. Boarding houses, run by an older generation of women, offered the answer.
As historian Wendy Gamber shows, boarding houses in nineteenth-century New England weren’t new—in fact, a large portion of the population lived in them—but the system at Lowell was a relatively novel take on the idea. Since there was essentially no housing stock at the time, boarding houses were built into the design of the city and were owned by the corporations where their tenants toiled. These neat rows of brick townhomes were situated close enough to the mills for the workers to be able to march down for their meals and be back at work within a thirty-minute window. The houses also provided a measure of protection for the young women away from home and assumed to be in danger of succumbing to urban corruption. The primary responsibility of the keeper was to support the factory work schedule (typically a twelve-to-fourteen-hour day) by providing the operatives with meals during their breaks and making sure all residents were in by a ten o’clock curfew. They did the regular washing of bed and kitchen linens and kept the house in order.