During the next few years many women's strikes are recorded among
cotton operatives, but most of them, though conducted with spirit and
intelligence, seemed to have ended none too happily for the workers.
It is nevertheless probable that the possibility that these rebellious
ones might strike often acted as a check upon the cotton lords and
their mill managers. Indeed the strikes at Lowell, Massachusetts, of
1834 and 1836 involved so large a number of operatives (up to 2,500
girls at one time), and these were so brave and daring in their public
demands for the right of personal liberty and just treatment that the
entire press of the country gave publicity to the matter, although
the orthodox newspapers were mostly shocked at the "wicked
misrepresentations" of the ringleaders in this industrial rebellion.

The 1836 strike at the Lowell mills throws a curious light upon the
habits of those days. Something analogous to the "living-in" system
was in force. In 1825 when the Lowell mills were first opened, the
companies who owned the mills provided boarding-houses for their girl
operatives, and the boarding-house keepers had in their lease to agree
to charge them not more than $1.25 per week. (Their wages are said to
have rarely exceeded $2.50 per week.) But in these thirteen years
the cost of living had risen, and at this rate for board the
boarding-house keepers could no longer make ends meet, and many were
ruined. The mill-owners, seeing what desperate plight these women were
in, agreed to deduct from the weekly rent a sum equivalent to twelve
cents per boarder, and they also authorized the housekeepers to charge
each girl twelve cents more. This raised the total income of the
housekeepers to practically one dollar and fifty cents per head. As
there was no talk of raising wages in proportion, this arrangement was
equivalent to a cut of twelve cents per week and the girls rebelled
and went out on strike to the number of twenty-five hundred. In all