In the early years of the eighteenth century not a manufacturing town
existed in New England, and for the whole country it was much the same.
A few paper-mills turned out paper hardly better in quality than that
which comes to us to-day about our grocery packages. In a foundry or two
iron was melted into pigs or beaten into bars and nails. Cocked hats and
felts were made in one factory. Cotton was hardly known.[14] De Bow, in
his "Industrial Resources of the United States," tells us that a little
had been sent to Liverpool just before the battle of Lexington; but
linen took the place of all cotton fabrics, and was spun at every hearth
in New England.

In the eight bales of cotton, grown on a Georgia plantation, sent over
to Liverpool in 1784, and seized at the Custom House on the ground that
so much cotton could not be produced in America, but must come from
some foreign country, lay the seed of a new movement in labor, in which,
from the beginning, women have taken larger part than men. By 1800
cotton had proved itself a staple for the Southern States, and even the
second war with England hardly hindered the planters. In 1791 two
million pounds had been raised; in 1804 forty-eight million; the
invention of the cotton-gin, in 1793, stimulating to the utmost the
enthusiasm of the South over this new road to fortune.

It is with the birth of the cotton industry that the work and wages of
women begin to take coherent shape; and the history of the new
occupation divides itself roughly into three periods. The first includes
the ten or fifteen years prior to 1790, and may be called the
experimental period; the second covers the time from 1790 to 1811, in
which the spinning-system was established and perfected; and the third
the years immediately following 1814, in which came the introduction of