Women, held in Washington in 1888, Mrs. H.H. Robinson, after telling how
she entered the Lowell Mills as a "doffer," when a child, gave a
brilliant description of the intellectual life and interests of the
workers. She remained in the mill till married, and said: "I consider
the Lowell Mills as my _alma mater_, and am as proud of them as most
girls of the colleges in which they have been educated."

With the growth of the factory system under very different conditions
from that of Lowell, there were as different results. Factories had
risen, at every available point in New England, all of them thronged by
women and girls. But great cities were still unknown; and the first
census, that for 1790, showed that hardly four per cent of the people
were in them. The tide set toward the factory towns as strongly as it
now does toward the cities, though factory labor for the most part was
of almost incredible severity. The length of a day's labor varied from
twelve to fifteen hours, the mills of New England running generally
thirteen hours a day the year round. Several mills are on record, the
day in one of which was fourteen hours, and in the other fifteen hours
and ten minutes, this latter being the Eagle Mill at Griswold, Conn.;
and previous to 1858 there were many others where hours were equally
long. Work began at five in the morning, or at some points a little
later; and there is a known instance of a mill in Paterson, N.J., in
which women and children were required to be at work by half-past four
in the morning.

In most of the New England factories, the operatives were taxed for the
support of religion. The Lowell Company dismissed them if often absent
from church, and their lives without and within the factory were
regulated as minutely as if in the cloister. Women and children were
urged on by the cowhide; and the first inspection of the factories,