As part of my sabbatical proposal, I promised that I would create a blog and document my experience. At this point, I don't know exactly what form this will take, but I think I'll just allow it to take shape as I move through the process. I'm making a promise (to myself) to write at least once weekly to talk about my progress. Knowing myself, my guess is that this will be more of a journal - about the project and about other things that I am working on this semester. I will try not to be boring and redundant, and will try not to be too personal here. BUT, I know that this work does feel very personal to me and that it will not be possible for me to write about this without talking about my feelings about the project and the fears and joys that come with it. To my students - current and past - I see this is an example of self-reflection. We all know that our work in theatre is personal. It can't help but be. This particular process of creation involves my doing something that I have never done before - writing a play. Knowing a lot about how plays are constructed and writing one are two very different things. I'm painfully aware of that at this point. So... I guess we'll just see how this goes!
I've spent time so far this semester visiting family and working hard to be present with my Dad and to help with a variety of financial, organizational, and care taking needs that he has. While my brother is an amazing man, doing the bulk of things that need to be done (and being a wonderful, kind and helpful son), it is important for me to do what I can. Having this time with a flexible schedule means that I need to take advantage of it and do whatever I can to make myself helpful. This changes the dynamic of this time 'off' to write, and simply means that I have to organize myself better. Continuing to do some necessary things for the department and having a major article that needs to be written are also things that make me panic from time to time. I had hoped to really concentrate on this alone, but luck will not have it so. I am
determined, however to do my best and have something to show for it. I don't guarantee that it will be any good, but I plan to give it my "all", as they say.
While in Boston I spent one day in Lowell, Massachusetts - the site of my research and the place where this project is centered. It was a very cold day, in between blizzards, and as it was a Sunday many of the things I wanted to see were closed. Still, I was able to see a lot and to re-ground myself in this place that has so intrigued me for 30 years.
The picture above is of a statue of the Lowell Mill Girls that I love. I took the picture but couldn't get any closer to the sculpture (due to snow and ice) to find the year it was made. Clearly it is new and I love the modern feel of it. It gives me that thrill of history happening today - links me to the story of these women in the past, and the impact that they have had on the present. It is a lovely sculpture.
My Proposal
For those of you who don't know what I'm really doing, here is some background and a brief summary of what I'm hoping to accomplish. (Most of this is taken from my actual sabbatical proposal):
From farms in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts the Mill Girls - some of the very first female industrial wage earners in the United States - flocked to the newly built mills and boarding houses in Lowell, Massachusetts from 1823 through the 1860's. The wages offered to them were the highest for female employees anywhere in America (from $1.85 to $3.00 per week), and presented independence and opportunities in the country's first planned industrial community. The textile industry in Lowell began a nationwide shift from farm to factory, and these women were the first factory workers. Despite a seventy hour work week they took classes, went to church and to concerts, and many of them found the time and energy to begin their own literary magazine, The Lowell Offering.
When Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Boston businessman, traveled to England in 1810, he was looking to copy many aspects of the English industrial model. The goal was to develop a system, however, that would create an American industrial experience introducing large-scale manufacturing without the human degradation that he had observed overseas. The idea of a female labor force came into being as a way to control conditions and to keep the communities where these factories were built from becoming slums and breeding places for 'sin and corruption.' If good young Yankee women could be recruited, they could be controlled in ways that men could not. To accommodate this new work force, therefore, a boardinghouse system was created where young women would live together, under the supervision of a matron, with strict adherence to regulations of behavior and mandatory church attendance. The girls were required (at first) to reside in these boardinghouses where the doors were locked promptly at ten o'clock each night. Visitors from all over the nation and the world, including Charles Dickens, President Andrew Jackson, and Harriet Martineau (an English writer and social reformer), recorded their impressions ad showed amazement at the energy of these women and their desire for self-improvement. It was, in so many ways, an amazing experiment and one that interested visitors as a model for the future of industrialization.
Many young women from the farms of New England were eager to leave their homes for the independent and self-sufficient lives advertised in Lowell. There are numerous diaries and letters from this period, documenting the desire for a new life, as well as the experience in those early days.
Below is an excerpt from a letter from Sally Rice of Vermont who left her home in 1838 to take her first job "working out". Writing to her parents, she tells why she does not wish to come home:
"I can never be happy there in among so many mountains...I shall need all I have got and as for
marrying and settling in that wilderness, I won't... I am almost 19 years old. I must of course have something of my own before many more years have passed over my head. And where is that something to come from if I go home and earn nothing?...I have but one life and I want to enjoy myself as well as I can while I live."
While the early days of this labor experiment,along with the energy and pursuits of these mill girls as they were known, was often portrayed positively, things changed rapidly as the city grew quickly and the labor practices of Lowell began to spread throughout a growing New England textile industry.While many of these women did develop independence and were able to support themselves and send money home, for many the long hours, rigid rules, and isolated lifestyle was not a happy one. As more money was made by the owners allowing more factories to be built, greed and competition led to reductions in pay and speed-ups of machinery increasing the already unhealthy working conditions to more hazardous ones with fewer benefits and greater risk. From here, the story leads from a paternalistic relationship between mill owners and workers to a far more adversarial one. There were labor protests and women began to publish in a variety of venues about the greed of the owners, the conditions in the mills, and the lack of rights of the workers.
The story of the Lowell mill operatives can be viewed from many perspectives. It is a story of a changing America, from agrarian to industrial. It is a feminist story and an important chapter of labor history in this county. It is the story of thousands of individual women and girls who sought to change their lives by making a move to be independent - to leave their farms and families and to change their lives, both economically and personally. The changing nature of women's work from the farming communities of New England to the factory system is an amazing story.
The Product
My goal is to develop a full-length play that will focus on the experience of the women in Lowell, from the earliest days of the factory system through the end of the female operative period in the 1860's. What form that play will take??? Well, the jury is still out on that one. But there is a vast amount of primary material - things written by the women themselves, along with music and other visual representations - that seem meant to be dramatized in some fashion.
