Mill Girls and Strangers

Download or read book Mill Girls and Strangers written by Wendy M. Gordon and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the nineteenth-century mill towns of Preston, England; Lowell, Massachusetts; and Paisley, Scotland, there were specific demands for migrant and female labor, and potential employers provided the necessary respectable conditions in order to attract them. Using individual accounts, this innovative and comparative study examines the migrants' lives by addressing their reasons for migration, their relationship to their families, the roles they played in the cities to which they moved, and the dangers they met as a result of their youth, gender, and separation from family. Gordon details both the similarities and differences in the women's migration experiences, and somewhat surprisingly concludes that they became financially independent, rather than primarily contributors to a family economy.