I have heard and collected stories from thousands of people. A few make it to the top of my list and I make a video or use the story as my daily photograph post for my members. This story presents a sterling example of that commonly used phrase, unintended consequences. In the 1840s woolen mill owners invited teenage girls from the farms in New England (who were incredibly poor at that time) to come to Lowell Massachusetts to work in the mills The mills became world-famous at that time by taking these largely uneducated girls and turning them into an educated group of workers. The girls worked extraordinarily long hours in very noisy and dangerous conditions. But the mill owners, Unitarian Universalist church leaders, believed that the girls should be educated and this meant learning to read and to discuss important subjects of the day. They offered the girls who were locked in their dormitories at night (for their own safety) something they called a Circle, a place where a group of girls would gather together in the evening to discuss books, kind of like a sewing circle. Almost 50 years ago, my mother (who was an antique dealer) gave me a diary written in 1841 by a girl who was a member of one of these circles. The diary indicates that the girls raised questions of major importance about America, about religion, about God, about women's rights, that surprised and provoked me to find out more. The questions they raised were not the kind of subjects the mill owners had imagined. The diary led me to search to understand who they were and what happened to them. Some went on to become farm wives but many became schoolteachers, travel to the west, never married, became authors and public speakers and even politicians before women had the right to vote.
This story directly connects to my video about the tragic story that Nettie Mitchell told me about Emmeline, one of the mill girls who left Maine to support her family. Here is the link to that video - • She Reveals The SIN Sh...