THE GOLDEN THREADS: New England's Mill Girls and Magnets

For nearly fifty years, from 1813 until 1860, the textile industry founded by Francis Cabot Lowell in Lowell, Mass., flourished and waxed fat. The Lowell girls, the ones who worked in the mills, shared in a sort of industrial utopia, and this is a vignette of the growth of our industrial system, and a prophetic pronouncement for the world of mass production which was to follow. The whole picture is drawn, the birth of the idea, the sometimes slick acquisition of the machinery, the raising of capital, the combines, the banks, the cities which all grew out of this expanding New England concept. Side by side with it runs the story of the Lowell girls, the workers, their lives, their vain attempts to lower hours, raise wages, and their gradual withdrawal from the field... Business men, students of economics, sociology, history, workers everywhere will find this easy and profitable reading.