Cindy Veach
How a Community of Women
Resolved, That we will not go back into the mills to work unless our wages are
continued...as they have been.
Resolved, That none of us will go back, unless they receive us all as one.
Resolved, That if any have not money enough to carry them home, they shall be supplied.
—Boston Evening Transcript, February 18, 1834
How my French Canadian great grandmother and great, great aunts
toiled thirteen hours a day in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts.
How weak the light when they left the boarding house each morning.
How screaming starlings flash mobbed them along the way. How they
sucked thread through the eye of their foot long wooden shuttles
that fed the cotton to the looms. How they called that quick motion
of their lips “the kiss of death.” How they could not converse over the
cacophonic, clickety-click, clickety-clack of five hundred howling
looms. How they walked back in ear-ringing darkness, had dinner,
then took up their needlework—crochet, crewel, cross stitch, knitting,
mending, quilting, darning—close work, women’s work. My mother
taught me, her mother taught her, her mother taught her.