Lyddie: Voices from the Field - Chapter 03 Homespun Dress

Many of the young, working-class women who left their family farms to find jobs in New England’s booming textile industry, arrived in Lowell dressed a lot like Lyddie!

Wearing a homespun dress likely wouldn’t have kept someone from getting hired. While they might have been unfashionable, many people associated homespun with the positive traits of New England’s farmers, like independence, a strong work ethic, and respectability. Shortly after beginning work, mill girls might go on small shopping-sprees to get new shoes and gloves, but not necessarily because they wanted to be stylish. Standing all day at their looms and throwing the shuttle made their hands and feet get bigger!

Mill girls were expected to dress respectably, which meant their clothes should be modest, clean, and, at least while at work, simple enough to make sure nothing got caught in the machines. Factory owners wanted to show everyone that mill girls were safe and healthy at the factories, so when important visitors, like President Andrew Jackson, visited Lowell, the mill girls paraded in white dresses with parasols. Even Lyddie’s favorite author, Charles Dickens, remarked that Lowell’s mill girls were “well dressed” with “extreme cleanliness.”

Though Dickens seemed impressed with their clothes, other people worried that this group of young women would waste all the money they earned on fancy new clothes. Buying fashionable, storebought outfits was easier for mill girls than for young women who lived in the country because they had their own money, lived somewhere with a lot of stores, and didn’t have parental supervision. But mill girls who dressed too fashionably were accused of being frivolous or immature.

In addition to concerns for the mill girls themselves, others worried that mill girls’ fashion sense would make people confuse a working-class woman for a middle- or upper-class “lady.” In her story “New Year at Home,” Godey’s Lady’s Book editor Sarah Josepha Hale wrote, “Many of the factory girls wear gold watches, and an imitation at least, of all the ornaments which grace the daughters of our most opulent citizens.” Writers like Hale worried that upwardly mobile mill girls were a threat to middle-class superiority. In an article titled “Gold Watches” an anonymous mill girl author responds to Hale, saying that if middle-class women, who didn’t need to work for a living and had a lot more free time, “still need richer dress to distinguish them from us, the fault must be their own” (378).

Despite all the public concern about mill girls’ fashion choices, former mill girl Harriet Robinson remembers the simplicity of their dress, with “no ruffles and very few ornaments” (89). A silk dress, like the one worn by the first mill girl Lyddie meets at Cutler’s Tavern, would have been a luxury, likely worn only on special occasions and probably not dusty travel days. Some mill girls, like Lyddie, chose to save as much money as they could, while others treated themselves to new clothes. Either way, they worked hard for what they had!

Just like today, people in the 19th-century assumed they could tell a lot about someone based on what they wore. From hard-working homespun to frivolous ruffles, mill girls knew what they wore mattered!

About the Author

Dr. Kassie Baron, an independent scholar specializing in nineteenth century American literature with particular interest in the literary representations of working-class women’s bodies and the ideologies projected onto them by writers during the first US industrial revolution