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Lowell Mill Women Create the First Union of Working Women
… average of nearly 13 hours a day. It was worse than "the poor peasant of Ireland or the Russian serf who labors from sun to sun." Lucy Larcom started as a doffer of bobbins when she was only 12 and "hated the confinement, noise, and lint-filled … others to join them, gathered at an outdoor rally and signed a petition saying, "We will not go back into the mills to work unless our wages are continued." No one had ever seen anything like this. But if the mill girls were exuberant, managers … with injustice in the workplace. They got fed up, joined together, supported each other and fought for what they knew was right. One of the mill girls put it this way: "They have at last learnt the lesson which a bitter experience teaches, not to …