employees the early manufacturers had to offer special inducements. This was all the more necessary because the appalling conditions that accompanied the beginnings of factory labor in England had created a great deal of prejudice against factory labor generally. Therefore, in Lowell and elsewhere the corporations that controlled the factories established boarding houses for their female operatives, devised to give an atmosphere of that home life to which the girls had been accustomed, and that they had been obliged to leave behind when they came to the mill town. These boarding houses were under the direction of respectable matrons, usually widows, many of whom had their own daughters at work in the mills. Each house had its parlor, with a piano or an organ and books and periodicals upon the table. Here the girls assembled in the evenings and on Sunday afternoons, read and played and sang, and fostered a spirit of good fellowship that the isolated woman in the home had never known, a spirit from which the larger, social consciousness was destined to spring.
The intellectual life of the early mill girls of Lowell is a phenomenon that will always amaze the student of American conditions. After a twelve-hour work-day in the mills these girls had enough spirit and ambition left to read and study, to attend lectures, and to take a lively interest in the public questions of the day. In Lowell Hall series of lectures were being delivered at that time by college professors and other learned men, and these lectures were chiefly attended by the mill girls. But not contented with simply attending the lectures, the girls afterwards discussed the subjects of the lectures among themselves and some began to put down their opinion in writing. This practice led to two noteworthy achievements: the founding of the Improvement Circle and the publication of the Lowell Offering. Among the thousands of members of the women's clubs, that to-day are spread broadcast over the country, we find very few working women; yet to working women belongs the credit of having organized the first woman's literary club in America. This first literary club, the Improvement Circle of the Lowell mill girls, gave its members an opportunity for intellectual development and expression that was entirely
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