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The Lowell mill girls
A cotton mill is a factory where raw cotton is spun into thread and woven into cloth, and the first American ones were driven by water power from river falls. The system was deliberately designed to avoid the reputation of British mill towns, and it gave a generation of women an income of their own before anyone had framed that as a demand. It also produced the first strikes led by women in the United States, in 1834 and 1836. The cotton came from the slave plantations of the South, so the freest and the least free labour in the country were two links in one chain of production.
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