The transition from man made to mechanical is something that has continually become more apparent as time goes on. Textiles are one of the many industries that have been directly impacted by industrialization.
Textiles back in the late 18th century in America were created using cultivated cotton and using spinning wheels and looms to make cotton into yarn. These yarns were then turned into textiles that would be made into clothing. It was common for people to have limited clothing pieces for they were very expensive and laborious to make. Later, water powered spinning wheels allowed for more complex machinery to make the long and arduous task of weaving material easier. Due to embargoes, British goods weren’t permitted into the New World, so people started having to buy locally which increased the need and market for cotton mills. Mill owners started investing in things like dams to harness the water’s power to increase their output ability.
Samuel Slater, a young entrepreneur from Britain, developed some of the first fully realized textile mills when he observed English-styled cotton spinning wheels and recreated the contraptions in America. Over time, mills began improving the size and capacity of their mills to accommodate larger orders. Some mills were so large that their wheels would disturb the natural flow of other mill’s wheels.
By the 19th century, mills went from small businesses that could be managed from one to two people, to factories housing hundreds of employees all making textiles. An issue came to arise where there were simply not enough able bodied men willing to work in these large factories, so mill owners began catering to country women. They would provide boarding houses and provide good meals to their working women. Young women lived in cramped conditions, with 1-2 women per room. This wasn’t necessarily a problem though, for most women at the time were used to more intolerable conditions on the farm.
But with industrialization, mill owners became more greedy and started assigning more girls to cotton wheels and making them work longer hours. Conditions began to worsen, and less and less resources were out toward proving the women with livable conditions and wages. Women often staged walk outs and protested for better conditions, but often these sounds of alarm fell on deaf ears. Eventually, steam engines took over the places of water wheels in mills. Mills could move away from rivers and labor became even cheaper.
Nowadays, companies outsource their textiles to other countries for cheap unregulated labor. Conditions in these types of sweatshops are atrocious, unsanitary, and not suitable.
(If you’re wondering, yes I wrote this by watching the PBS video Mill Times).