Mary Paul Post

http://www.uml.edu/tsongas/bringing-history-home/page_02/sb3.htm

Throughout her letters, Mary Paul’s experience and attitude gets progressively worse and shows both the successes and failures of the “Lowell Experiment”. In her first letter, Mary begs her father to let her go to Lowell and work in the mills. She wants to help provide income for her family and she also wants to be able to buy clothes by working in the mills. This shows the success of the experiment because it is able to attract farm girls to work in the mills. In her next letter two months later Mary is disappointed that she is not making as much money as she thought after paying bills, but she is still happy and recommends that other kids go to work in the Lowell mills. The “Lowell Experiment” succeeds in attracting people because current workers recommend it to other people as well as going themselves. Mary is also homesick because she asks for paper so she can write to her family and friends. In the third letter to her father, Mary talks about the many deadly accidents that had occurred at the mill she worked at and how she still is not saving much money. The negative events she describes indicate that Mary is not very happy with working at the mills anymore. Nevertheless, Mary still encourages other girls to go work at the Lowell mills, causing the “Lowell Experiment” to succeed. In the fourth letter, Mary is still homesick and not very happy. She is being underpaid because of backwater in the factory, but she still tries to stay positive in here letter and writes about her schedule and how she likes the other girls. In the next letter, Mary talks about how hard her labor is and says sometimes she thinks she cannot endure it. She also talks about how the mill is lowering wages even though they do not need to. She says that she moved to a lower quality boarding house just to save twelve cents per week. She is clearly unhappy in this letter and many other girls like her are unhappy about the wage cuts. This is a failure of the “Lowell Experiment” because it angers the workers. In Mary’s last letter, she explains how she had been sick and did not expect to get paid a lot even though she worked hard. After this letter Mary goes back home to Vermont. This is another failure of the “Lowell Experiment”. After a few years most workers decide to leave. Overall, the “Lowell Experiment” was a success. It was able to bring in many teenage girls as the labor force and kept them for several years. While most girls left eventually, they also encouraged more to come which is how come the “Lowell Experiment” was successful in providing labor for the mills.