Book Review : Mill Girls: The Slavery of Ignorance
Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South by Victoria Byerly; with an introduction by Cletus Daniel (ILR Press, c/o New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. 14851-0952: $19.95)
After reading “Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls,” you can’t help but come away with at least two very strong ideas. The first is that there must be some mill owners and “boss men” still alive in the South walking around with such bad karma that their neighbors ought to run them out of town this week. If this were a just world (don’t get me wrong, that’s just wishful thinking), their houses would have already shuddered to the ground, and their wives would never have sex with them, except to bear unlovely children who’d grow up to be arsonists or molesters to bring shame upon their family names.
We’re talking heartless, monstrous, unforgivable villains here. The men who put their employees through these agonies should rot in hell--or better yet, be born again as little girls, to grow up as one of 19 or 20 children (to one mother) and go to work for 16-hour days, sleep on beds of straw and die an early, painful death from brown lung.
The second idea that hammers and hammers home here with the monotony and insistence of a shuttle going across the loom is that it’s not physical good looks, or a nice disposition, or even a loving set of parents that determines what will become of a woman in this world, but how well she is educated, her knowledge of birth control and her grasp--however rudimentary--of the world of finance (how money is made, and who’s making it off whom).
Victoria Byerly’s great-grandma made the move to the New Amazon Cotton Mill after she’d had 12 children and finally given up on her drunken sharecropper husband. “Eventually,” Byerly writes, “all 10 of her surviving children followed her to the Amazon (in Thomasville, N.C.), as did their children and their children’s children. When I went to work in the mill in 1967, four generations of women in our family had, altogether, worked around 400 years in the mill.”
Victoria was the first one in her family--in all those flocks of children--to finish high school. Even then, “for lack of a better alternative,” she went to work in the mill after graduation--turning down cuffs on children’s socks. Then, by one of those miracles that make life worth living, her high school arranged for her to get a scholarship to a small Appalachian college: to get out.
Later, she went to work for a scholarly journal, read some work on women in Northern mills, realized that her own cultural heritage had been ignored by historians: “I began collecting data on Southern textile workers,” she writes, “with the idea that I might go back South and try my hand at oral history.” Her account of how that happened is in itself an exemplum of what she found when she returned--poverty and solidarity.
From this base, and just from this, Byerly went out and asked the women in her town, young and old, black and white, to tell their stories. Taken a few at a time, they are wonderful. But all together these tales are almost too painful to read.
Why did mothers send their children to work so early in the mill? Because if the children didn’t all go to work, the family would be evicted from their mill house. And, since the family needed the combined incomes of everyone, all the children had to work.
It was in the interest of the mill owners to have all these kids around, because 7- to 10-year-olds don’t command a very high salary. And if they were slow learning the job, it didn’t matter, because when they were training, for weeks at a time they weren’t paid at all.
Despite all this, these women managed to have some fun. It’s true they took 5-minute lunch breaks in the mill. They worked like beasts of burden out in the fields. They labored (if they were black) to keep white children clean and fed while their own children ran untended. Still, they remember enchanted moments--as children in the woods, making dresses out of leaves, or moving away from intolerable conditions at home and into a boarding house where they--young, irrepressibly cheerful, their own 19 or 20 children not yet born--told jokes, sang songs, turned their leaden lives into gold.
Still, this tells of a world where women are worked to death, and ignored, laughed at, condescended to. By a colossal irony, that mind set is repeated in this book itself, where Byerly’s excellent work is undercut by an amazingly dopey introduction by Cletus E. Daniel, who tells us that “one need not be a scholar” to have written this book and “that it is of rare value if for no other reason than because it provides a welcome antidote to the sophistical and intellectually enervating impression that we too often indulge that history is somehow larger than the individual lives that populate it. . . . Think of Victoria Byerly as an accomplished locksmith. . . . “
A locksmith ? Next thing, he’ll be telling us--and taking the credit for it--that Victoria Byerly is pretty good at turning down the cuffs on socks.