City of Looms and Spindles

Filomena and Prudence were New Hampshire farm girls who were joyful when they had the opportunity to apply for a mill job in Lowell, Massachusetts. Their pay was $3.50 a week for a 70 hour work week. The alternative was to hire out as household help for $.75 a week. The fathers allowed their unmarried daughters to leave home only because the mill owners required the girls to live in the mill's boarding house with strict supervision by a matron.Filomena was inspired by the Grimke sisters with their ideas of abolition and female rights. She met her first Negro family when she became part of the church committee to help newly arrived Negroes adjust to a life of freedom. She was shaken when she discovered the family were runaway slaves and her beau and Prudence's new suitor were both abolitionists. Within two years of starting at the mill, Filomena grew from a naive farm girl to an empathetic city woman eager to learn and experience life as offered in the last half of the 1830s.