At the Loom

Alexa Frangos | Wilmette, IL, USA

The labor demands of capitalism have little regard for community. When the first textile mills were built in 1814, “the principal limitation on the firm’s output was the availability of labor,” wrote the Vermont Historical Society. The company “began to recruit young farm girls from the surrounding countryside.” The women and children lived in boarding houses and were supervised on and off the job. At first the jobs were well-paid, but economic downturns led employers to see wage cuts. The women and children were pressured to increase productivity. Far away from their home communities, the workers grew despondent in the face of deteriorating conditions. Using letters of women working at textile mills in the 19th century, At the Loom by Alexa Frangos speaks to the experience of being forced to labor away from one’s community. She writes: “Like many Yankee farm daughters in the nineteenth century, sisters Rebecca and Caroline Ford traveled from their struggling family farm in Vermont to earn a steady wage in Middlebury’s textile mills. Letters the sisters sent home, housed at the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History, draw a picture of the lives of this first wave of women mill workers. They write of tiring work days and homesickness, and all the while, death looms large. Rebecca writes of a mother dying of consumption, and of a father drowning trying to save his son, concluding that ‘in the midst of life we are in death, let us be wise and make sure work for eternity.’ Women like the Ford sisters were soon joined at New England mills by immigrants and child laborers also in search of a living wage.” “In this piece I’ve used the handwritten letters of the Ford sisters to create silhouettes representing both this first wave of young women laborers and the larger mill worker community of the time, specifically the outline of a child worker from a 1908 Lewis Hine photograph. Wool thread connects the figures, and a carding board references the delicate hand labor involved in working the mill spinners. Words pulled from the letters surround the figures, referencing the hope for continued work and wages.” In the 21st century, American employers draw thousands of immigrants to work in conditions often found unacceptable by members of the communities where their businesses are located. The United States meatpacking industry employs roughly 175,000 immigrants, many of whom come to the country to support families in their home communities.