Talk:Waltham-Lowell system

Slater Employment Practices

I am having some difficulty with Slater's initial attempts at getting employees.

The practice he was familiar with in England was that whole families would be given housing. The children would work in the mills, often with their mothers, while fathers stayed in the house weaving the cotton into stockings - so called framework knitting. The youngest children would usually be looked after by their grandmothers.

I imagine that this would be how Slater would expect to go on. The inference in the article is that the families would need to be split unlike the English experience.

In England at that time very few people owned property. They would be commoners who in many cases had been displaced by the enclosures.

I'm imagining that the families in the US might have their own property for a start and the fathers tied to the family locality by whatever employment they had.

What was the usual employment in America for these fathers? Was there the fashion in the US for stockings and thus the same demand for framework knitting? Chevin (talk) 16:11, 14 January 2010 (UTC)