ng until seven in the evening in summer time and from dawn to dusk in the winter months. The work was grueling and even the most robust of these women ended her day completely fatigued. The women typically lived in boardinghouses and slept five or six to a room, having been provided room and board from the mill owners. It would be conditions like this that would eventually prompt labor reforms regarding the number of hours to be worked in a day and under what types of conditions that work would occur:
At half past four in the morning the factory bell rings, and at five the girls must be in the mills. At seven the girls are allowed thirty minutes for breakfast, and at noon thirty minutes more for dinner, except during the first quarter of the year, when the time if extended to forty-five minutes. But within this time they must hurry to their boardinghouses and return to the factory, and that through the hot sun or the rain or the cold. At seven o’clock in the evening the f
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