Dancing with Mill Girls

I was ordained in 1986 - to the diaconate on April 12 and to the priesthood on October 18, the Feast of St. Luke. My bishop, Fred Wolfe, thought that a suitable date to ordain someone who had been a nurse.

I was part of the first 10-12 year wave of ordained women in The Episcopal Church. Some thought a Tsunami had hit the church.

Indeed, some still do.

Women have always been part of the social revolution of institutions, especially the church – from Queen Elizabeth I and the Anglican Church to the eleven women ordained in the Episcopal Church of the Advocate in Philadelphia.

Little did I know that I was to be ordained into the rich heritage of other revolutionary women.

I had been called as a Chaplain at University of Lowell, so it was determined that the ordination service would take place at St. Anne’s Church, in Lowell, MA.

This seemed appropriate enough. St. Anne’s was known as “The Mill Girl Church,” because the rector, whose family was the owner one of the cotton mills in that city, demanded and arbitrarily extracted a tithe – 10% of their meager salaries – for the building fund of the church.

In a touching act of sensitivity, he named the church after a woman – his wife.

My mother and aunts and cousins were the updated 20th century version of “Mill Girls” in the sister textile city of Fall River, MA. My mother worked in the garment industry as a “presser” who worked on “pieces” – the automotive assembly line, adapted to the garment industry.

As the dress or blouse was made, a sleeve or the skirt was sown by one group of women, then passed on to another group who “pressed” (or ironed) it before it went to the next station of women on sewing machines, who sewed another “piece” which was sent onto another group of presser, and so on until the garment was complete.

The dirty trick to the work was that no one was paid an hourly wage. A woman was paid by the number of pieces she produced. The faster she worked, the harder her labor, the better her pay.

Well, nothing wrong with that, right? Sounds fair enough. Except, of course, when you factor in the mind-numbing, back-breaking monotony of this work – and, oh yes, the profit margin and the bottom line.

More specifically, who was profiting from the profit margin and who was at the bottom of the line.

It seems that some things haven't changed much in a little over 100 years.

The Lowell Mills were built during the first wave of the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution in New England. The first Lowell mills were built in 1823. By 1848, Lowell was the largest industrial center in America, producing a reported 50,000 miles of cotton each year.

Lowell was also known around the world for the “innovative solution” to the high demand for cheap labor to work these mills. Farm girls from around New England were recruited to work the mills for a few years and then return to the farms or marry.

This turned the tables on the “natural role” of women, who changed from “money saving” to “money earning.” Rather than improving her station in life, however, it often worsened it.

Mill Girls ranged in age from 10 to middle age, but most were between 16-25. The youngest girls were called “doffers” because they “doffed” or took off the bobbins from the spinning frames.

They worked from five o’clock in the morning to seven in the evening, with half hour each for breakfast and dinner. Even the doffers, little girls of 9 or 10, who actually worked about 15 minutes every hour, were required to work 14 hour days, six days per week. At the peak of their careers, Mill Girls earned about $2 per week.

Even so, several of the Mill Girls found time to write their stories. In 1842, two women, Harriet Farley and Harriot Curtis co-edited “The Lowell Offering: Writings By New England Women”

(http://courses.wcupa.edu/johnson/Low-offr1.html ). Their stories are compelling for the harshness of their lives told in their own voices.

One anonymous woman wrote these words: “In vain do I try to soar in fancy and imagination above the dull reality around me but beyond the roof of the factory I cannot rise.”


A Mill Girl may have changed in status to be a money earner, but the law took no cognizance of a woman spender. In MA before 1840, a woman was not supposed to be capable of spending her own or anyone else’s money. Indeed, she could not inherit property from her father unless she agreed to remain single.

The Industrial Revolution may have produced benefits for society and the ruling class, but it was profited on the backs – and at the fingertips – of young girls and women. It has ever been thus. Indeed, it goes on today in East LA and Southeast Asia and Central America.

It was, therefore, no small thing that the daughter of a family of Mill Girls was being ordained in St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Lowell, MA. Indeed, the front page, bold type headline of the local newspaper proclaimed: First woman ordained at St. Anne’s.

I was keenly aware of the heritage of that church, and felt I was living into a reality the Mill Girls could never have dreamed. I was stepping into a revolution which had begun centuries before.

“In vain do I try to soar in fancy and imagination above the dull reality around me,” wrote that nameless Mill Girl. I felt the responsibility of rising beyond the factory roof for her.

Strange. The responsibilty did not feel heavy. Indeed, I felt a rush of wind under my feet, sweeping me up to the altar, beyond the factory roof that trapped the dreams of young Mill Girls.

I may have looked as if I were walking, but in my heart, I was dancing. Dancing for the Mill Girls who could not. Dancing with my sisters who dared not. Dancing into the revolution which had begun and into which I had been ordained to continue. Dancing on history and into the future. Dancing with Mother God.

Four days after my ordination, one of the women in attendance – a reporter and the granddaughter of Mill Girls – sent me a letter. I still have it, written in longhand on legal paper, tucked in the back pages of my photo album.

Even as I read it now, twenty years later, I find deeper levels of meaning and understanding of the sacramental grace of my ordination at St. Anne’s – the Mill Girl Church – in Lowell, MA - and, I feel even more deeply indebted to their legacy.

She begins, “I cannot remember the exact words Elizabeth spoke in blessing me . . . I began to cry when I heard her say, “Mother God.”

"It seemed a dream, a thing that could not happen in real life; at once a horrible sacrilege and a joyous, long-overdue righting of wrong. It seemed the kind of thing you’d expect to see only in heaven, so unearthly was the vision. A dream of women.”

“There were lots of women . . . and few men in the procession, and then, Elizabeth, radiant as a bride. I felt the same rush of mixed feelings when I saw her that I did when the procession began – hatred for these women who were living what I felt denied, the hatred of the poor for the rich, the kind of blind, ugly hatred that must belong in prejudice, but also deep and admiring and vicarious joy in their forbearance and their triumph. . . . .”

“ . . . . .As I prepared to receive communion at Elizabeth’s ordination – something I hadn’t done for years but which seemed so right – I began to tremble and tears kept welling in my eyes, and I tried urgently to understand my agitation."

"A story from Alice Walker came to me. It’s from “When The Other Dancer Is the Self,” an essay, and in it she describes how she once had a recurring dream in which she was dancing and dancing and could not find her partner.”

“Alice Walker has a glass eye – the result of a childhood accident involving one of her brothers – and in the essay she recounts how she grew up being very self-conscious about her appearance because of it.

"One night, putting her toddler daughter to bed, the child looked up from her crib and – thinking of something she’d seen on T.V., a globe – looked into her mother’s face and said, “Mommy, you have a world in your eye.”

“And something in Alice Walker was healed by that baby sentence."

"And that night, when Alice Walker slept, she dreamed she was dancing and dancing and a partner approached to dance with her and the partner was herself.”

“That’s what I felt approaching the communion rail – I felt I was approaching my other self whom I had blinded years ago."

"I don’t know what she has for me now – whether God or church or those painful memories can inform me – but I know I must learn to dance with her.”

“God our Mother.”

“I wish someone had said that to me so long ago, before my leaving began.”