Did this emphasis on growth (along with the requirement for integrative services) make a difference in the life and labor of the women we studied (Sun and Bergquist, 2021)? The New England Mills and Fred Harvey restaurants that employed these women epitomized growth. Frederick Cabot Lowell and Fred Harvey both championed expansion in the size of their existing organizations. Both entrepreneurs envisioned a significant increase in facilities they would own and operate. Did the visions and challenges faced by these entrepreneurs filter down to the women working in their organizations? Probably not directly. However, there was an indirect impact. Growth did provide opportunities for new women to be recruited to the mills and restaurants. Potentially, our working women could move up a bit in their organization’s hierarchy as it expanded in size. However, the pressure for growth was accompanied by a pressure to increase profits.
Pressure and Regulation
As noted, growth and profit are intertwined when capitalism is in force. As experienced by the owners and managers of the mills and Harvey operations, this pressure led to decisions regarding the wages offered to both the Mill Girls and Harvey Girls. Wages were kept quite low so that profits could increase to fuel further growth. Poor and laborious working conditions for the Mill Girls also resulted from this profit-oriented pressure. Even more broadly, emphasis on expansion eventually led to significant problems in the Lowell and Harvey organizations. Strain was placed on the budgets and dreams of these entrepreneurs. Unrelenting growth is not sustainable in any organization. Constraints (negative feedback loops) must always accompany growth (positive feedback loops) in a system if it is to remain viable.
I suspect that the strict regulation of work and nonwork life in the New England Mills was an important way to ensure that all functions of the Mill are tightly integrated. There can be no variations. The windows are kept shut in the mills, whether summer or winter. Work is performed every day (except Sunday). Work hours are invariant. Strict management provided the foundation for “smooth-running” mills. All mills owned by Lowell (or other Mill owners) were to operate uniformly. The same machinery was used, and uniform worksite regulations were imposed in all mills. This means that the stories of abuse and alienation among the women were pretty much the same in each of the mills. The narratives conveyed by women working in the Lowell mills were echoed in mills throughout New England.
Similarly, all Harvey restaurants were required to operate in a specific, prescribed manner. This was Fred Harvey’s way of providing high levels of integration. For Harvey, all operations needed to be uniform in his growing population of restaurants as they spread throughout the West. These heavy-handed regulations, in turn, would not always lead to pleasant working conditions for the Harvey Girls.
Alienation and a sense of powerlessness would easily have accompanied conformity to these regulations; however, some women in these highly regimented settings might have appreciated the order and predictability of work at their restaurant. Stability would have been valued by those Harvey girls working many miles from their home and in a quite different environment. The same might be said about the need for order and predictability when viewing the lives of those Mill Girls coming from Ireland and other European countries. They were working far away from their homeland and at a great distance from their culture and traditions.
Ownership, control, and direction
The movement from a premodern to a modern society typically has involved a shift from predominant family ownership to corporate ownership. The small craft shop gives way to the mass-production factory. The family farm gives way to mega-agriculture. The lone fisherman stands back while the large fish-processing organizations and canneries take over. The corporations are, in turn, owned by many shareholders. On the surface, this would seem to suggest the democratization of the corporation, with less-wealthy people holding at least some shares in the corporation.
