Newfound Independence, from Lowell Mills to the Bangalore Garment Factories

Last updated on: September 27, 2016 at 5:00 am by Libby Anne

Newfound Independence, from Lowell Mills to the Bangalore Garment Factories 2016-09-26T18:08:33-04:00 Libby Anne

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I recently read a New York Times article titled Rural Young Women in India Chase Big-City Dreams. The piece covered a government program that encourages garment-manufacturers to recruit young women from rural areas to work in their factories. The idea is that these rural young women are a largely untapped labor force, and that their gainful employment would help grow India’s economy. But the article didn’t focus on the politics of the program or the incentives of the employers but rather on the young women who take part on it—and on the ways in which it changes them.

The village had its own plan for these young women. Upon reaching adulthood, they would be transferred to the guardianship of another family, along with a huge dowry that serves as an incentive to treat them well. The transfer is final. Once married, the new bride cannot return to visit her parents without permission, which is given sparingly, so that the bonds to her old home will weaken.

She must show her submission to the new family: She is not allowed to speak the names of her in-laws, because it is seen as too familiar, and in some places she is not allowed to use words that begin with the same letters as her in-laws’ names, requiring the invention of a large parallel vocabulary. Each morning, before she is allowed to eat, the daughter-in-law must wash the feet of her husband’s parents and then drink the water she has used to wash them.

And yet, by the end of the article, Shashi, one of the girls who left her rural village to go work in a textile mill, has bought a smartphone with her earnings and is plotting to marry her boyfriend, whom she meets clandestinely, regardless of her parents disapproval. I am utterly fascinated.

We see a lot of disapproval of sweatshops, and for good reason—poor working conditions and exploitation by overseers and bosses are serious problems that absolutely need addressing (and if we can do this through our trade negotiations, all the better). But we see much less discussion of the ways in which the garment industry, and factory work more generally, can gradually raise people out of rural (or urban) poverty, give them additional options, and (in the cases of rural girls like Shashi) broaden their horizons. Shashi would be demonstrably worse off if her garment factory did not exist.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen teenage girls and young women leave home for mill work. During the antebellum period, Lowell Mills, one of the first factories in the United States, was designed specifically to employ farm girls. The idea was to give these girls a chance to make some money to put a brother through college, or to save up toward establishing a household once they married. The girls lived in communal lodging houses, and while they didn’t go to the big city the way Shashi and her fellow workers did, they often attended lectures or created reading groups that broadened their horizons nonetheless.

The New York Times article describes a brief labor protest of sorts that Shashi and her fellow workers carried out when they were late in being paid. The Lowell mill girls also went on strike. One thing I see, in each case, is a growth in confidence tied partially to living independently and partially to becoming a wage earner. Even though many of Shashi’s fellow workers may ultimately return to their rural villages and marry, they won’t be unchanged. Their sense of their place in the world will have changed, and they will live with the knowledge that they have the ability to earn their own way.

In my own small way, I identify with the girls at Lowell Mills, and with Shashi. I grew up in a conservative evangelical homeschool community where many believed that daughters remained under their fathers’ authority until marriage. The “stay at home daughters” movement made an impact in our community, and when I prepared to leave home for college, there were those who tried to dissuade both me and my parents. A good friend of mine told me that a young woman’s unmarried years should be spent serving, not away from home in a hedonistic atmosphere focused on myself. A friend of my parents insisted that attending college would ruin me as a future wife and mother. I left home anyway.

In college, I exercised newfound independence and gained skills, knowledge, and confidence. When I ultimately ran into trouble with my parents, who weren’t pleased with all of my decisions, I had the know-how and the confidence to find my own housing and employment and to pay my own expenses. The contrast between my upbringing and my life in college was not as extreme as the contrast between Shashi’s rural village and the big city that housed her garment factory, and college is very different from textile work. Still, there are common threads of newfound independence and self-confidence.

As a feminist, I am excited to read about the opportunities factory life is giving Shashi and her fellow workers. And as a feminist, I am concerned by the low wages, bad working conditions, and potential for exploitation we often see in sweat shops like those of the garment industry. I believe we can be both.

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