Living/working conditions

•Bedrooms in boarding houses offered little or no privacy, usually between four and six women shared a room, and sometimes two women had to share a double bed.
•These dwellings housed 20 to 40 people and contained a kitchen, a dining room and parlor, a keeper’s quarters, and up to ten bedrooms. Row after row of boardinghouse blocks visually distinguished Lowell from earlier New England mill towns.

*The working conditions were often times not good. The girls worked between 60 and 80 hours a week.
*In return for monthly cash wages, female workers in Lowell agreed to regulations that varied little from company to company: work for at least a year live in a company boardinghouse, attend church. Many worked for a year and went back to the farm, some repeating this pattern two or three times.