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In the nineteenth-century mill towns of Preston, England; Lowell, Massachusetts; and Paisley, Scotland, there were specific demands for migrant and female labor, and potential employers provided the necessary respectable conditions in order to attract them. Using individual accounts, this innovative and comparative study examines the migrants’ lives by addressing their reasons for migration, their relationship to their families, the roles they played in the cities to which they moved, and the dangers they met as a result of their youth, gender, and separation from family. Gordon details both the similarities and differences in the women’s migration experiences, and somewhat surprisingly concludes that they became financially independent, rather than primarily contributors to a family economy.

This article compares the experiences of independent women migrants in the textile cities of Preston, England; Paisley, Scotland; and Lowell, Massachusetts in the period 1850–1881. There are essentially two models describing single women's migration in the current historical literature. Both describe young women primarily in terms of personal economy and what kind of relationship they maintained with their parents before and after migration. The first emphasizes that though the European migrants were physically removed from their parents, they remained economically tied to their families; the second refers specifically to American women, defining them as emphatically independent, economically and socially, and cut off from their families. Direct comparison reveals remarkable similarity of experience for these young women. Though migrants in each city chose different occupations, each chose occupations that provided accommodation. Most became financially independent, rather than primarily contributors to a family economy, but maintained important supportive ties with family.

In the nineteenth-century mill towns of Preston, England; Lowell, Massachusetts; and Paisley, Scotland, there were specific demands for migrant and female labor, and potential employers provided the necessary respectable conditions in order to attract them. Using individual accounts, this innovative and comparative study examines the migrants' lives by addressing their reasons for migration, their relationship to their families, the roles they played in the cities to which they moved, and the dangers they met as a result of their youth, gender, and separation from family. Gordon details both the similarities and differences in the women's migration experiences, and somewhat surprisingly concludes that they became financially independent, rather than primarily contributors to a family economy.

This article compares the experiences of independent women migrants in the textile cities of Preston, England; Paisley, Scotland; & Lowell, Massachusetts in the period 1850-1881. There are essentially two models describing single women's migration in the current historical literature. Both describe young women primarily in terms of personal economy & what kind of relationship they maintained with their parents before & after migration. The first emphasizes that though the European migrants were physically removed from their parents, they remained economically tied to their families; the second refers specifically to American women, defining them as emphatically independent, economically & socially, & cut off from their families. Direct comparison reveals remarkable similarity of experience for these young women. Though migrants in each city chose different occupations, each chose occupations that provided accommodation. Most became financially independent, rather than primarily contributors to a family economy, but maintained important supportive ties with family. 3 Tables, 3 Figures. Adapted from the source document.

Gordon reviews Global Migrants, Local Culture: Natives and Newcomers in Provincial England, 1841-1939 by Laura Tabili.

While young women were migrating to Preston in response to employers’ demands for domestic servants, women in New England were enticing one another to move to industrial employment. In May 1866 Emma Page, working in her uncle’s woolen mill in Readfield, Maine, received a letter from a friend who had gone to work in Lowell, Massachusetts. Her friend, Mattie Weymouth, wrote, “I wish you was up here Em tell Hat Malissa sais thare is plenty of chances whare she works she and Hanah had 80 cts per day the first month.” By the end of the summer Emma had joined

Grace Campbell was fourteen years old when she moved from Campbelltown, Argyllshire to Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland, in the late 1830s. She went to work at the Lounsdale bleachworks just outside Paisley and lived there with dozens of other young female migrants in accommodations provided by the bleachworks. Thirty years later and across the Atlantic another young woman, Mattie Weymouth, was the first of her friends to move from Readfield, Maine, to Lowell, Massachusetts. Mattie went to work for one of Lowell’s textile manufacturers, living in a private boardinghouse close to the mill with many other mill workers. Both of these