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Updated: June 27, 2025
Although that trade had ceased, his family had still retained the bleachery belonging to it, commonly called the bleachfield, devoting it now to the service of those large calico manufactures which had ruined the trade in linen, and to the whitening of such yarn as the country housewives still spun at home, and the webs they got woven of it in private looms.
At six o'clock in the morning the bleachery whistle blows three times loud enough to shake the shingles on the roofs of the one-hundred-year-old houses and the leaves on the more than one-hundred-year-old trees about the Falls. Those women who have their breakfasts to get and houses to straighten up before they leave for work—and there are a number—must needs be about before then.
I can hear a bleachery operator grunting, “My Gawd! what's the woman ravin' over? Is it our bleachery she's goin' on about?” Most of the workers in the bleachery know no other industrial experience.
I thought of Tessie at the candy factory—Tessie who had been sent speedily home by the pop-eyed man at the door because she was ten minutes late, due to taking her husband to the hospital. Verily, there is no “factory atmosphere” about the bleachery, compared with New York standards. The men, they say, take the whole matter of punctuality and attendance more seriously than the women.
No one has measured yet what crowded transportation takes out of a body in the cities. New York factories are used to new girls—they appear almost daily in such jobs as I have worked in. At the Falls a strange person in town is excitement enough, a strange girl at the bleachery practically an unheard-of thing.
The second day I began my diary with, “A bleachery job is no job at all.” That again was by contrast. Also, those first two days were the only two, until the last week, that we did not work overtime at our table.
I can lie awake nights and imagine what fun it is going to be getting back to the Falls some day and waiting by the bridge down at the bleachery for the girls to come out at noon, seeing them all again. Maybe Mrs. Halley will call out her, “Hi! look 'ose 'ere!” At our bleachery, be it known, no goods were manufactured.
There was one union in the bleachery; that was in another department where mostly men were employed—the folders. They worked time rates. With us, as soon as a girl's record warranted it, she was put on piece rates. Nancy and most of those young girls were still, after one or two years, on time rates—around eleven dollars a week they made.
“What do you feel you can pay? We want you should have some money left each week after your board's paid. What do you make at the bleachery?” My conscience fidgeted within me a bit at that. “I'd rather you charged me just what you think the room and board are worth to you, not what you think I can pay.” “Well, we used to get eight dollars a week for room and board. It's worth that.”
Early the following week Daniel and his father started on their journey. The dog accompanied them and sat on the front seat of the carriage, next to the driver. As Mr. Swift neared his home, the linen lying in the bleachery was plainly discernible, and the dog, recognizing the locality, leaped out of the carriage. Mrs.
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