Before the Industrial Revolution in the United States, textiles were produced at home with the help of the entire family. The work was split into two categories of spinning and weaving. Mothers and daughters did the spinning while fathers and sons did the weaving on the loom. This ideas of the family working together allowed fathers to teach their sons a trade and mothers to teach their daughters how to cook and sew. It also enabled parents to educate their children and supervise their upbringing. Working on the spinning wheel and weaving machine could be done at anytime because there were no clocks in the house that told you when to start working and when to quit. Dinner could be eaten at a leisurely pace without being rushed be a clock, and children could play and rest properly so they could grow up healthy and strong.
With the invention of the mechanical spinning and weaving machines in the late 1700’s the way textiles were being made had changed forever. Families that had once worked together in their homes now had to go work in textile mills. Children worked along side their fathers but not as before. Now, they were standing on their feet all day and putting in long hours just like their fathers. Young women too, were no longer learning how to cook and sew. Instead, they were learning how to run several machines at one time in the textile mills. Eventually immigrants also found themselves in the textile mills working for poverty level wages and enduring the harsh conditions of the mills.
