With the factory came a new epoch for women in America. The War of the Revolution and the War of 1812 had been ended long enough to induce a general feeling of security concerning the future of the republic. For a large number of people, the hard work and deprivations of the past were as a dream; peace and plenty promised to abound. Wealth came flowing from all directions in a steady stream into the country through the various channels of commerce and agriculture. Numerous business enterprises were undertaken, principal among which were the factories for weaving cotton and wool into cloth. The earliest of these was built in Massachusetts, where numerous swift-flowing rivers abound, capable of being utilized for moving machinery. Through the energetic, progressive spirit of the descendants of the Puritans, it was not long before New England began to rival Old England in manufacturing the increased production of cotton grown in the United States. The first cotton mill erected in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1822, was followed so quickly by others, that by 1839 there were in Lowell ten companies incorporated with a capital of $13,000,000. These produced 2,463,000 yards of cloth per week, of which all but 91,000 were cotton. The number of operatives employed were 12,507, and in the cotton mills the majority of these were women. From the amount of capital invested and the number of operatives employed, Lowell was termed, in the period between 1840 and 1850, “the Manchester of America.” But in nothing—except that Lowell and Manchester were places filled with the hum of machinery tended by human workers for their own livelihood and the profits of others—was there any resemblance between Manchester and Lowell. The recorded condition of the English operatives, especially women, at that time reads like a page torn from some canto of Dante’s “Inferno;” while that of Lowell, pictured by women who worked as ordinary mill-hands in the Lowell factories, seems in comparison like a Utopian idyl evolved from the brain of dreamers.