According to writers, the women operatives who entered the Lowell mills came from the New England farms, not from stress of circumstances, but to get wage-money to help lift a mortgage from the family farm, or to assist some son or brother in obtaining an otherwise impossible university education. A large majority entered the mills to secure independence, or household and dress adornments. Not a few entered so as to be near circulating libraries and schools, with the opportunities for self-culture which these afforded. Coming from the agricultural class, which considered itself among the aristocracy of America,[173] no class distinctions were made, and the factory young women were welcomed into the best social circles of Lowell. Well but simply dressed, as was the fashion of the times, they were to be seen at church, Sunday-schools, and social gatherings at the parsonages and elsewhere, receiving the same consideration as those whom circumstances had placed above the need of work. The girls themselves felt no loss of caste or diminution of self-respect. Most of them expected to marry—many did—and withdraw from the factory, and failing this, when factory work became disagreeable, to retire to the family home. The factory was an episode, not, as it later became too frequently elsewhere, the burden of this chapter in woman’s life. The factories _per se_ were as remarkable as the women who operated them. Kept as clean as the nature of the work would admit, with plants growing in the windows trained to shade the glass, the rooms seemed redolent of the country. Fronting one side of the building were the banks and waters of the swift-flowing Merrimac, which, as it hastened on to meet the sea, turned the wheels of the machinery, ignorant as yet of steam. On the other was the bright, new village, looking, as Dickens said in 1843, “as if every kind of store had taken down its shutters for the first time and started in business yesterday.” Standing on the hill was the prettiest building in the place, which was the hospital where girls when sick were tenderly cared for. Those unable to pay the weekly charge of three dollars, had it provided for them by the corporations. Seldom were the latter put to this expense, for Yankee girls had a horror of being placed under money obligations. Boarding-houses, erected by the mill-owners, were given in charge of reputable women. The charge for board in them, including the mid-day meal,—which was taken in civilized fashion at the boarding-house tables,—and washing to a certain extent, was fixed at the small sum of $1.50. Wages, counting in those of the little doffers, averaged $3.75 per week. Weavers, drawing-in girls, warpers, and spinners, who tended extra work, could earn from six to eight dollars per week. These wages, with the low price of board and the economical style of dress common in those days, enabled the mill operatives to place a large part of their earnings in the savings bank