There was no thought among them that there was anything degrading in factory work.

Most of the girls came from the surrounding farms, to earn money for a trousseau, to send a brother through college, to raise a mortgage, or to enjoy the society of their fellow workers, and have a good time in a quiet, serious way, discussing the sermons and lectures they heard and the books they read in their leisure hours.

They had numerous "improvement circles" at which contributions of the members in both prose and verse were read and discussed.

And for several years they printed a magazine, "The Lowell Offering", which was entirely written and edited by girls in the mills.
Charles Dickens visited Lowell in the winter of 1842 and recorded his impressions of what he saw there in the fourth chapter of his "American Notes".

He says that he went over several of the factories, "examined them in every part; and saw them in their ordinary working aspect, with no preparation of any kind, or departure from their ordinary every-day proceedings"; that the girls "were all well dressed: and that phrase necessarily includes extreme cleanliness.