Paternalism and Protest in Augusta’s Cotton Mills: What’s Gender Got to do with It?

Abstract

With the publication in 1921 of this classic work The Rise of the Cotton Mills, the historian Broadus Mitchell set the framework for discussions of the nature of the mill workforce and the mill owner in the southern textile industry: According to Mitchell, the development of that ndustry in the late nineteenth century was benign and benevolent. The white southerners who established mills wanted to promote the betterment of their communities and ameliorate the condition of the growing ranks of the rural and urban poor created by the economic decline of southern agriculture. In establishing textile mills, local capitalists were empowered to offer these less fortunate white members of the community remunerative employment when their farms failed. They often supplied improved housing, started schools for children, and helped to finance mill churches. Altogether, Mitchell concluded, mill owners behaved more like fathers than like employers to “their” mill people, and the workers responded with gratitude and intense loyalty to the men who had created a better way of life for them. It was unfortunately true that these mill owners paid workers miserable wages and worked them long hours, while making handsome profits from their employees’ labor. However, since the profit motive was basically secondary to the mill owners’ desire to promote class relations that would mirror those found in a happy family Mitchell expressed his hope that this one blight on the industry would soon be eliminated.¹