You may want to look at the sources I suggested for our Woman’s Suffrage issue http://historynow.org/03_2006 /ask2.html for works surveying 19th-Century American women’s history in general.

These books provide more general surveys of women in the workforce in that period:

Baxandall, Rosalyn Baxandall, and Linda Gordon. America's Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present. New York: Norton, 1995.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. Out To Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Reprint of a pioneering work.

Woodberry, Helen Laura. History of Women in Industry in the United States. New York, Arno Press, 1974. Reprint.

The “Teachers” section of “Women Working, 1800 -1930,” a section Harvard University Library’s Open Collections website, doesn’t yet have much material directly related to this period, but it is a work in progress, so check back periodically for relevant additions:

http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/teachers/

You’ll find a great deal of good material on the evolution of the systems in the early textile industry. I’ll start with books:

Dalzell, Robert F. Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Scranton, Philip. Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800-1885. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Tucker, Barbara M. Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790-1860. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984.

On the Internet, you might want to start with the brief but sound essay on the “Textile Industry” in Answers.com. Follow the links there to find out more about the “Lowell system,” Francis Cabot Lowell, and other details:

http://www.answers.com/topic/textile-industry

PBS’s “They Made America” website has a good sketch of Francis Lowell and the industrial world he remodeled:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/lowell_hi.html

Your choices are even wider when you and your students take a look at the women who were part of this new industry. On the specific question of women factory workers, start with this article and these books by Thomas Dublin, author of the article in this issue:

Dublin, Thomas, ed. Farm to Factory: Women's Letters, 1830-1860. New York: Columbia, 1993.

Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Dublin, Thomas. "Women, Work, and Family: The View from the United States." Journal of Women's History 11 (1999): 17-21

And continue with some of these books:

Eisler, Benita, editor. The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1840-1845). Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1977. A selection of sketches, poems, stories and essays from the monthly magazine written by these workers.

Weisman, JoAnne B., ed. The Lowell Mill Girls: Life in the Factory. Lowell: Discover Enterprises, Ltd., 1991. Part of the Perspectives on History Series, this contains essays and historical fiction, including writing from the Lowell Offering and Factory Tract Number 1. Designed for use with a school curriculum.

Two organizations in Lowell, Massachusetts, have created online sources that will be of enormous help to you. The National Park Service’s historic site at Lowell, working with the Tsongas Center for Industrial History at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell produced this Activity Guide on farm and factory life for classroom useful:

http://www.uml.edu/tsongas/programs/pdfs/farmtofactory.pdf

Lowell National Historical Park offers excellent suggestions in its annotated “Bibliography”:

http://www.nps.gov/archive/lowe/2002/loweweb

The University itself has a first-rate “Essays and Exhibits” page at its Library’s website that offers links to many interesting options including essays and bibliographies:

http://library.uml.edu/clh/Exhibit.Html

Be sure to try Gray FitzSimmons’ “Mill Life in Lowell” there – you won’t believe the links:

http://library.uml.edu/clh/mo.htm

One of my sentimental favorites is this website on “Mill Girls” prepared by a 5th grade class at Berwick Academy:

http://www.berwickacademy.org/millgirls/mill_girls.htm

You can find Harriet Robinson’s contemporary account of “Lowell Mill Girls” at the Fordham website:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/robinson-lowell.html

CUNY’s website on the documentary “Daughters of Free Men,” part of the University’s “Who Built America?” series of documentaries. Even if you don’t have the video, the essays, visuals, and links are great for studying the lives of Lowell factory girls:

http://www.ashp.cuny.edu/video/d-guide.html

This is an interesting study of contemporary discussions of the impact of factory work on American women:

Maibor, Carolyn R. Labor Pains: Emerson, Hawthorne, and Alcott on Work and the Woman Question. New York: Routledge, 2004.

We have a good choice of materials for expanded study of unrest among women millworkers – their various associations and the ten-hour movement:

Murphy, Teresa Anne. Ten Hours' Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.

Zonderman, David A. Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815-1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

There’s some terrific material on the Internet, too:

About.com’s Women History has a good essay on the Lowell Factory Girls associations:

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/worklowellmill/p/lflra.htm

You can supplement this with the 1836 constitution of the Lowell Association, mounted by the University of Massachusetts at Lowell:

http://library.uml.edu/clh/All/doc01.htm

Here’s a chapter on the ten-hour movement in Delaware County, Pennsylvania from an 1884 History of Delaware County, Pennsylvania. by Henry Graham Ashmead :

http://www.delcohistory.org/ashmead/ashmead_pg108.htm

“New Hampshire Mill Girls and the Ten Hour Struggle”, a “Labor History Curriculum with Historical and Contemporary Readings” from the New Hampshire AFL-CIO:

http://www.labor-studies.org/Documents/New%20

George Mason University’s “History Matters” website provides the outlines of a classroom “Talk Show” on the Lowell strikes of 1834 and 1836

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6614/

You’ll find several good studies of women in the abolitionist movement. History Now’s issue on abolition has two essays on the role women played in the movement as well as resource pages for each article:
http://historynow.org/09_2005/index.html

Salerno, Beth A. Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005.

Venet, Wendy Hamand. Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991.

Yellin, Jean Fagan, and John C. Van Horne, eds. The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

And the Women’s History Museum (a cybermusem) provides links that create a virtual tour of women abolitionists in four cities:

http://www.nwhm.org/home/abolitiontour/abolitiontour.htm

The Worcester Women’s History Project provides a great site on the women’s rights conventions held in that city in 1850 and 1851. Original materials for teaching galore:

http://www.wwhp.org/Resources/

I hope that Dr. Dublin forgives me for closing with a recommendation of a website that deals with a topic he doesn’t discuss in his essay. I just can’t resist. It’s the part of the IIEE Virtual Museum’s “Powering the Electrical Revolution: Women and Technology “ Take a look at this thought-provoking section on “Women and the Communications Industry” that shows how women played significant roles in telegraphy and telephone communications from the earliest days:

http://www.ieee-virtual-museum.org/exhibit/exhibit.php?id=159251&lid=1