Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Letter to a Fanzine, circa 1841

From A History of American Labor by Joseph Rayback, this description of two oddly zine-like publications:
In 1841 there had appeared in Massachusetts the Lowell Offering, a magazine dedicated to the principle that the lot of the factory girl was a veritable heaven on earth. Recognizing the palpable falseness of the publication, groups of girls at Lowell and Exeter established their own periodicals, the Factory Girl and the Factory Girl's Album. These publications, crudely produced as they were, soon demolished the myth concerning the bucolic beauty of factory life.
Hey, female textile workers, that was pretty punk rock.

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