Bobbin Doffing
BY TAYLOR CLARKE
It is difficult to masturbate in petticoats. I hike up three layers of skirt, and then the nineteenth-century bloomers, ruffled and puffy—invisible to a National Park visitor unless one were to bend me over my warp beam—and then contemporary tights. I hold the skirts in one hand and plunge the other past bloomers, control-top, and then my normal underwear, a polyester lace thong from Victoria’s Secret that I wash in the bathroom sink because my mother doesn’t approve. She would not approve of me touching myself behind the Visitor’s Center either, which is where I find myself, under windows that have never opened for risk of suicide and fresh air.
I’m fingers deep in my own underwear most days of the week, but I’m not always thinking about sex. Some days I’m thinking about college applications or the next tour group, and it’s just something to do with my hands. Like men in movies, feet on their desks, who pluck at a rubber band ball while doing shady capitalist shit. Like them, I am working.
My name is Harriet Hanson, and I participated in my first textile mill strike in 1836. I’m a bobbin doffer. I remove empty spools from the looms and I replace them. I kept a real meticulous journal about my mind-numbing job and the incredibly shitty working conditions, which I guess is why some teenager is paid seven dollars an hour two centuries later to impersonate me to strangers. The book’s called Loom and Spindle, though it’s unclear if I was self-impressed enough to title my own diary or if that was done after the fact.
But I don’t want to be Harriet anymore. My diary is written like I was the only woman alive on the nineteenth-century factory floor, which is some horse shit when you consider that’s not how collective action works. Collective action is supposed to be collective, which is why the mill strikes worked, because straight up everyone was involved, from the boffin doffers to the weavers to the boarding house matrons. No one broke the line.
Everyone else is just mentioned in passing, unless I’m citing some man’s more definitive history, which is also a load of horse shit, but it was 1836 so perhaps I deserve a break. A woman is mentioned in my diary; her name is Lovey. The diary only mentions Lovey once, in a list of “queer country girls.” I know that’s not what ‘queer’ meant then but still, this idea of Lovey, a woman who feels like she named herself. I don’t know what a lesbian might have looked like in the 1830s, but I’m pretty sure she’d refuse to wear the bonnet that’s part of my costume, a frilly thing with a ribbon under the chin that functions effectively like horse blinders, so that if a man wanted to rub up next to me, I couldn’t see him until it was too late.
I don’t masturbate with the bonnet on. That would be idiotic. I want to think about Lovey, who almost certainly would have preferred me with my bonnet off.
Men ogle me. Not while I’m masturbating, that’s just for me, but when I’m explaining how the looms work or how my job is actually super dangerous. They run their hands over the wood railings separating them from the machines. They ask me questions like “why did young girls do such scary work?” And I want to tell them that the story is always the same. What’s more erotic than a girl sticking her fingers where they don’t belong?
But I don’t say that. I say that our labor is cheap, and new industries are always sites of exploitation. This is before child labor laws, unions, or suffrage. My options are the mills or teenage childbirth. What would you pick?
The men don’t want to hear this. I can tell. They would rather I hadn’t said anything, so that the answer they could conjure to mind instead would be the one ripped from the most niche of porn clips: So you can protect me from the whims of the Industrial Revolution, big boy.
As part of my demonstration, I show my tour groups an entire floor of restored electric looms. I warn everyone that the sound of hundreds of machines thwacking away at muslin fabric will be extremely loud, almost unbearable, and I recommend visitors cover their ears. The men never do. I make direct eye contact with them as I flip a switch on the wall and the hulking, hibernating machines all come to life at once, and the sound that fills the old factory floor is immense, louder than they planned on, a cacophony of metal on metal. I hold these men’s eyes and refuse to shut off the machines until I see them wince. Only then do I flip the switch and shout into the newly quiet room, “Whew! Can you imagine 14 hours a day of that? Us mill girls stuff fabric in our ears!” I actually say “whew!” or sometimes even “gosh!” I maintain direct eye contact with the macho man in question while I use “stuff” as a verb.
On the day I plan to become Lovey and leave Harriet in the dust, I have to get off twice, the need so urgent I risk the Visitor’s Center restroom, the one we share with actual visitors. I have foregone my own underwear, because Lovey doesn’t strike me as a lace thong kind of person. I can’t tell you why my body is suddenly pressing on me so much. It’s not that far out of the normal range for me — masturbation is a healthy activity for a changing body, it is a feminist practice, I’m pretty sure all my friends are lying at sleepovers about how much they do it, blah blah — but the sense of urgency today is new, a physical sensation that might render walking my tour route difficult if I’m not attentive to it. But it’s not just about pleasure, or whatever. I risk being seen so I can be more fully Lovey.
My boss’s name is Seth. He’s a legitimate National Park Ranger because all of Lowell’s downtown is a National Park, though I have to admit I’ve never understood the suggestion that Lowell is the same as like, Yellowstone. But Seth wears the full regalia to work every day, even the hat, and I like to think I look slightly less stupid in comparison. When I approach him about changing my character, he scoffs.
“Harriett left us the best primary source there is,” he says. He is actually standing underneath a portrait of Ms. Harriet Hanson Robinson, because eventually I married rich and acquired portrait money. It was the best I could hope for. Hanging on the wall, I have an extremely square jaw and really great eyebrows, which are a low straight cliff over my eyes. They give me a very intense stare. The portrait could probably see me masturbating through the brick wall. Seth talks about Harriet like this all the time, like a personal friend. “She has a great story, and you deliver it well.”
This is true. I’ve been Harriet for two summers now, and no one can do it better. Personally, I think it’s my hatred for everyone around me.
“I just think we’re not doing enough justice to queer women’s participation in labor movements.” I am using Seth’s words against him. He is very concerned that we are never ‘doing justice’ to the historical record. It’s why he gets so pissy when he sees any one of us costumed and eating a candy bar.
I can see I’ve got Seth feeling guilty about whose stories we privilege with reenactments. He’s digging his hands around in his pockets like he’s looking for something. I continue. “Based on what Harriet says about her, Lovey is probably illiterate.” This is a stretch, and Seth knows it, as he has also read Loom & Spindle, probably many times. Harriet has some nasty things to say about the country girls, but she doesn’t go as far as to say they can’t read. “Queer illiterate factory workers are most vulnerable to the limitations of the archive.”
This job has taught me how to sound smart when talking to people who assume that I’m not. The tricks are vocabulary and sentence structure. Archive is a panty-dropper word. Put a definite article in front of it as if you and the person you’re trying to impress share context — like of course you’re talking about the same archive, the definitive one, the proverbial archive — and you’re home free. Your conversation partner will assume you know more than they do. You can say anything. Which is to say (another phrase I recommend), Lovey was a done deal.
Even with Seth’s sign-off, my options are pretty limited. The costume closet in the back of the Visitor’s Center is not extensive: dresses and men’s work shirts and trousers in various calicos (you may have assumed from various Oregon Trail-esque media that a calico is a printed fabric. It’s not necessarily. It’s just thick, scratchy cotton, and probably, historically, unprinted. Because who has time for that?). Lace-up leather boots in various sizes, all of which smell. In fact, the whole room smells, and I only tolerate time back there because I am deciding who Lovey could be. The question really is, how butch can I get away with? Seth had clammed up once I’d strung together ‘queer’ and ‘absence’ in the same sentence, so there is room to push the boundaries, but I haven’t lost sight of the fact that I am trying to accomplish something that is bigger than myself. I’m bored, sure, but I’m also hellbent on some kind of larger historical truth, so some level of accuracy is crucial.
For Lovey I choose: a tight French braid, the kind that pulls my skin back and makes my face look more masculine. No bonnet, and if Seth gives me grief, I will walk him through the Visitor’s Center and show him that not a single one of these washed-out angry ladies in the sepia photographs on the walls is wearing a fucking bonnet. But I chicken out on the clothing somewhat – I go with a muslin work shirt and plain skirt. No patterns, no pleats, buttons to the neck. I stuff the toes of men’s boots, convinced no museum-goer will know the difference. If they do, I will shrug. “I wear whatever boots I can find. When mine wore out, my ma sent my brother’s.”
I offload Harriet onto a girl who is only here to tick a college application box. I mean, we all are, but I can tell she doesn’t care. The new Harriet rolls her eyes when I point to the binder where Seth keeps the photocopy of Loom and Spindle. Her heart isn’t in it. I am comfortable with a phoned-in Harriet. Lovey will shine all the brighter.
I write a new script. I use the barest of details pulled from Harriet’s descriptions of country women in Loom and Spindle. Seth ok’s it with an extremely skeptical air, and specifies that if we are ever visited by a National Parks department representative over the course of the summer, I am to sit down and shut up. That didn’t happen last summer, and it is unlikely to happen now, though I think Seth and I both know I would have some things to say to said representative of the powers that be, starting with the anachronistic bonnets that privilege femininity over the backbreaking labor I engage in. I’m sure he dreads the possibility.
The next day, I know I’ve made the right decision because the family that arrives to the Visitor’s Center is so perfect I want to scream. Our most frequent guests are summer camps and the elderly, working their way through local free activities. Mostly visitors wander into the Visitor’s Center in search of a foothold in the downtown, someone to tell them where to go, maybe give them a map, and instead find a cadre of bored teenagers in pre-suffrage drag. The holy grail is a family humoring a young girl with a Dear America hard-on, just like this family, the daughter quite literally clutching “So Far From Home” to her chest while her brother remains buried in some gaming console. I recognize a time to shine. I aspire to making an impression. This sounds recruit-y of me, and maybe it is, but the girl in the purple vest with the beribboned book is already so far gone.
Seth typically offers up our services like an overeager pimp, and if the visitors do not seem overwhelmed already, which they often do, he invites us to summarize our histories so the visitors can choose. We are all pretty into it, because a tour is an opportunity to get out into the sunshine, drop your tour group at the designated ending place, and get in some texting or masturbating on the walk back.
Lovey, I had decided, is a weaver, managing the bucking bronco of the power loom all by herself. There is mastery there, but people come to the Visitor’s Center – if they come with any intention at all – not because they care about textiles but because they can’t imagine that a bunch of teenage girls literally invented the concept of the weekend without a single solitary man’s help. So I go for that angle. I fashion Lovey into a revolutionary.
“Who wants to work for fourteen hours a day? And Mr. Boott thinks he can just dock our pay when he wants, because we don’t have families to feed. I have a family to feed! My ma and sisters are back home, and they depend on me!” This is pretty typical propaganda. I could have lifted it straight from the National Park website, or any of the informational placards lying around. Mr. Boott, the owner of the mills, is always the villain. His first name was Kirk, and he looks as much like a date-raping frat boy as its possible to look in nineteenth-century portraiture. He just exudes Bad Man energy.
I continue, a bit further afield: “But we aren’t gonna get what we need sitting back and letting these industrialists run our lives! We gotta rise up, and show these men they don’t make nothing without us!”
I end my speech shouting, with my fist in the air. In hindsight, the grammatical errors aren’t fair to Lovey. I don’t know enough about nineteenth-century speech patterns to assume Lovey would screw up a negative. That might be anachronistic.
The father turns to his daughter: “Admera, who do you want to lead our tour?” Admera hasn’t taken her eyes off me. She points right at me. Of course she does.
Our walking routes are the same regardless of character. The canal, Boarding House Park, and finally the mill itself, the grand finale of turning on all the machines. Admera keeps pace with me, her braids quite literally swinging with eagerness. Her parents and brother are slightly behind as we approach our first stop, where Merrimack Street crosses over the canal.
“Where are y’all from?” I ask while we wait for her family to catch up.
“Albany,” she says. “The New York state capital.” In case I am unfamiliar.
“So far!” I exclaim. “Your horses must be tired!”
Real commitment to the nineteenth century never fails to get a chuckle out of parents and confuse small children. I once had a young boy burst into tears when I refused to acknowledge the reality of cars. Admera, on the other hand, nods seriously. “Yes, we will need to rest for some days before they can bear us home.”
I am fucking thrilled.
“I’ve never been so far,” I say. “My ma and sisters are up in Nashua, but there’s no work out in the country. I’ve been there and nowhere else. I would love to see New York.” This is true, though I don’t mean Albany, and I assume Admera knows this. It must be an old song for someone from Albany.
“Albany is fine,” she says, “It’s not like this.”
If I was willing to break character, which I’m not, I would tell Admera that’s not true. Every place is the same, really, if you wish you were someone else. Jack Kerouac got out of here as fast as he possibly could, and we still named a ton of shit after him.
By now her family has caught up with us, and I can start my canal spiel, which is not all that different from what Admera’s family could read on the placard in front of us. Water-powered electricity, feat of human engineering, blah blah. Sometimes, when it feels like my gathered crowd isn’t listening, I like to include a single untrue fact to catch them unawares. Something like the city throws its witches in here to see if they sink or swim. But that’s nearby in Salem, and Admera would know better. It’s possible we did it too, though, while everyone’s attention was elsewhere.
The walk to Boarding House Park along the trolley tracks is our longest stretch, and we quickly lose Admera’s parents, who I realize are trying to give us space. Even so, Admera says nothing, struck dumb either by the star power of a mill girl in the flesh or all the justice she now needs to mete out in Albany.
“Why did you want to visit our little town from so far away?” I finally ask, because Admera’s face is turned up like a golden retriever’s.
She gestures at the book in her armpit. It’s the original red hardcover. “Mary made it sound tremendous.”
I really, truly want Admera to find me tremendous. Her awe feels important. I want to tell her that when I’m in the Visitor’s Center bathroom, I’m thinking about an entirely different life. That I don’t know how to talk to girls, that I’ve never been kissed, that the life I want feels years and years away. Being Lovey or being with Lovey means I can invent the details. Lovey had been real, once upon a time, one line in a book long out of print. That’s enough, sometimes. Other times I feel so lonely and defensive that I really do wish I were centuries older, because Lovey and even Harriet have purpose, and I have to wait until college or longer to really start my life.
But I don’t say any of that, because Admera is ten years old. The point I want to make isn’t sexual or creepy, but it is depressing. I’d rather give her a tremendous memory instead.
Boarding House Park is a flat grass pavilion with a large steel stage on one end. Behind the stage are the trolley tracks, and then the canal, and the mill on the other side where we’ll finish our tour. I’ve always thought it a serene and uncomplicatedly beautiful space. Today, there are other teenagers on their backs in the grass watching the clouds. Other teenagers are wild cards. I’ve had my script thrown off entirely by kids I recognized from school who humped the air behind my tour group. These kids seem stoned, and therefore relatively inoffensive.
“This is where the women of the mills took their stand.” I tell Admera and her family. We are no longer allowed to refer to the mill girls as girls, Seth says it’s too diminutive, even though I like to remind him that these women were thirteen and fifteen. My seventeen-year-old ass is here because it’s now illegal to hire girls that young, which is thanks to the labor laws these girls themselves pushed for, but Seth likes to remind me this is a nuance lost on the average National Parks visitor. “The mill women organized many of their strikes in this park, and the city has memorialized it as a site of free assembly and continued protest.” And though I feel slightly undercut by the banner over my head that advertises children’s sing-along time with Muppets knock-offs every Friday, Admera’s eyes are big and shiny and eager. Across the grass, the other teenagers watch me, slack-jawed.
The loom room is always a grand finale, the noise and the gnarly stories of missing limbs enough to draw out even the most bored tour participant. Admera’s brother finally looks up from his screen when I allude, tastefully, to the terrible consequences of a single hair tendril caught in a loom’s gears.
The old mill buildings don’t have air conditioning, and inside the loom room, even with the machines all powered off, it is nearly one hundred degrees. Admera’s father starts sweating immediately, droplets forming on his bald head like a cartoon character.
“With each of these machines powered on, the mill floor could easily reach one hundred and twenty degrees in the summer time. Windows would remain firmly shut.” Tour participants are separated from the rows of machines by a wooden railing. I step through a gap near the wall to reach the switch. Sometimes we catch other tour groups on the final stop of the tour, but today we are alone.
I’d more or less ignored Admera’s father up until now, because he’s pretty inoffensive, as far as men go. It’s not that I think they’re all predators, statistically that can’t be the case, it’s just that I’ve never met a middle-aged man who actually cared about historical reenactment except Seth, and Seth cares so much it’s like a weird fetish thing. My point is simply that most men on my tours are at worst nefarious and at best bored. Admera’s father is trying his best to look interested, but he’s not really. He’s snuck a couple glances at the clock over the doorway by now, which just proves my point.
I’ve never masturbated in the loom room. There’s no privacy; people are always coming in and out. The gift shop is just through the opposite door. Inexplicably, they have a barrel of geodes there, the kind you purchase by weight in a cotton bag. Also a $300 hand loom, which Admera will probably lust over for the next six months of her life, like I still do, sometimes.
“Would you like to come closer?” I ask Admera, and she is slipping beneath the railing even as her mother opens her mouth to say something, probably that the barrier exists for a reason, which it does, but I want this to be special. I want to be remembered.
“Is that safe?” Admera’s father asks, his eye having caught Admera’s mother’s, and I want to say, what is the point of safe?!, but I don’t, instead I say, “Just don’t touch anything, you haven’t been trained yet!” Mom’s mouth is pursed. “The machines are very loud. I will only turn them on for a moment. Remember that I have to work here, for fourteen hours a day.”
I flip the switch. As always, the racket that fills the air is tremendous. Mom and Dad cover their ears immediately, but Admera is spinning around in the midst of the machines in total awe. She tries to look at them all, and also at me, and I find I’m smiling hugely and I’m slow to turn off the machines, even though both parents are grimacing, because I want that joy to last a bit longer for us both.
I think it’s pretty hard to see and hear the looms and think of anything but sex. I mean, Admera probably isn’t, but for anyone who has ever seen an ounce of porn, the looms would trigger something like a sense memory. The rhythmic thwack! of the beater bar thrusting into muslin is fast, like a jackhammer. The hundred looms no longer run in unison, maybe they never did, and so the room is an orgy of wood meeting fabric. The power loom was invented by Edmund Cartwright, and there’s a reproduction of his portrait in the loom room. He’s got curly hair and a butt chin and somehow looks even dykier than I could possibly describe him.
When I switch the looms off, the sound in the room always takes a moment to right itself. The looms slow, rather than stop suddenly, and so there are few more half-hearted thwacks? before it’s all over. Sometimes there is ringing, like what I’d imagine happens after a bomb. Or sometimes there is total unearthly silence before the sounds of the normal day creep back in, birds chirping or a door closing. Today, there is the sound of a man yelling, which is not all that out of the ordinary for a factory floor.
“Get out from there!” Seth is waving Admera out from behind the railing like a lifeguard trying to rein in reckless swimmers. Unsurprisingly, she does not respond well to his tone and crosses her arms across her chest. I want to point out that the looms are off and any perceived danger is passed, but I am about to be fired for gross negligence, and so I stay quiet. Admera does not move even though Seth’s voice has increased an octave.
“You could be hurt!” he says, “Girls—I mean women—were scalped!”
I have already covered this topic area, in present tense, outside the mill. As Seth well knows, women were far more likely to lose fingers than entire scalps, but Seth is going for drama and fear and not historical accuracy.
Neither of Admera’s parents have moved, though her mother’s face swivels between daughter and father, as if she has yet to decide who is at fault. Dad watches Seth. Everyone, except for Admera, has forgotten about me. She is looking at me for permission.
Lovey would not bend so easily to the will of an overseer. She would resent being used to control another woman’s body. But I am not stupid enough to believe this situation is even remotely the same as those. For one, we’ve redefined what a child is since Lovey would have had to make this choice. For two, what would be the point?
“Admera, go back over. I have to get back to work now, before the boss man catches me idle.” At this, Seth remembers my presence, and he does not think this is funny. There will be forms. I will have to explain to my parents and find another job. It is only July. There is so much summer left.
But Admera slips back underneath the wood railing to safety, which in this case is two anxious parents and a brother who still could not care less. And though I want to give Admera a hug, and tell her that meeting her has been tremendous, her parents are already ushering her and her brother into the gift shop. Seth yells after them that they should enjoy the rest of their stay, but it sounds sarcastic, as if instead of tour guides, we were time travelers hellbent on keeping this place to ourselves.
When we are alone, Seth rubs the back of his neck with one hand. Lovey wouldn’t apologize, but I want to. He cocks his head back in the direction of the Visitor’s Center, suggesting that we walk back there together so he can fire me properly. But I want to stay. I want to forestall the inevitable, maybe, but mostly I want to send Lovey off in proper style. When I say so, Seth shrugs like a man choosing his battles and leaves—confident, I guess, that I’m not the kind of person to burn down the building on my way out.
I don’t know what I’m hoping for. That Admera will break free of her parents and run back to give me a hug, maybe. Or a visitation from the real Lovey, alighting behind the barrier like some kind of Christmas Carol ghost. Neither girl appears. The looms and their massive rolls of cream-colored muslin are silent. In the minutes with Admera’s family, the looms created a few additional feet of fabric. We sell those spools at the gift shop too, though no one ever purchases one hundred yards of undyed, scratchy cotton.
Once Seth is out of earshot, I flip on the switch. Amid the noise, I walk behind the barrier, behind rows and rows of looms. On the back wall, there is a surprising lack of museumness – no placards, nothing hung on the brick walls between tall windows. Dust dances in the grime-filtered sun. What I do back there is no one’s business but mine.
