Life in the Factory
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What students do
- Describe the factory system and how the working day was organized by the clock and an overseer
- Explain the tasks children and women performed on the machines, such as doffing and piecing
- Analyze Elizabeth Bentley's 1832 Sadler Committee testimony as a primary source
- Trace how that testimony helped win the Factory Act of 1833
What it covers
- What a working day looked like inside an early industrial mill, including wages and conditions
- How the Sadler Committee gathered worker testimony to expose factory conditions
- Key vocabulary including factory system, doffing, piecing, overseer, and child labor
Learning targets
- Describe the factory system and how the working day was organized by the clock, shifts, and an overseer.
- Explain the kinds of work children and women did in the mills, such as doffing and piecing, and why owners hired them.
- Describe the wages and conditions workers faced in early factories in plain historical terms.
- Explain how reformers on the Sadler Committee gathered worker testimony to expose factory conditions.
- Explain how that testimony helped win the Factory Act of 1833 and what the law did.
From one teacher to another
This lesson stays close to one worker's actual words, Elizabeth Bentley's 1832 testimony to the Sadler Committee, because a mill day described in the abstract loses details like doffing, piecing, and an overseer keeping everyone at the machines. Students trace how testimony like hers became evidence lawmakers could use, and how that evidence turned into the Factory Act of 1833. I wanted the reform to feel earned by the end, built from the evidence students already read for themselves.
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