Turning raw cotton into cloth required many specialized mill jobs along a production chain that began with men opening cotton bales and loading them into cleaning and fluffing machines, continued through picker and carding rooms where workers cleaned the cotton and formed slivers, moved through machinery that stretched and twisted the fibers, and reached the spinning, spooling, slashing, and weave rooms, where women tied broken threads, doffers replaced full spools, yarn was transferred and coated with starch, and looms were threaded and operated according to the cloth pattern. Workers’ jobs depended on age, gender, and race, and pay varied by job, experience, speed, skill, and sometimes production rates; in 1904, a weave room supervisor earned about $15.00 per week, a doffer as little as $2.40, and most workers between $3.00 and $7.00 weekly. During the late nineteenth century, mill hands usually worked six twelve-hour days each week, and the eight-hour day did not become standard until 1938. Textile mills operated on a family-based labor system, recruiting entire families from the countryside to live in mill housing and work in the mills, but many found prejudice from the larger community and struggled with the noisy, hot, crowded pace of machine work and the loss of control over their own time, even as some regarded the work as drudgery while others found satisfaction in paid labor.