The first waves of migration off the farms into textile mill villages were primarily single women and widows, who had limited access to land and were drawn by the steady work and housing the mills provided. In Bynum, North Carolina, in 1880, widows headed nine of the fourteen households in the mill village. Mill owners valued women workers because they earned 60% of a man’s wage and were seen as cheap, unskilled labor. Inside the mills, work was often divided by sex, with women serving as spinners and weavers while men held more skilled, heavier, and supervisory jobs. In farm families, women had long carried major responsibilities including cooking, cleaning, child rearing, gardening, and fieldwork, and after moving to mill villages, married women with children often shouldered both household management and mill labor. Women moved in and out of millwork as children were born and domestic circumstances changed, and the number of married women and mothers entering the mills increased as child labor laws kept young children from working and economic necessity pushed both parents into paid employment. Edna Hargett, a weaver at Chadwick-Hoskins Mill in Charlotte, North Carolina, recalled rising at five o’clock to prepare food for her children before reporting to work at six, then returning home to washing, boiling clothes, and making lye soap in what she called a day of drudgery. Women mill workers were more often affected by sexual harassment than men, and without legal protection from workplace discrimination, they often had to defend themselves against intimidation, profanity, and dating pressure from supervisors. Although excluded from nearly all mill jobs, black women met an essential need in the mill village by working as domestic laborers who cleaned homes and cared for children while parents worked, often for extremely low wages that kept them away from their own families. Women also held mill village communities together through close social networks of visiting and gossiping, often on front porches, where they shared the news of the town and sustained a community bound by one another’s troubles, hardships, triumphs, and joys.