“And that’s how we did in the mill” Women in the Lowell Textile Mills. Dir. Martha Norkunas, 1983.

“And that’s how we did in the mill” is based on excerpts from oral histories with the last generation of women to work in the Lowell, Massachusetts textile mills. It is divided in to three parts: Stories of Immigrating to the United States, Stories of Living in the Ethnic Neighborhoods, and Stories of Work in the Textile Mills.

In 1983 Martha Norkunas co-created a series of oral history interviews with twenty-two women who worked in the Lowell textile mills in the first half of the twentieth century. The women identified ethnically as Irish, Greek, French-Canadian, Polish, Lithuanian, and Italian. Some months later Norkunas returned to Lowell with a camera crew and shot video footage for the film. It aired on WGBH Boston and was regularly used in the Lowell National Historical Park’s educational programs. In 2010 Norkunas digitized and re-edited the film at the University of Texas at Austin. Now it is freely available to teachers and others interested in oral history, women’s history, labor history, industrial history, and Lowell history.

The project was funded by Humanities Massachusetts, the Theodore Edson Parker Foundation, and sponsored by the Lowell Museum Corporation, with support from the Lowell National Historical Park, The Indiana University Folklore Institute, and the Indiana University Oral History Research Center. All interviews and video footage are available to the public at the Center for Lowell History at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.