 The New England textile industry was rapidly expanding in the 1850s and 1860s . Unable to recruit enough Yankee women to fill all the new jobs , to supplement the workforce textile managers turned to survivors of the Great Irish Famine who had recently immigrated to the United States in large numbers . During the Civil War , many of Lowell 's cotton mills closed , unable to acquire bales of raw cotton from the South . After the war , the textile mills reopened , recruiting French Canadian men and women . Although large numbers of Irish and French Canadian immigrants moved to Lowell to work in the textile mills , Yankee women still dominated the workforce until the mid @-@ 1880s . 
