The magazine represented by this masthead was one of the few in the early 1800s that featured writings by women. Textile production in cotton mills, specifically those in New England, in the early 1800s marked a new chapter of industrialization in the United States, which was moving increasingly away from being a nation of small independent farmers that Thomas Jefferson championed. Cloth production in textile mills, the first American factories, soon outpaced production by hand or loom by individuals at home, who could not produce cloth quickly enough to meet the growing demand or make use of the large quantities of short staple cotton being produce in the South. Initially powered by water wheels, textile mills housed a growing array of everlarger and more complicated machinery that spun the thread and wove it into rolls of cloth. A sizeable human workforce was also needed to monitor the machines and to perform tasks automation had not yet replaced.