<P> Economic instability in the 1830s as well as immigration greatly affected the Lowell mills . </P> <P> Overproduction during the 1830s caused the price of finished cloth to drop and the mills' financial situation was exacerbated by a minor depression in 1834 and the Panic of 1837 . In 1834, the mills cut wages by 25%, which led the girls to respond by staging an unsuccessful strike and organizing a labor union called the Factory Girls Association . In 1836, they went on another unsuccessful strike when their housing rates were increased . Conditions continued to deteriorate until 1845, when the mill girls formed the Female Labor Reform Association, which joined forces with other Massachusetts laborers to pass laws aimed at improving working conditions in the state, which the mills simply ignored . </P> <P> The women responded by going out on strike and published magazines and newsletters like the Lowell Offering . They even petitioned the Massachusetts state legislature to pass a law limiting the workday to ten hours . The petition was unsuccessful but it mill owners that their employees had become too troublesome . </P> <P> By the mid-1840s, a "new generation of mill managers was in charge", for whom "profits rather than people seemed their primary, even sole, concern". </P>

3. what was the result of the invention of the lowell factory system