The Millers

It's tempting to write that this photo has to be from the World War 2 era because of all the women in the picture.  But, that sure looks like a cotton bale in the center of the photograph and women have always been a large part of the textile industry.  I'm in my sixties and for about a third of my working life it was legal to smoke at work.  There is a no smoking sign in the background of this image and textile mills were one of the places where smoking was not allowed before work place smoking, in general, was banned.  The cotton dust in the air was highly flammable, and cotton mill fires killed a lot of people.