the daring ladies of lowell by kate alcott

And the following morning, there is the horrifying discovery of Lovey's hanged body.

When she returns from a futile dinner at the Fiske's Boston home where she was meant to be an emissary between the mill workers and the Fiskes but where her ideas were roundly dismissed or ignored, it is to find Lovey missing. Alice quickly becomes a voice in defense of the mill girls and the problems with their working conditions, even as she worries about Lovey's sudden secretiveness and tries to stop herself from being drawn to Samuel Fiske, the mill owner's son. As she settles into her work at the looms, she sees firsthand the dangers that abound in the mill: dangerous machinery, unavoidable inhalation of cotton fibers, and appallingly long work hours that make workers careless out of fatigue to name just a few.

She finds a room in a boarding house with several other mill girls who quickly become her closest friends, especially the cheerful and occasionally reckless Lovey. Kate Alcott's latest novel, The Daring Ladies of Lowell, offers up the story of one such fictional mill and the opposing political ideas about mills and mill workers that swirled around even as early as the 1830s.Īlice Barrow is newly arrived in Lowell, eager to find work as a mill girl, to forever escape her father's farm and become independent. They were both great economic opportunities and potentially dangerous and deadly for the workers employed there. There's Ford's assembly line and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, both of which date to the early 1900s but even before that there were factories and mills operating in the US. (You remember those moth pictures, right? The ones where peppered moths were typically white speckled with black before the industrial revolution but became almost entirely black so they blended in with the soot covered leaves.) I rarely think of the mills and factories in this country but occasionally it does creep into my consciousness.

When I think of the Industrial Revolution, I tend to think of England, the Luddites, and the pictures of peppered moths from science textbooks illustrating evolution at work.

The daring ladies of lowell by kate alcott