For more information about the Concord Public Library, visit concordpubliclibrary.net.
The Daring Ladies of Lowell
Kate Alcott
2014, 286 pages
Fiction
Twenty-year-old Alice Barrow flees her strict, straight-laced, widowed father who is a tenant farmer in New Hampshire to escape to the mills of Lowell, Mass. As a factory girl, she plans to earn enough money to help her father with his bills and save so she never has to work on a farm again. As a mill girl, she learns that factory work is long and hard and dangerous, just as work on the farm was. Alice finds the courage to speak-up and represent the workers and their grievances, although she never loses sight of her goal to become an independent woman. The author also weaves a murder, based on the actual case of Sarah Cornell from 1833 that happened in another New England state, and a little romance into the story.
Having been to the Lowell National Historic Park last year and seen one of the Boott Boardinghouses, I thoroughly enjoyed this tale of what life was like for the local girls who were brave enough to leave home and attempt to help their families by earning a weekly wage. They were the first mill workers, followed by many different immigrant groups who worked in the mills until the last of the mills closed in the 1950s.
