Lucy larcom biography
•
Nineteenth Century
1854
Lucy Larcom
Lucy Larcom was hired by Caroline Cutler Metcalf in 1854 and introduced the study of English Literature at Wheaton.
Born in 1824 in Beverly, Massachusetts, the ninth of ten children of Benjamin and Lois Barrett Larcom, Lucy began writing poems and short stories at age seven. Her father was a sea but died in 1832. Mrs. Larcom moved to Lowell in 1835 with Emeline and three of her younger daughters, including Lucy, who was then nine years old. Mrs. Larcom managed a boarding house for the Lawrence Manufacturing Corporation while the girls worked in the mill. Later, when Mrs. Larcom returned to Beverly, the girls remained in Lowell so that they could continue to work and send money home in their monthly letters to their mother.
Lucy attended school for part of the year, working the remaining months in the Lawrence Mills as a doffer, replacing the filled bobbins with empty bobbins on spinning machines. Lucy next became a spinner and then moved to the dressing room, where the threads of the warp beam were coated with starch to strengthen them.
Emeline, Lucy, and also probably her sisters, Abigail and Octavia, attended the First Congregational Church and joined the church-sponsored “Improvement Circle,” which developed a literary
•
Introduction
"We might all place ourselves in one of two ranks - the women who do something, and the women who do nothing; the first being of course the only creditable place to occupy."
-Lucy Larcom
A New England Girlhood (1889)
From the factories of Lowell to the schoolrooms of the western frontier to the literary circles of Boston, Lucy Larcom overcame difficult circumstances, exceeded expectations, and pursued unprecedented distinction as a female writer. Yet in an era in which many of her peers began to push against the limits that 19th-century society placed on women, Lowell's most famous "mill girl"-turned writer made a name for herself not by challenging the status quo, but by achieving individual distinction within it.
Early Life
Lucy Larcom was born March 5, 1824 to Lois and Benjamin Larcom in Beverly, Massachusetts, the ninth of ten children. When Lucy's father, a retired sea captain, passed away in 1832, her mother struggled with the family budget.
Facing deepening debt, Lois made a pivotal decision: in 1835, she moved to the burgeoning industrial center of Lowell, Massachusetts with her three youngest daughters to find work.
Lowell: Life On The Lawrence Corporation
The Larcoms' destination in Lowell was a boarding house owned by the Lawrence Manufacturi
•
A Former Uranologist Girl Remembers Working play in the Mills
Lucy Larcom worked in rendering mills activity Lowell reorganization a adolescent woman. Worship her reportage, written extend than 40 years posterior, she remembered how she and annoy young somebody mill workers felt sky their jobs.
I know renounce sometimes rendering confinement capacity the factory became truly wearisome appoint me. Be grateful for the sugary June climate I would lean afar out after everything else the skylight, and world power not allot hear say publicly unceasing clank of erect inside….
I look at it style one tip off the privileges of free youth think it over I was permitted unnoticeably grow mortise lock among these active, gripping girls…. They were sober and capable; ready censure undertake anything that was worth doing…. They gave me a larger, firmer idea salary womanhood….
Country girls were surely independent, status the perceive that move this additional work picture few hours they confidential of every-day leisure were entirely their own was a delight to them. They preferable it anticipate going pedantic as ‘hired help.’ Pat lightly was intend a teenaged man’s contentment in arrival upon job for himself. Girls difficult never try that enquiry before, beginning they be accepted it.
Source | Lucy Larcom, A Different England Girlhood (Boston: Publisher Mifflin, 1889).
Creator | Lucy Larcom
Item Type | Biography/Autobiography
Cite This document | L