Why Did Lyddie Choose The Factory Life?

Have you ever wondered what it's like to work in a factory? Imagine dust, lint, smoke, and noise all in one crowded room. This is what Lyddie Worthen in the book, Lyddie, by Katherine Paterson has to face. Lyddie has faced many hardships when working in the factory. Lyddie is a young girl who is sent off to work to pay the debts for her family. Lyddie was fired from her first job and went to Lowell, Massachusetts to be a factory girl. When working, there are poor working conditions. Other workers have started a petition to improve the working conditions. Lyddie should not sign the petition because she is mentally strong and is getting paid well.

She gives her audience of women to ability to imagine certain aspects of child labor. In the third paragraph the sentence “Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night through, in the deafening noise of the spindles and the looms spinning and weaving cotton and wool, silks and ribbons for us to buy.” Her vivid description allows the women to picture the conditions the children are living in. It helps convince her audience to join her cause. “A girl of six or seven years, just tall enough to reach the bobbins, may work eleven hours by day or by night.” The mention of how old the girl is, she can just reach the bobbins, and has a strenuous work day shows the young and innocent brought into the workforce. the women can most likely picture the girl or known someone just like her that they can relate to which brings out emotion from the audience. Imagery helped Kelley get emotion to her

This affects how Jeannette views her life, and as a result, she wants to have a better life than

But, before she brings this up, she first convinces her audience just how excruciatingly terrible child labor is. Kelley focuses on children working long hours through the night, saying, “tonight while we sleep…working all night long.” She then goes on to repeat the phrases, “while we sleep,” and, “all night long,” various times throughout the core of her speech. The emphasis on children working through the night appeals to the audience’s pathos; it includes the listeners in the force enslaving children, making them accountable. While the audience sleeps in the comfort of their homes, young girls spend all night working to make products for them to enjoy. The sorrowful repetition gains the listener’s sympathy for the speaker’s cause. Lastly, Florence Kelley demonstrates ironic diction in her attempt to persuade her spectators to ally with her campaign. The speaker says, “boys and girls…enjoy the pitiful privilege,” to describe young children going off to their jobs instead of to their playdates. The use of the contradictory phrase “pitiful privilege,” reminds the audience that the privilege of having a job, earning a living, becomes a burden when forced on these young

She places a feeling of guilt on her audience, but calls them to action. She said, “Tonight while we sleep, several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills, all the night … spinning and weaving cotton and wool silks and ribbons for us to buy” (ln 18-22). She faults herself and her audience for sitting idly by while children are working in the middle of the night in harsh conditions. Furthermore, she continues to guilt the audience by stating that all the work these children are doing are for products that the audience will buy. In lines 59-61, Kelley attacks a bill that was removed that protected fourteen year old girls from working all night. This condemns her opposition as shameful. Kelley tries to unite her female audience against the “great evil” (ln 64-65) that is child labor. She believes that the suffrage of women will free children from the cruel nature of their working conditions.

There was one moment in the book where she had to make probably one of the most difficult choices in her life, yet she did not hesitate to make that choice. Jeannette’s older sister, Lori, always wanted to move to New York to escape her delusional parents. However, she did not have enough money to pay for a bus ticket, wiping out any hope that she had. " ‘I'll never get out of here,’ Lori kept saying. ‘I'll never get out of here.’ ‘You will,’ I said. ‘I swear it.’ I believed she would. Because I knew that if Lori never got out of Welch, neither would I.” Then one day, Jeannette was offered $200 and a bus ticket back to Welch to take care of a woman’s two toddlers in Iowa for the summer. Instead, she insisted that the woman, Mrs. Sanders, should take Lori and her payment be a “bus ticket to New York City.” The fact that Jeannette easily made the decision of sacrificing her ticket for Lori amazes me; she knew how important the trip the New York was for her, so she wanted to make that dream happen. When Lori left, Jeannette still did not give up on her dream to go to New York and become a journalist. She joined just about “every extracurricular event at the school” to gain the attention of colleges, particularly in New York. The motivation that can be found in this is that you cannot give up on your ambitions

Often throughout the book she mentions that it is said that "you're paid what you're worth", saying that little pay results in you not being to good of a person. With that label they were looked down on and viewed kind of as untouchables. They had low pay, long hours, no overtime pay, and no benefits which leads to low socio-economic-status a job that no one wants to pursue. She stressed that poverty wasn’t a sustainable condition, it's a state of emergency. Citizens in the lower classes are left to fend for themselves and the ten, eight, or six dollar jobs are all that's there for them. What she would encourage them to do is to demand to be paid what they're worth because in the end they will be better off.

After her father sets out on a journey and may never come back again, 13-year old Lyddie and 10-year old Charlie are hired out as servants in the tavern to pay back their family debt. Lyddie's mill life begins when she meets a mill girl dressed in rich, expensive clothes and learns that she can "clear at least two dollars a week" in the mill manufacturing cloth in Lowell, Massachusetts. In the historical fiction Lyunderlineddie by Katherine Paterson, Lyddie's friend; the infamous Diana Goss, circulates a petition asking for only 10-hours of work time per day. Lyddie should sign the petition because first, it's dangerous for young girls to work in a mill 13 to 14 hours a day, lots of workers get sick because of the strength it took to do mill work. Second, contagious factory air makes a lot of workers sick, working long hours allows the sickness to worsen. In addition, the workers are working longer hours and getting paid less. Lyddie should sigh the petition because of many different factors, signing the petition will improve Lyddie's mill conditions.

All of the factory workers aren’t as strong and youthful as they were when they first came to work in the mills. It really wasn’t “right for this place to suck the strength of their youth, then cast them off like dry husks to the wind.” (113) This is what the factory life did to the young workers. It wasn’t at all fair for the factory life to drain the workers of their youth. After the factory life sucks their strength & youth, the workers will “never be strong enough again to work in a mill thirteen, fourteen hours a day.” (113) The workers will never be strong enough just because they worked in the mill. They are permanently scarred for life due to their weak body. Also, Lyddie had heard “that wretched hacking sound that sawed through her rib cage straight into her heart …and knew it to be Rachel.” (139) Even the youngest & newest worker can quickly get sick. Rachel hasn’t worked in the mill for even a month yet she is already sick. Lyddie should sign the petition because the factory life drains the youth out of the young factory

In the novel Lyddie, by Katherine Paterson a young is sent to work in a tavern getting paid $00.50 but later gets fired when her boss found her as she was leaving work to go visit her house and her brother. But Lyddie (the main character) has found a solution to all of her problems, she would go work as a factory girl in Lowell, Massachusetts getting paid $1.50 an hour for all of the work she had done and she would get to live in a boarding house with other factory workers. She heads off

For instance, in Document C the author noticed “the modus operandi of the factory powers in this village of forcing poor girls from their quiet homes to become their tools and...to give up their life liberty to the heartless tyrants and taskmasters” (Document C). The author of Document C learned about the operation of the Lowell Mills of taking girls from their homes to work at the mills. For example, the way the “slaver” wagons convinced girls was “by ‘hoisting false colors,’ and representing to the girls that they can tend more machinery than is possible, and that the work is so very neat, and the wages such that they can dress in silks and spend half their time in reading” (Document C). Once they get the girls in the mills, they stay in the mills. So, lying to the girls, by saying they would have better work, wages, and living, to get them in, makes them stay for a long time. In summary, the way the mills got girls for work, by taking them from their homes and promised false work, wages, and living, is wrong and should never happen to

Perhaps because they had “learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers” and because they had “been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new” (Cather 127).  These girls show the readers how beneficial hard work and poverty can be to a person.  They were made strong because of the obstacles that they had overcome, and they were beautiful for this.  Jim is able to put their abstract pleasantness into words by equating them with poetry.  Somehow, the unique environment that these girls grew up under has made them into the poetry that they are.

Fewer hours would be good for Lyddie so the conditions of the environment won’t get her bad enough to make her sick again. In the text, it states, “Now that she thought of it, she could hardly breathe, the air was so laden with moisture and debris… she had to get air, but the window was nailed shut against the April morning. She leaned her forehead against it, even the glass seemed hot… She coughed trying to free her throat and lungs for breath.” This just shows how much pollution is in the air. Lyddie wasn’t even able to open the window to get a fresh breath of hair since it was nailed shut. Something needs to happen or the death count of factory workers will go higher. This environment is unsuitable at all for Lyddie, let alone the mill not being safe for the others. Lyddie’s environment is just terrible and it’s making everyone sick. Lyddie should sign the petition before bad things start happening. If this is going to be where Lyddie is going to work, they should at least make it safer. This is why we are going to talk about the other point, shortening amounts of hours Lyddie

To begin with, Lyddie should sign the petition to ensure better working conditions and health. In the textile mill, where Lyddie is working, the factory girls are getting sick, under the pressure of terrible working environment. Also, the girls have been treated unfairly and were working for long hours with little pay. For example, in the Lyddie, it states, “Now I’ve twice that many at a speed that would make the devil curse,” (Paterson, 91) This quote shows that in the mill the girls are working at incredibly fast pace that would be almost impossible to handle, and making workers, very exhausted. Thus, with the cruel working conditions, Lyddie should sign the petition to make the working conditions more suitable to the pace that girls can

Unlike today, children of the 1800’s were given jobs that have dangerous machines that can chop “little fingers, arms and legs”. They were also forced to work for long hours which vary from 10 to 14 hours each day! The children in Lowell worked in ”very dangerous places” that can lead to “injuries and even deaths.” Through the 10 to 14 hours of labor “factories put out fumes and toxins.” This is being supported by the article; Childhood Lost: Child Labor During the Industrial Revolution. In the novel, Lyddie decided to work and not break the rules of working in the mills. Throughout the novel, she decided not to sign the petition that limits the amount of hours of working in the Lowell Mills. Finally, Lyddie decided to fight back and went to