Joining the other lintheads at the local cotton mill, Selena 'Sippy' Wright gave up the world of a child and took on the responsibility of a woman as her family joined the emerging middle class on the landscape of the nation's fledgling economy. Facing the harsh realities of America's Industrial Revolution, Sippy learns to find her joy through the love of her friends and family, and eventually though the art of poetry. Join author Flora Ann Scearce as she shares her own mother's story, a story of life and learning, but more importantly a story of love and finding one's self during a time when the only thing constant in the world was change.

Saturday 21st May 1842 Something terrible has happened. I can scarcely bring myself to write the words. I Am to Start at the Mill On Monday. "You said never," I cried to Mother. Her face was white. "Oh Eliza," she said. "I'm so sorry. If there was anything I could have done..." "Where am I to work?" I demanded. The room was so quiet that I could hear myself breathe. "In the carding room. Sickness. They need more hands." I wasn't Eliza any more, just a pair of hands. Factory hands.

Discusses the history of the first mill in the United States to use machines to turn raw cotton into finished cloth, the women who worked in the mill, and how the innovations in the textile industry brought on the Industrial Revolution.

In spring 1842 Eliza is shocked when she is sent to work in the Manchester cotton mills - the noisy, suffocating mills. The work is backbreaking and dangerous - and when she sees her friends' lives wrecked by poverty, sickness and unrest, Eliza realizes she must fight to escape the fate of a mill girl...

A ten-year-old bobbin girl working in a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1830s, must make a difficult decision--will she participate in the first workers' strike in Lowell?

At the dingy, overcrowded Acme Garment Factory, Emily Watson stands for eleven hours a day clipping threads from blouses. Every time the boss passes, he shouts at her to snip faster. But if Emily snips too fast, she could ruin the garment and be docked pay. If she works too slowly, she will be fired. She desperately needs this job. Without the four dollars a week it brings, her family will starve. When a reporter arrives, determined to expose the terrible conditions in the factory, Emily finds herself caught between the desperate immigrant girls with whom she works and the hope of change. Then tragedy strikes, and Emily must decide where her loyalties lie. Emily's fictional experiences are interwoven with non-fiction sections describing family life in a slum, the fight to improve social conditions, the plight of working children then and now, and much more. Rarely seen archival photos accompany this story of the past as only Barbara Greenwood can tell it.