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?

1910. Pownal, Vermont. At 12, Grace and her best friend Arthur must leave school and go to work as a “doffers” on their mothers’ looms in the mill. Grace’s mother is the best worker, fast and powerful, and Grace desperately wants to help her. But she’s left handed and doffing is a right-handed job. Grace’s every mistake costs her mother, and the family. She only feels capable on Sundays, when she and Arthur receive special lessons from their teacher. Together they write a secret letter to the Child Labor Board about underage children working in Pownal. A few weeks later a man with a camera shows up. It is the famous reformer Lewis Hine, undercover, collecting evidence for the Child Labor Board. Grace’s brief acquaintance with Hine and the photos he takes of her are a gift that changes her sense of herself, her future, and her family’s future.

Author Harriet Robinson (1825-1911), born Harriet Jane Hanson in Boston, offers a first person account of her life as a factory girl in Lowell, Massachusetts in this 1898 work. Robinson moved with her widowed mother and three siblings to Lowell as the cotton industry was booming, and began working as a bobbin duffer at the age of ten for $2 a week. Her reflections of the life, some 60 years later, are unfailingly upbeat. She was educated, in public school, by private lesson, and in church. The community was tightly knit. She also had the opportunity to write poetry and prose for the factory girls' literary magazine The Lowell Offering. When mill girls returned to their rural family homes, she says, "...instead of being looked down upon as 'factory girls, ' they were more often welcomed as coming from the metropolis, bringing new fashions, new books, and new ideas with them."

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.

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...