The Daring Ladies of Lowell by Kate Alcott

The Daring Ladies of Lowell sets the stage for the spirited heroine, Alice Barrow, who leaves her farm to come to the city to work at a cotton mill. “I could almost hear them clattering up the stairs …,” she said, “taking their positions to work.” O’Brien said that’s where she got a sense of how the mill girls once lived. She said they went for a drive through the downtown’s cobbled streets and toured a few local museums. O’Brien, who lives in Washington, D.C., said she became enamored with Lowell when she visited the city for a day recently with a friend. The historical fiction centers on the life and times of mill girls in the early 1830s and is based in part on the 1832 murder of Sarah Cornell, a Lowell factory worker who was found strangled to death in Fall River. Somerville-born Patricia O’Brien, who writes under the pen name Kate Alcott, is releasing her latest book, titled The Daring Ladies of Lowell, on Feb. What is Alice’s most admirable trait? What is her least admirable trait?ġ0.LOWELL - The Mill City has served as inspiration for writers going back to Charles Dickens’ time and beyond, and now a New York Times best-selling author has set her sights on Lowell for her new novel. What does she represent and how has her influence shaped Samuel?ĩ.

Alice forms a bond with a Samuel’s grandmother, who stands apart from the rest of the Fiske family. Stanhope’s knowledge of the poor conditions and health hazards at the mill).Ĩ. Discuss the role respectability plays in the novel, and the consequences of the secrets that are kept to save reputations (as in the case of Jonathan Fiske) and to maintain the status quo (Dr. Could you make it through a “factory girl” workweek?ħ.

Alice and her co-workers have a grueling schedule: thirteen-hour days, ceaseless physical labor, and only one day a week off. Discuss Delia and Ellie’s difficult situation and the many parallels with the challenges working mothers still deal with today: a troubled marriage, battle for custody of a child, and the difficulty working women can have in securing adequate child care.Ħ. Why do you think progress has been so slow in protecting working people?ĥ. Hunt held that workers have the right to organize and strike, and more than one hundred years until federal law was passed prohibiting child labor. The Daring Ladies of Lowell takes place in 1832, ten years before the landmark decision in Commonwealth v. What was your initial reaction to Lovey? Do you think she is reckless or a woman ahead of her time?Ĥ. When Alice first meets Lovey, she doesn’t quite know what to make of Lovey’s frankness and her high spirits. Did the descriptions of how much work went into creating simple piece of cotton cloth surprise you?ģ. How is the treatment of the “factory girls” different from the way women are treated in today’s work place? How is it similar?Ģ.

The Daring Ladies of Lowell by Kate Alcott