"Although Lucy Larcom was a well-published poet in her lifetime, she is best known today for writing A New England Girlhood (1889). This autobiography is a classic book about the age of industrialization and her role in it as a textile mill worker – beginning at age eleven.

She was born on May 5, 1824, in the then-rural town of Beverly, Massachusetts, north of Boston. Lucy's life was greatly affected when her father, Benjamin, died when she was just eight. From then on, the family struggled to maintain middle-class status. Social Security, life insurance, and other mechanisms to assist such families had yet to be created, and the financial fate of widows often was hard. Instead of taking the usual path of finding a stepfather for her eight children, Lois Larcom moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, where the older girls worked in the textile mills, while she ran a boarding house for mill workers.

[Larcom] started as a spinner, using the education her mother had given her, rose to become a bookkeeper.

Larcom wrote many short stories and poems. Her first work was published in Operative Magazine, which was founded by her sisters for other machine operators. In 1843, Lucy Larcom's writing caught the attention of John Greenleaf Whittier, a nationally known poet and Quaker activist against slavery, and they became long-time friends.

After more than a decade in the mills, she took the big step of moving from New England in 1846; at 22, Lucy accompanied her sister Emeline and Emeline's new husband to the boomtown of St. Louis. Although she had little formal education, Lucy had learned enough from her mother and older sisters that she was hired as a teacher in nearby Illinois. She continued to write poetry, and in 1849, was recognized with inclusion in Female Poets of America. She managed to save enough from her teaching salary that she soon could afford to enroll at Monticello Female Seminary in Godfrey, Illinois. She graduated in 1852, having earned the credentials to teach at similar institutions back East.

Larcom then became a teacher at Wheaton Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts, while also continuing to write. When she won a major poetry contest in 1854, Whittier introduced her to his publishing contacts. Soon her poetry appeared in the leading periodicals of her time. She also anonymously edited three volumes of Whittier's work.

Larcom was an abolitionist and rejoiced when Abraham Lincoln was elected president. She became more conservative as she aged, however, and did not support Massachusetts' Lucy Stone or other women's rights leaders. Her chief ambition throughout life was maintaining middle-class respectability, while also asserting women's right to economic independence via education.

In 1889, Larcom published A New England Girlhood, which detailed her life as a Lowell mill worker. The book became her most famous work and is still in print today. She was sixty-five when she wrote it, and her reminiscences emphasized the positive side of life in the nation's early textile mills. It nonetheless has served as a valuable record of this unusual time in American history, when factories recruited teenage girls, paid them relatively well, and even provided opportunities such as Operative Magazine.

Larcom died in Boston on April 17, 1893 and was buried in her hometown of Beverly, Massachusetts."

[Sources: National Women's History Museum (NWHM) webpage.

Baldwin, David. "Lucy Larcom" in Notable American Women, vol 2, 368-69.

Kirkland, Winifred and Frances. Girls Who Made Good. Freeport, NY: books for Libraries Press, 1971.

Larcom, Lucy. A New England Girlhood: outlined from memory. Boston : Northeastern University Press, 1986.

Selden, Bernice. The Mill Girls: Lucy Larcom, Harriet Hanson Robinson, Sarah G. Bagley. New York: Atheneum, 1983.]