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What Is Lyddie Essay

853 Words4 Pages

Girls from Lowell, Massachusetts, worked hard for around 14 hours each day in dust and lint filled air in the mid 1800’s. In the book, “Lyddie”, by Katherine Paterson; the main character, Lyddie, is one of the girls from the factory. Lyddie is a young teenage girl who grew up on a farm in Vermont with her mom and her three younger siblings. Her dad left her at a young age which caused her mom to go crazy, leaving Lyddie in charge of taking care of the rest of the family. Her dad left her family with so much debts making her have to rent out the farm and work at Lowell. The factory offered high pay, but desired hard work in a poor conditioned area. This left many factory girls very sick, and almost causing them to die. Many girls started to protest, forming the petition. …show more content…

Lyddie should choose to sign the petition. With nothing to lose, Lyddie can help her friend Diana, and help the girls around her to avoid working in a toxic area for a long amount of time and the long working hours each girl must participate in each day.
One reason Lyddie should sign the petition is because the working conditions in the Factory are harmful to all the factory girls containing toxic material from the machines filling the air. When Lyddie just figures out that Betsy has to go home because of a sickness of the factory in chapter fourteen, she states while Betsy is leaving to go home in the boardinghouse, “It ain’t right for this place to suck the strength of their youth, then cast them off like dry husks to the wind.”(Paterson, p.113) Therefore, the lint and dust filling the air while girls work each day is making them so sick that they can’t gather the strength up to work hard again. The working conditions is making it very easy for girls to develop strong sicknesses, that could cause them to end up having to leave the factory. If Lyddie were to catch a virus, she could be

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