Poems & Poets Please: Lucy Larcom

Lucy Larcom [1824-1893] was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1824, the ninth of ten children. She left Massachusetts, in 1835 to work cotton mills in Lowell from the ages of 11 to 21 as a doffer. As a mill girl she hoped to earn some extra money for her family. While working at the mills in Lowell, Lucy made a huge impact. She wrote and published many of her songs, poems, and letters describing her life at the mills. Her idealistic poems caught the attention of John Greenleaf Whittier. Larcom served as a model for the change in women's roles in society. 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.

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