Lyddie, Chapter 16: Harassment by Mill Overseers Was Real

In chapter 16 of Katherine Paterson's novel Lyddie, the overseer stops Lyddie on her way out of the mill one evening and makes unwanted advances. She struggles free, stamps hard on his foot and runs back to her boardinghouse. For the mill girls of Lowell, Massachusetts, this was not invented drama.

What happens in the chapter

• Lyddie reluctantly withdraws savings to pay for her sister Rachel's board, and buys her clothes and books.
• At the mill, Brigid is falling behind because her mother is very sick; Lyddie gives her all the change in her pocket to fetch a doctor, and Brigid, her mind at ease, learns to keep pace with the machines.
• After fighting off the overseer, Lyddie lies for days with a terrible fever, drifting in and out of consciousness, and survives.

Was it real?

There are recorded cases of overseers behaving improperly toward the women they supervised — and probably many more that went unreported, because workers feared losing their jobs or being blamed.

• A letter from 1852. Eliza Bixby wrote to her brother that she was sorry a young woman named Lydia had gone to work for a certain overseer, whom she called one of the greatest villains she had ever known: his character, she wrote, was to seduce every innocent girl in his power.
• A memoir from 1898. Harriet Hanson Robinson recalled an overseer in her room whose familiar manner the girls disliked, and how, one day when he was especially offensive, she decided to confront him.
• A historian's view. Robert Forrant of the University of Massachusetts Lowell has described how supervisors harassed women on the job, with no union and no protection, and how older workers — "older" meaning perhaps 20 — watched over girls of 14 and 15. Most women sent money home to pay for the farm, a brother's schooling or family illness, which made the threat of dismissal all the more powerful.

Questions to write about

How might Lyddie have handled Mr. Marsden if she had not been sick? What was her attitude toward spending money on Rachel? And who was Brigid — what might she have seen, heard and felt in her first days in the weave room?

See it yourself

Lowell National Historical Park has a working weave room.

Sources

Based on "Lyddie: Chapter 16 - Fever," from the National Park Service Books to Parks series (Lowell National Historical Park), a work of the United States government in the public domain. It cites Eliza Bixby's letter of March 3, 1852 (Lowell National Historical Park), Harriet Hanson Robinson's Loom and Spindle (1898) and a 2017 WGBH News interview with Robert Forrant. Lyddie is a novel by Katherine Paterson; this page summarizes it and does not reproduce it.