Lucy Larcom's memoir of her girlhood as a worker in the Lowell, Massachusetts cotton mills in the 1830s and 1840s, published in the Atlantic Monthly. She describes the founding of Lowell, Francis Cabot Lowell's power-loom and the corporation boarding-house system, and the daily life, religion, reading and self-education of the young women operatives. She discusses the Lowell Offering, the mill-girls' magazine, lyceum lectures, and the dignity of women's labor. There is little technical weaving content; the value is social and labor history.