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.

A literary essay by Mary Austin portraying Seyavi, a Paiute basket maker of the Owens Valley in California. It recounts her widowhood, her survival after the Paiute defeat, her bowls decorated with a quail-plume design in colored bark, and her old age and blindness. Basketry appears as an expression of the maker's character and landscape rather than as a technical subject; there are no construction instructions.

A late-19th-century magazine article on child labor in Massachusetts factories and mills. It cites state school-attendance statutes and inspectors' findings of widespread non-compliance, and uses anecdotes and family budgets to show how working-class households depended on children's wages. It closes by arguing that child labor lowers adult wages and increases poverty, and it compares conditions in England.

A poem by George Parsons Lathrop printed in the Atlantic Monthly, December 1873. It imagines Helen of Troy weaving a purple mantle on an upright loom, working scenes of the Trojan War into the cloth with her own sorrow and remorse. The loom serves as poetic imagery; there is no technical weaving content.

A short story, "A Loom-Master of Iran," about an orphan boy from the Persian village of Sofian who is taken in by the caravan merchant Sadak and chooses to become a weaver rather than a farmer, shepherd or merchant. In a carpet factory in Azerbaijan he is made master of the loom on which a copy of the famous Ardebil mosque carpet is woven under an American superintendent. He finishes the carpet while plague spreads through the city, and dies on it. The text is fiction and contains no weaving instruction or drafts, but it gives a romanticized picture of child weavers, knotted-pile carpet work, tools and a bazaar workshop in turn-of-the-century Persia.

A two-page poem from the Atlantic Monthly in which a weaver at his loom throws the shuttle and ponders the pattern of the cloth. The woven web becomes an allegory of a human life, from the flowers of youth and a bridal veil, through the olive and vine of later years, to the shadow of night. It is literary verse and gives no technical weaving instruction.

A general essay from the Atlantic Monthly on the lives and work of women in medieval Europe. It covers needlework and embroidery (including the Bayeux Tapestry and royal patrons such as Anne of Brittany and Mary of Scotland), silk history, the origins of point lace and Spanish convent lace (drawing on Mrs. Palliser's history of lace), and the education of girls. It also treats women as manuscript copyists, poets and artists, such as Diemudis, Marie de France, Christine de Pisan and Sofonisba Anguissola, and describes domestic life, cradles and furnishings.