Skip to main content

In Lyddie by Katherine Paterson, what job does Lyddie's younger sister get at the factory?

Lyddie's little sister, Rachel, becomes a doffer at the Concord Corporation. When Rachel first comes to Lyddie, Rachel is silent and withdrawn. Lyddie, who has been so intent on saving money so she can reunite her family at their farm, can't abide the thought of having to put her hard-earned money into supporting Rachel, especially if she were to go to school. Considering how hard she has worked since she was Rachel's age, Lyddie entertains the idea of Rachel working as a doffer. From Lyddie's perspective, being a doffer is an easy job. The children work about fifteen minutes out of an hour; they simply have to take full spools off the machines and put empty spools on. Lyddie has been able to see the doffers playing in the mill yard while she herself is working on her looms. To her, being a doffer seems like a life of comparative ease, and she is more than ready for Rachel to take that role.


When Lyddie first suggests to Mrs. Bedlow that Rachel could be a doffer, Mrs. Bedlow says that Rachel is too young and too weak to do that job. However, after Rachel proves herself by nursing Lyddie back to health, Mrs. Bedlow advocates for her with the factory agent, and Rachel is hired. Rachel herself wanted the job, even though by the time Lyddie had recovered from her fever, she was leaning toward sending Rachel to school instead. Unfortunately, despite Rachel's positive attitude about working at the factory, the job takes its toll on her health. She develops a cough, and Lyddie fears that it will become a serious health issue for Rachel like it did for Betsy. Lyddie decides to let Rachel go live with the Phinneys so that she will no longer have to work as a doffer and so she can go to school.


At the link below, you can see pictures of children working as doffers in a factory about 70 years after the time period of Lyddie. Although the machinery in these photographs is more modern than what Rachel would have worked on, the concept is the same. Child labor was still an issue in the early decades of the 20th century.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more