Mill workers, suffragists, and ‘Rosie the Riveter’ helped change the definition of ‘woman’
by Barbara Spindel
Apr 15, 2022
2 minutes
In a memoir written late in her life, teacher and poet Lucy Larcom recalled the decade she worked at a cotton mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the mid-1800s. “I felt that I belonged to the world, that there was something for me to do in it,” she enthused. As Lillian Faderman illustrates in her sweeping “Woman: The American History of an Idea,” that sentiment had been largely denied
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