Child Labor Laws In Katherine Paterson's Lyddie

If Lyddie does sign the petition and gets

People make decisions everyday, but sometimes there are hard decisions that could change our lives forever. In the book Lyddie by Katherine Patterson a girl named Lyddie that lived during the Industrial Revolution worked in a mill in Lowell. Lyddie worked in some pretty bad working conditions and workers wanted better working conditions so they started a petition. Lyddie is wondering if she should sign the petition, but if she does she could get fired and lose the money that she needs for the dept on the farm back home, and also maybe if she signs it that may help in getting better working conditions. While there are reasons Lyddie should not sign the petition, there are more reasons why Lyddie should sign the petition for better hours and wages, and also for a better working environment.

In Katherine Patterson's novel Lyddie, the main character is facing a difficult decision to sign a petition to decrease the number of working hours and decrease the dangerous working conditions. On on hand, she thinks she should sign because of how it is affecting her and her friends, but on the other hand, she could get blacklisted for doing so. Lyddie is working in a mill with harsh working conditions. The air is polluted, humid, and on top of all that, the hours they spend in the crowded room with the looms is over fourteen hours each day. She traveled from her home at the farm, then to a tavern where after being fired, realized the best place to go was to Lowell, Massachusetts.

The children will always be working there because without an education, they can’t really do anything else. Kelley uses her tone to show us how shameful some states should be when it comes to their child labor laws. Her sympathy can be heard through the speech when she talks about little girls staying up day and night to weave and sew the products. When she talks about New Jersey’s laws, she was disappointed because New Jersey lets the children work all night long with only a small amount of money.

Lyddie Argument Essay In the book Lyddie written by Katherine Paterson, Lyddie the 13 year old girl works hard for her family, around 13 hours, and is surrounded by disease, low pay and is being watched over all the time. But when she is sent a way to work she finds a mill, then she meets Diana, who started a petition and who wants something more than her factory life. Lyddie thinks about joining her and signing her petition. There may be consequences but i think it will have a good turn out for lyddie, This is why...

Because of the poor pay wages workers received, families were forced to send their children. These children were forced to work in unsafe factory conditions. Kelley emphasizes that “... several thousand little girls will be working in textile mills… in the deafening noise of the spinales and the looms spinning and weaving.” She established herself as an equal.

Women could not go to work and make money, in the south they stayed at home and did work inside the house and cooked. “Mayella looked as if she tried to keep clean…” (Doc A; Chapter 18) All women had expectations to live by. Men in the 1930’s went to work everyday trying to make money so their family could survive.

The implication is, Lyddie is not paid by the hour, but also from how much fabric she makes. Other factory girls are not even increasing their pay, in fact their pay is only lowering. In addition to the other girls not even going to budge working because of their low pay, Lyddie has a chance to get the money she needs to reunite with her family. Therefore, if Lyddie were to sign the petition, her pay will only decrease. Lyddie is already making a good amount of money, signing the petition will only slow her down, and even worse, Lyddie could be dismissed leaving her with debt.

Kelley then brings the opinion of the mothers and teachers into her argument. She uses the quote “Would the New Jersey Legislature have passed that shameful repeal bill enabling girls of fourteen years to work all night, if the mothers in New Jersey were enfranchised?” (lines 59-62). Using the word shameful does not give good connotation to Kelley’s point and gives it a negative tone. She claims that New Jersey was “enabling girls” to work all night; this means that New Jersey is giving fourteen year old girls the authority to do something, while if their mothers were enfranchised or given the right to vote, they may not be in this position.

Before the war, it was not likely for women to work in factories. However, by 1945, women made up one third of all industrial workers. This was a big change for women, because women usually only worked at home

What would you do if you were forced to work 11chours a day jus as a kid? That’s what Lyddie had to do in the novel Lyddie by Kathrine Paterson. In this novel, Lyddie decides to go to the Concord Corporation and work as a mill girl to pay off the debts on her farm and reunite her family. She then meets her roommates: Betsy, Amelia, and Prudence. However, Lyddie then finds out that terrible working conditions, long hours, and even harassment are key reasons why she shouldn’t work there.

The costs of the industrial revolution outweighed the benefits for the women; they had to work long hours, were trapped in the factories, and had little to no personal time. First of all, Women in silk factories had to work long hours. In document B it states that normal working hours in Okaya was 13-14 hours. They would work from 4:30 am to 7:30 pm. They did not have work straight from 4:30 am to 7:30 pm.

Laundry was not an easy job back in the Civil War era and once she got so frustrated with one of the laundresses that she slapped her. On February 25, Von olnhausen finally had enough wounded soldiers to keep her busy. She even cared for a confederate soldier; something she never wanted to do. When

(29, 54) Despite the fact that Jolly was in a bad place, she still had people in her life like LaVaughn who were having a positive influence on her and her actions. For example, Jolly dropped out of high school at a young age because of her giving birth to Jeremy and Jilly. She had never got the chance to go back because she had to work to be able to pay the bills. There was no time to go to school, which Jolly originally laughed at because the thought of going back to school was incredulous to her and it was ridiculous.

If you look closley to your left you can see that the cart says “ supported by child labor”. This proves that there are people out there, who think child labor is right. The companies who support labor at a young age push children to their limits.