Lucy Larcom - Biography

Biography

Larcom was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1824, the ninth of ten children and died in Boston in 1893. She left Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1835 to work cotton mills in Lowell from the ages of 11 to 21 as a doffer. As a mill girl she hoped to earn some extra money for her family. While working at the mills in Lowell, Lucy made a huge impact. She wrote and published many of her songs, poems, and letters describing her life at the mills. Her idealistic poems caught the attention of John Greenleaf Whittier. Larcom served as a model for the change in women's roles in society.

She was a friend of Harriet Hanson Robinson, who worked in the Lowell mills at the same time, and who also became a poet and author. Much later, Harriet Hanson Robinson was to become prominent in the women's suffrage movement.

In the 1840s (circa 1846), Larcom taught at a school in Illinois before returning to Massachusetts. From 1865 to 1873, she was the editor of Our Young Folks, later renamed St. Nicholas Magazine.

Larcom penned one of the best accounts of New England childhood of her time, A New England Girlhood, commonly used as a reference in studying early American childhood.