I never really saw really poor people before... My parents always told me nobody had to be poor—that they wouldn't be if they weren't shiftless or didn't spend everything they earned on drink. I don't understand how Mama and Papa could be so mistaken! ...Yes, I guess I do.

Report after visiting a textile factory upriver from South Hadley, Massachusetts on a senior year assignment in an American industrial history class taught by Miss Annah Soule at Mount Holyoke College. In the factory she saw row after row of women bent over their work in dim light with small children squatting near them, winding bobbins by hand. The millworkers' shacks seemed less substantial than her uncle's chicken coops.