On Saturday, when the line

of mill girls passed

through the paymaster's office,

the youngest was too small to reach

the ledger to sign her name

Rebecca Putney, Bobbin Girl. 

Rebecca is only ten, yet she works all day long in a hot and noisy cotton mill. She's grateful to have the chance to help her struggling family, but not all the girls at the boardinghouse are happy about their jobs at the mill. The damp, lint-filled air has made one girl sick, and there is talk of lowering the workers' pay.

Judith, an older girl who is Rebecca's idol, wants to protest the pay cut, but troublemakers at the mill are dismissed. Does Rebecca have the courage...or the right...to join the protest?

In a stirring tale based on the memoirs of a real Lowell, Massachusetts, mill girl of the 1830's, Caldecott Medalist Emily Arnold McCully evokes an era when American women stunned the world—first by proving their independence as wage earners, then by standing together in the brave fight for workers' rights.

From the dust jacket