The novel sensitively handles a number of social issues which grow out of the lives of the women who worked at the Lowell factories. Both Lyddie and Brigid are victims of sexual harassment and, while Lyddie stands up for her rights, she loses her job as a result.

Lyddie's mentor and co-worker, Diana Goss, spearheads an attempt to better working conditions for the factory girls, dramatizing the conflicts that have sometimes arisen between labor and management. She leaves the factory, however, because she is pregnant, not because of her crusade for social reform. While the book effectively depicts the often dehumanizing conditions of factory work, it is equally critical of the conditions Lyddie encounters while working in a tavern and on the Worthen farm.

At times the novel questions extreme and fanatical religious fundamentalism, particularly when Lyddie's mother is convinced that the world is about to...