Call the Darkness Light by Nancy Zaroulis

It is an eventful, colorful period, and although she is a curiously passive heroine for a novel with strong feminist over tones, Sabra manages at one point or another to come into contact with nearly all the developments of the time.īesides the Industrial Revolution, these include the abolitionist movement the Underground Railway, the beginning of Utopian communes based on transcendentalist ideas, the surge of immigration and the rise of Know-Nothingism, the California gold rush, the first stirrings of the women's movement, the rise of various religious sects (Millerites, Mormons and Shakers), the work of Florence Nightingale and the development of photography. The story of how Sabra fell into this situation and struggled to escape it is told against a broadly sketched background of American history in the years from 1839 to the beginning of the Civil War. Workers who circulate a petition for a 10-hour day are dismissed in disgrace and blacklisted so that they cannot find work elsewhere.

In the evening, the young ladies sing around the piano in their boarding-house parlors, attend lectures at the Lyceum, visit the library or stroll through the downtown shops - carefully watching their pennies, for many are helping to support their parents, saving up for a dowry or putting a brother through college.īut at work, lung disease lurks in the lint-filled air, and the primitive machines can mangle an unwary worker - making the plant manager grumble about lost time if the machines have to be stopped to pull a victim out of their clutches. This is the world into which Nancy Zaroulis plunges her heroine, Sabra Palfrey, at the beginning of 'Call the Darkness Light.' It is a world of harsh realities under a genteel facade.

If they worked hard and avoided illness or accident (difficult under their working conditions), they could hope eventually to rise to positions where they might earn more than $2 per week beyond that basic living expense. Lowell was then populated mostly by unmarried women (an unhappy surplus in New England of the period) who worked in the mills 12 to 14 hours per day, living under strict regulation in company-owned boarding houses which cost them $1.25 per week. The city was once of the wonders of the world, visited by such celebrities as Davy Crockett, Charles Dickens, even President Andrew Jackson, and universally praised for its enlightened management. In the 1830s, Lowell, Mass., was the city of tomorrow, the shining spearhead of the Industrial Revolution - a city bright, new and hopeful, a planned community dedicated to the textile industry and organized according to the highest ideals of Yankee enterprise.

Call the Darkness Light by Nancy Zaroulis