After the Civil War, economic necessity forced many women to work in factories. In this painting, which depicts the start of a workday, a fashionably dressed young woman, lunch pail in hand, walks up a makeshift ramp and rickety bridge leading to a dark mill. On the right, three chatting women in homespun dresses evoke a sense of rural community in contrast to the solitary figure who probably came from the city. Isolated at the crossroads of the painting, she remains symbolically poised between an agrarian past and the increasingly depersonalized, industrial present.
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