The Hired Girl

Description

Fourteen-year-old Joan Skraggs works without pay on her family’s farm near Lancaster, where her mother’s death has left her surrounded by men who dismiss her hunger for books, schooling, and a larger life. When she loses access to education, Joan runs away and finds employment as a hired girl earning six dollars a week. Her journal records the comic misjudgments, moral convictions, romantic hopes, and class boundaries she encounters while learning the demands of domestic service in pre–First World War America. Earnest, impulsive, and determined to remake herself, Joan tests her ideas about religion, literature, work, and love against an unfamiliar household. Her coming-of-age story asks what independence can mean for a girl whose labor and ambitions are rarely taken seriously.

Themes