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BOOK REVIEW: The Hired Girl by Laura Amy Schlitz
At fourteen, Joan Skraggs is pulled out of school. Her father deems she’s had enough education, and she is needed at home. The woman’s work needs to be done by someone, and since her mother’s death four years prior, there’s no-one else to cook the meals, carry the water and ashes and coal, scrub the privy, mend the clothes, do the laundry, feed the chickens and collect their eggs, pick the berries and make the jam… and she can’t have her school work getting in the way of that.
Her father says she’s done with learning. She is to carry out the woman’s work on the farm as long as she lives.
I look ahead and I don’t know how I can bear the life that’s laid out for me. Years and years of it: washing and ironing and scrubbing out the privy, cooking and scouring and feeding and mending, everything the same, day after day, season after season, working myself to death, as Ma did. Only Ma wasn’t strong. It’ll be years before the work kills me.
Joan’s father refuses her everything, even the money they make selling eggs which used to be her mother’s only income. It’s not much, but with it she would be able to buy some books and some new clothes and make her life slightly bearable. She can’t do this anymore. She can’t go her whole life without books, and learning, and adventure.
So she runs away and finds work as a maidservant for a Jewish family.
The rest of this review can be found HERE!
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