When she eventually became free, the living conditions she faced were tough with racial prejudice. Wells’s parents both died when she was sixteen and she had to drop out of school to take care for her other siblings. She had received education up to that point and tricked a school into hiring her as teacher even though she did not reach the age requirements. While she had her job, she was journalist and activist in her community because of the racial prejudices that white people expressed towards blacks. The lynching, murdering, and castrating of black men and women spurred her writing. She saved enough to own her own paper, and while she did write what was on her mind, white mobs countered by destroying her office and sending death threats. Wells moved her writing to the North, but her activism and writing only grew. In 1896, she created the National Association of Colored Women to advance the treatment and respect of both women and black people. Wells faced the typical struggles of woman when she tried to run for Senate because no woman at the time was viewed as credible enough, not even considering she was a black woman. Ida faced the struggles of black person in America and as woman which made her life difficult, but she contributed much to …show more content…
Once her father died when she was eight, her mother became the breadwinner for the family. That was not sufficient enough, so at age eleven, Lucy worked at the cotton mills replacing empty spindles in the cotton machines. During her period in working the mills, she wrote many songs, poems, and letters describing her life as a worker, and she received literary attention to her work. She described the deafening noise of the machinery and the lethality of the machines. Her work encouraged a movement into a more progressive area where women could get a more equal stature to men even despite the risks. Because Lucy knew women could only be independent without men, she never married because that would prevent surrendering her legal rights and wages to her husband. With the money she saved, she advanced her education, and later on in life, she moved on to become a teacher in Illinois where she encouraged a student literary magazine at the Whorton Female Seminary. Larcom had a trying childhood, but her writing was her outlook to convey the struggles and difficulties she faced as a young girl. Larcom’s contribution in the literary field and in teaching met opposition, but nevertheless, she impacted the lives of women