Saturday Sherlock: Study in Scarlet continues

Lots of Mormons this week. Fortunately next week, we return to Dr. Watson.

(Also and unrelated - check meta_holmes tonight for a post called "Mummy Issues." I've been thinking about it ever since the Baker St. Supper Club post about Mrs. Hudson, but won't be back online until evening.)

FFS, Fried!

I'm still enjoying Appetite for America, but if Fried insults the Lowell workforce one more time, I'm gonna hit him upside the head with his own book. Repeatedly. The Lowell Girls were a well-treated, well-paid all-female work force decades before the Harvey Girls were. GET OVER IT!

Yeah, that statement doesn't hold true by about the time the Harvey Girls come along, but the original set of mill working women (who had solid wages, read during working hours, attended educational lectures, and ran their own literary magazine) would be pretty damned surprised to learn that they had been exploited and abused from the start. (And Fried might be surprised that their response to the beginnings of exploitation was a crash course in unionization and agitation. The Lowell workers were *tough!*)

Their own literary magazine. Suck that, Harvey Girls.

Actually, other than Fried's frantic attempts to build up the Harvey women by dissing the Lowell women at every opportunity, it's a great book. But he's so damned in love with the Harvey Girls as being the first and best in everything that he's going out of his way to diss, dismiss, and frankly misrepresent the Lowell workers. And if you know anything about the mills (which believe it or not, I've researched as part of the missionary project), it's damned irritating.