Answer:
Nationwide, eighty thousand children worked in the textile industry. In the South, Mother Jones
had seen how dangerous their jobs were. Barefooted little girls and boys reached their tiny hands
into the treacherous machinery to repair snapped threads or crawled underneath the machinery to
oil it. At textile union headquarters, Mother Jones met more of these mill children. Their bodies were
bone-thin, with hollow chests. Their shoulders were rounded from long hours spent hunched over
the workbenches. Even worse, she saw “some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing,
some with their fingers off at the knuckles”—victims of mill accidents.
Josephson begins the paragraph with the detail that “eighty thousand children worked in the textile
industry” nationwide. This alerts readers to the size of the problem. She then focuses on the main point of
the paragraph—the dangers the children faced. Josephson describes the dangers by using details that
Mother Jones had actually seen: the children reaching into dangerous machinery; their “bone-thin” bodies,
“hollow chests,” and “rounded shoulders”; their missing hands, fingers, and thumbs. Tying these
descriptions to what Mother Jones had personally seen allows the author to show how the “broken”
children themselves influenced Jones’s attitude toward child labor.
Explanation:
