The contributions to _The Offering_ were on a great variety of subjects. There were allegories, poems, conversations on physiology, astronomy, and other scientific subjects, dissertations on poetry, and on the beauties of nature, didactic pieces on highly moral and religious subjects, translations from French and Latin, stories of factory and other life, sketches of local New England history, and sometimes the chapters of a novel. Miss Curtis, in 1840, wrote an article on “Woman’s Rights,” in which were so many familiar arguments in favor of the equality of the sexes, that it might have been the production of the pen of almost any modern advocate of woman’s rights; but there was this difference, that the writer, though she felt sure of her ground, was too timid to maintain it against the world, and towards the end throws out the query, “whether public life is, after all, woman’s most appropriate and congenial sphere?” It is a curious coincidence, that at this date the English and the American Anti-Slavery Associations were at the point of division on this very question. There is a certain flavor in all _The Lowell Offering_ writings, both in prose and verse, which reminds one of the books read by the authors, and the models they followed in their compositions. The poetry savors of Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Hemans, Miss Landon, Mrs. Barbauld, Milton, Pope, Cowper, and Hannah More. Byron’s sardonic vein is copied by one or two of the most independent minds among them. The prose models of writing were _The Spectator_, the English classics, “Miss Sedgwick’s Letters,” “The Vicar of Wakefield,” and Lydia Maria Child’s writings. Though the literary character of these writings may not rise to the present standard of such productions, yet at that season of intellectual dearth they must have had a certain influence on contemporary literature; and viewed by the critical eye of a later date, it is found that the selections from _The Lowell Offering_ will compare quite favorably with those in the “Ladies’ annuals” of the same date, as, for instance, _The Lady’s Repository_, _The Rose of Sharon_, _The Lily of the Valley_, _Gems of Beauty_, _The Opal_, and other like literary curiosities, of which _The Lowell Offering_ may well be ranked as one, and with which, no doubt, it will hold its place in the history of American publications. These factory-girl writers did not confine their talents within the pages of their own publication. Many of them wrote for the literary newspapers and magazines. One sometimes filled the poet’s corner in _Zion’s Herald_ and in the _Saturday Evening Gazette_; another took that envied place in _The Ladies’ Casket_; a third sent poetic effusions to _The Lowell Courier and Journal_. These authors represent what may be called the poetic element of factory-life. They were the ideal mill-girls, full of hopes, desires, aspirations; poets of the loom, spinners of verse, artists of factory-life.