We Were Not Spoiled: A Franco-American Memoir

Ledoux, Lucille Verreault

Ledoux, Denis

We Were Not Spoiled chronicles the early life of a Franco-Mainer born in 1921 in Lewiston and raised there. Lucille Verreault Ledoux's life is typical of many Franco-American women of her generation, children of immigrants to the US from French Canada, and, as such, the book is an important addition to our understanding of Maine’s ethnically diverse communities in the last century. We Were Not Spoiled offers insight into Franco-American social life and identity of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In this story of the effects of immigration to the US from French Canada, we glimpse into the lives of French-speaking women and girls in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. French Canadian culture continued to be alive in the New England girls who people this eminently readable memoir. We Were Not Spoiled reveals an eye for often neglected details, of information thought to be marginal and so too frequently lost to students of history. A basic function of memoir is to give witness to a time and a way of life gone by, and this book succeeds well at this. In its pages, we find ourselves going with Lucille into textile mills of the Northeast US, living religious orthodoxy, and creating an identity for herself as a woman, wife and mother in the context of industrial New England..

Soleil Press

2014

Taylor, Paul E.

en

Book

We Were Not Spoiled

978-1-4937-7246-9

206

Lisbon Falls, ME