In Wirt Sikes’ Among the Poor Girls, he describes the working conditions that women experience during the Gilded Age. Among the Poor Girls was first published in Putnam's Magazine, in April 1868. Sikes was a popular social reformer in his day, and he worked with church groups and supported the efforts of the Working Women's Protective Union.  He empathetically touches on issues of labor conflicts in a specific factory, such as working conditions, low wages, child labor, and eventually the reality of death. He describes the experience of Susie L, a seventeen-year old farmer’s daughter working at a factory. He descriptively captures her initial hope and eagerness as she, like many others, possesses when migrating to a city with the dream of becoming rich. He structurally contrasts her hopeful nature with her reality of bad working conditions, which he states being the lack of ventilation and the crowdedness, and the long hours that lead to her death. Through the choice of beginning his article with the general conflicts of the workroom and the rest of the working women, he establishes a generalization that this is a reality for most women. However, when specifying on Susie L., there is an empathetic personification as he mentions her young age that come with hopefulness and aspirations, to be successful in her case, which fade away in the factory, and eventually dies. In the first passage, he metaphorically states “They breathe an atmosphere of death” which is eventually interpreted literally as he ends with the death of Susie L., after working there no longer than a year. This was the reality of many factory workers, especially women, as horrible working conditions and long hours set up for dangerous work in which death was common.