Harriet H. Robinson (1825–1911)

Harriet Hanson Robinson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of a carpenter and his wife. After her father died suddenly when she was a small child, her mother struggled to support her four children before moving the family to Lowell, a center of the textile industry. Harriet began working in the mills at age 10 as a bobbin doffer, replacing full bobbins with empty ones. She rose in the ranks to tending a spinning frame and then becoming a drawing-in girl, one of the better jobs in the mill. While working, she attended evening classes, and at age 15, she left the mills for two years to study at Lowell High School, where she was taught French, Latin and English grammar. While there, she wrote two essays that have survived, "Poverty Not Disgraceful" and "Indolence and Industry." Harriet returned to the mills, working there until age 23, and in her free time she wrote and published poetry, and participated in literary groups in Lowell. She met William Stevens Robinson, then editor at of The Lowell Journal, when he published some of her work, and the couple married in 1848 and had four children. He was opposed to slavery and an advocate of women's suffrage and Harriet also adopted the cause. In 1868, she joined the American Woman Suffrage Association led by Lucy Stone, and founded the Malden women's club. Harriet and her daughter Harriette Robinson Shattuck, also a writer and women's rights activist, organized the National Woman Suffrage Association of Massachusetts. Harriet gave the opening address at the 1881 Boston Convention of the organization. After her husband died in 1876, Harriet rented out rooms to support herself, her three surviving children and her mother. She wrote several books on the women's suffrage movement and factory labor, and her autobiography, Loom and Spindle, or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (1898), which continues to be read today.