Harriet Hanson Robinson

Harriet Jane Hanson Robinson (* 8. Februar 1825 in Boston, Massachusetts; † 22. Dezember 1911 in Malden, Massachusetts) war eine US-amerikanische Autorin, Dichterin und Frauenrechtlerin. Sie arbeitete als Klöpplerin in einer Baumwollspinnerei in Massachusetts und war an einer Protestaktion beteiligt, wurde Schriftstellerin und spielte später eine wichtige Rolle in der Frauenwahlrechtsbewegung in den Vereinigten Staaten.

Harriet Hanson, 1843

Leben

Lowell, MA, Anfang des 19. Jhd.

Boott Mills, Pension und Lagerhaus

Lowell Offering, Nummer 1, 1840

Hanson Robinson war die Tochter von Harriet Browne Hanson und dem Schreiner William Hanson. Beide Eltern stammten von frühen englischen Siedlern ab, hatten aber keine bedeutenden Vorfahren. Ihr älterer Bruder war John Wesley Hanson und sie hatte zwei überlebende jüngere Brüder: Benjamin und William. Harriets Vater starb, als sie fünf Jahre alt war, und hinterließ seine Witwe, die vier kleine Kinder zu versorgen hatte. Harriets Mutter war trotzdem entschlossen, die Familie zusammenzuhalten, ein Angebot eines Nachbarn, die Tochter zu adoptieren, damit sie eine Person weniger zu ernähren hätte, lehnte sie ab.

Die Mutter betrieb ein kleines Geschäft in Boston, MA, in dem sie Lebensmittel, Süßigkeiten und Brennholz verkaufte. Die Familie wohnte im Hinterzimmer des Ladens und teilte sich ein Bett. Auf Einladung der Schwester der Mutter, ebenfalls Witwe, siedelte die Familie nach Lowell, MA, damals ein Zentrum der Textilindustrie.

Die Unternehmen in Lowell rekrutierten junge Frauen von den Bauernhöfen in Neuengland, die in den Fabriken arbeiten sollten. Die Unternehmen errichteten Pensionen, die von älteren Frauen, oft Witwen, geführt wurden, um Mahlzeiten und sichere Wohnmöglichkeiten zu bieten. Kirchen und kulturelle Organisationen boten Vorträge, Konzerte, Lesesäle, Gesprächskreise und andere kulturelle und bildungsbezogene Angebote. Ein weiterer Anreiz waren die guten Löhne, die im Vergleich zu Hausarbeit und Lehrtätigkeit, die viel schlechter bezahlt wurden, bar ausgezahlt wurden. Die Mutter erhielt eine Stelle als Pensionswirtin bei den Tremont Mills und im Sommer 1836 begann auch Hanson Robinson eine Teilzeitarbeit bei den Tremont Mills. Nach eigenen Angaben wollte sie arbeiten, um Geld für sich selbst zu verdienen, möglicherweise war sie aber auch gezwungen, da ihre Mutter mit der Führung der Pension nur wenig Geld verdiente. Ihre Arbeit, die mit 2 US-Dollar pro Woche entlohnt wurde, war die eines „Doffers“, die volle Spulen durch leere ersetzte. Die Arbeit nahm stündlich nur eine Viertelstunde in Anspruch, und in den freien Zeiten konnten die Jungen und Mädchen spielen oder lesen oder sogar für eine Weile nach Hause gehen.

Im Jahr 1836 organisierten die „Lowell Mill Girls“ einen turn out. Ein erster Streik war 1834 wegen einer Lohnkürzung um 15 % erfolgt. Nun ging es um eine Erhöhung der Verpflegungskosten, die einer Lohnkürzung von 12,5 % entsprach. Für Harriet, die elf Jahre alt war, war es ihre erste Arbeitsniederlegung. In ihrer Autobiografie notierte sie, dass sie die unentschlossenen Mädchen anführte. Dass sie damit ihrer Mutter geschade hatte, die von der Erhöhung der Internatsgebühren profitiert hätte, wurde ihr erst beim Niederschreiben klar.

As a consequence of the turn out, several of the mills reversed the increase in charges, and the boarding system was reviewed on the grounds that since it was the principal inducement for young women and girls to come and work at the mills in the first place, it must not be having the desired effect if they were so dissatisfied that they struck.Vorlage:SfnVorlage:Sfn However, the turn out organizers were fired from their jobs, as was Harriet's mother, which Harriet depicted in her autobiography as an act of petty revenge for Harriet's own actions.Vorlage:SfnVorlage:Sfn

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Harriet continued to work in the mills after the turn out was over and graduated to tending a spinning frame and then becoming a "drawing-in girl," one of the better jobs in the mill.Vorlage:Sfn The drawing room was relatively quiet, away from the spinning and weaving machinery.

The drawing-in girl took over after the warp threads had been wound onto the take-up beam and drew each thread through the harness and reeds using a long metal hook. She could sit on a stool or a chair as she worked. Once that was complete, the beam would be delivered to the weaving room.Vorlage:Sfn The pay was on a piecework basis and so Harriet could work at her own pace, and while the looms were operating, she could find a quiet room away from the machinery in which she was able to read.Vorlage:Sfn

Harriet had obtained an elementary education before she started work in the mill. While she worked as a doffer, she also attended evening classes.

At the age of 15 she left the mills for two years to study French, Latin, and English grammar and composition at Lowell High School. She studied in a wooden school room in a building that had a butcher's shop on the ground floor.Vorlage:Sfn

The titles of two of her compositions have survived: "Poverty Not Disgraceful" and "Indolence and Industry", reflecting her opinion that there was nothing wrong with the honest labor of poor people.

Harriet returned to the mills and worked there until 1848 but, in her spare time, participated in literary groups in Lowell.Vorlage:Sfn

Lowell was rich in educational and cultural opportunities for women at the time. There were libraries and bookstores, evening schools and lectures, concerts and balls. Two of the first magazines written by women were published in the town, the Lowell Offering and The New England Offering. Betsey Guppy Chamberlain (1797–1886), one of Harriet's companions in the mills, became a noted contributor of sketches and stories to the Lowell Offering.Vorlage:Sfn Harriet said that "the fame of The Lowell Offering caused the mill girls to be considered very desirable for wives; and that young men came from near and far to pick and choose for themselves, and generally with good success."Vorlage:Sfn Harriet also wrote and published poetry, and it was through this that she met her future husband, William Robinson, who worked as an editor at the Lowell Journal, which published some of her work.Vorlage:Sfn

Harriet married William Stevens Robinson (1818–1876) on Thanksgiving Day in 1848, when she was 23. Also from a poor background, Robinson was a writer for a newspaper and a supporter of the Free Soil Party, which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories and made it hard for him to keep a job.Vorlage:Sfn During the early years of her marriage, Harriet was not interested in women's rights. In her early writings, she described the pleasure of having a husband to handle worldly problems, and her job was to take care of him and said that for that reason she did not want to vote. Harriet later adopted the women's rights cause, after her husband had taken it up.Vorlage:Sfn The couple would have four children, one of whom died young, and they also looked after Harriet's mother. Often, they struggled to make ends meet.Vorlage:Sfn

In 1858, the couple moved to Malden, a new residential suburb five miles from Boston and bought a house two blocks from the railway station. That was to be Harriet's home for the rest of her life.

At first, Robinson struggled to earn a living as a journalist.Vorlage:Sfn The couple had a large garden, grew fruit and vegetables, and made some money by raising chickens and selling the eggs.

In 1862 Robinson held a well-paying job as clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives for 11 years.Vorlage:Sfn

In 1868 Harriet joined the American Woman's Suffrage Organization, led by Lucy Stone, and founded the Malden women's club.Vorlage:Sfn Robinson was forced out of his job by the politician Benjamin Butler, and in 1876 died after a long illness.Vorlage:Sfn

Her daughter, Hattie, served as assistant clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1872, being the first woman to hold such a position. Another daughter Elizabeth was considered to be a pioneer in introducing kindergarten to Connecticut.

As a widow, Harriet Robinson rented out rooms to support herself, her three daughters and her aged mother. She wrote several books, including a biography of her husband, and became increasingly active in the women's suffrage movement.Vorlage:Sfn Harriet's book Loom and Spindle (1898) portrayed the industrial town of Lowell in her childhood and youth as a time of great opportunity for mill girls, who learned the discipline of labor and gained broader ideas about the world from their experiences. The book continues to be read more than 100 years after it was published.Vorlage:Sfn

Harriet and her daughter Harriet Lucy Robinson Shattuck organized the National Woman Suffrage Association of Massachusetts, associated with Susan B. Anthony's organization, and Harriet Robinson made the opening address at the 1881 Boston Convention of the organization. They also helped Julia Ward Howe to organize the New England Women's Club.Vorlage:Sfn Harriet Robinson corresponded extensively with the suffrage movement leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.Vorlage:Sfn When the National Woman Suffrage Association opened on 26 May 1881 at the Tremont Temple in Boston, Harriet Robinson welcomed the delegates and guests.Vorlage:Sfn At this session she offered the following resolution: "Whereas, We believe that it is not safe to trust the great question of woman's political rights solely to the legislature, or to the voters of the state, therefore Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of Massachusetts to organize an active work, to secure a sixteenth amendment to the United States Constitution."Vorlage:Sfn Harriet Robinson wrote enthusiastically in 1881,

Harriet never took a theoretical position on women's rights and may have been largely motivated by an ambition to advance in society, which the movement offered. However, she became a formidable advocate of suffrage in her writings and as a public speaker.Vorlage:Sfn

The poet Lucy Larcom, a friend of Harriet who had also worked in the mills as a child, wrote of her, "Mrs. Robinson is deeply interested in all the movements, which tend to the advancement of women, and uses her pen and her voice freely in their behalf. She was the first woman to speak before the Select Committee on Woman Suffrage in Congress, and has spoken for the cause before the legislature of her own State, where she is not only a citizen, but a vote as far as the law allows."Vorlage:Sfn

Additionally, Harriet contributed to the fourteenth annual report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, which was published in 1883. Here is an excerpt from the annual report written by Harriet Robinson:

They [the mill girls] went forth from their Alma Mater, the Lowell Factory, carrying with them the independence, the self-reliance taught in that hard school, and they have done their little part towards performing the useful labor of life. Into whatever vocation they entered they have made practical use of the habits of industry and perseverance learned during those early years. Skilled labor teaches something not to be found in books or in colleges. Their early experience developed their characters... and helped them to fight well the battle of life.

Harriet lived to the age of 86 and died at home in Malden on 22 December 1911.Vorlage:Sfn

Werke

Although she published several books, Harriet Robinson did not make money from her writings, which she published at her own expense.sfn|Marsh|1990|p=48}}

sfn|Emerson|Edwards|Knox|2000|p=82-83}}

• Harriet Hanson Robinson: "Warrington" pen-portraits: a collection of personal and political reminiscences from 1848 to 1876, from the writings of William S. Robinson. 1877 (archive.org). 
• Harriet Hanson Robinson: Massachusetts in the woman suffrage movement. A general, political, legal and legislative history from 1774, to 1881. 1881 (archive.org). 
• Harriet Hanson Robinson: Early Factory Labor in New England. 1883. 
• Harriet Hanson Robinson: Captain Mary Miller: A Drama. 1887 (archive.org). 
• Harriet Hanson Robinson: The New Pandora: A Drama. 1889 (archive.org). 
• Harriet Hanson Robinson: Loom and Spindle, or Life Among the Early Mill Girls. 1898 (archive.org). 

Beiträge in Anthologien

• David Brion Davis: Antebellum American Culture: An Interpretive Anthology. Penn State University Press, 1979, ISBN 978-0-271-01646-7, S. 121–123. 
• Harriet Hanson Robinson: Women and Children of the Mills: An Anotated Guide to Nineteenth-Century American Textile Factory Literature. Greenwood Press, Westport, CT 1999, Names and Noms de Plume of the Writers in The Lowell Offering (1902), S. 299. 

Literatur

• Claudia L. Bushman: "A Good Poor Man's Wife": Being a Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and Her Family in Nineteenth-Century New England. University Press of New England, Hannover, CT 1981, ISBN 978-0-87451-883-2 (google.com). 
• Gerald A. Danzer: The Americans. Houghton Mifflin College Div, 2006, ISBN 978-0-618-01533-7, The Changing Workplace, 242–243 (archive.org). 
• Dorothy May Emerson, June Edwards, Helene Knox: Standing Before Us: Unitarian Universalist Women and Social Reform, 1776–1936. Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, 2000, ISBN 978-1-55896-380-1 (google.com [abgerufen am 2. Juli 2012]). 
• John Wesley Hanson: Bible threatenings explained: or, passages of scripture sometimes quoted to prove endless punishment shown to teach consequences of limited duration. Universalist Publishing House, 1885 (google.com [abgerufen am 1. Juli 2012]). 
• Margaret S. Marsh: Suburban Lives. Rutgers University Press, 1990, ISBN 978-0-8135-1484-0, 48 (archive.org [abgerufen am 2. Juli 2012]). 
• Tim McNeese: Revolutionary War. Lorenz Educational Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-7877-0583-1 (google.com [abgerufen am 2. Juli 2012]). 
• Tracie Peterson, Judith Miller: Fragile Design, A. Bethany House, 2003, ISBN 978-0-7642-2689-2, 183 (archive.org [abgerufen am 1. Juli 2012]). 
• Judith A. Ranta: The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker. UPNE, 2003, ISBN 978-1-55553-564-3 (google.com [abgerufen am 2. Juli 2012]). 
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Ann Dexter Gordon: The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: When clowns make laws for Queens, 1880–1887. Rutgers University Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0-8135-2320-0, S. 8– (google.com [abgerufen am 2. Juli 2012]). 
• Bernice Selden: The mill girls: Lucy Larcom, Harriet Hanson Robinson, Sarah G. Bagley. Atheneum, 1983, ISBN 978-0-689-31005-8 (archive.org). 
• Dorothy Boroush: Standing Before Us: Unitarian Universalist Women and Social Reform, 1776–1936. Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, 2000, ISBN 978-1-55896-380-1, Harriet Hanson Robinson, S. 80–84. 

Weblinks

Commons: Harriet Hanson Robinson – Sammlung von Bildern, Videos und Audiodateien

• Vorlage:Worldcat id
• Harriet Hanson Robinson bei LibriVox

Einzelnachweise

LCCN =n81015861
{{DEFAULTSORT:Robinson, Harriet Hanson}}
[[Category:1825 births]]
[[Category:1911 deaths]]
[[Category:Writers from Boston]]
[[Category:American suffragists]]
[[Category:Textile workers]]
[[Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating text from A Woman of the Century]]
[[Category:19th-century American non-fiction writers]]
[[Category:19th-century American women writers]]