Going to Boston: Harriet Robinson's Journey to New Womanhood
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Going to Boston - Claudia L. Bushman
University
CHAPTER ONE
Harriet’s World
Women After the Civil War
Young Harriet Hanson is a disadvantaged little girl who makes good. As a young mill worker, she attends school for three months a year, as required by law, and later wins two years of high school by a competitive exam. She takes good advantage of this limited formal education, spurred on by her mother, who urges her, Improve your mind, try and be somebody.
¹ Harriet maintains that her time in the mill has educated her well, and that she is as good as anybody. And she is. She more than fulfills her early promise as a bright little girl.
Harriet comes from a family of long New England identity and proudly notes that she was born the year the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument was laid, placing herself firmly in the history of her colonial forebears. Harriet meets William Stevens Robinson, a Lowell newspaper editor, when he publishes one of her poems. They keep company for a while and are then married. The families of Harriet and William are old Yankee stock fallen on hard times, both having lost their lands and whatever fortunes they possessed. William excels at high school in Concord, Massachusetts, but he goes to work as a printer rather than to college.
Married in 1848, Harriet and William live mostly in Lowell until 1854, when they move to Concord to care for William’s aged mother. Robinson, a newspaperman who champions the unpopular Free Soil Party and abolition, is often out of work prior to the Civil War. His family lives on $400 a year while he edits a special-interest news paper. Harriet is the poor wife of a poor, idealistic man. During these years of poverty before the war, the family lives on small rations. For Harriet, these are years of loneliness and boredom.
Harriet does not like Concord. Here, in 1858, in some of her saltiest prose, she talks about that dull old place, the Concord of Thoreau, Emerson, and Alcott.
It is a dull old place. It is a narrow old place. It is a set old place. It is a snobbish old place. It is an old place full of Antideluvian people and manners. It is a sleepy old place. The women are all sick, the leaves never shake on the trees and the children never cry in the streets. It is full of graveyards, and winters are endless. The women never go out, and the streets are full of stagnation. It was so still that walking up and down its streets filled me with horror. I used to feel that I must jump up and holler, or do something desperate to make a stir. A good place to be born and buried, but a terrible, wearing place for one to live.²
William serves two terms in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, commuting to Boston on the Fitchburg Railroad line. Harriet stays home.
Then the Robinsons move to Malden, a northern suburb of Boston, a fifteen-minute train ride away. Harriet describes Malden as a strange place, but near Boston, and we like. It certainly costs less to live and we enjoy more.
³ In 1862, his Republican Party in power, William is elected clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. This steady job with an annual salary of $1,600 means relative wealth. He receives raises in his eleven-year tenure as clerk, eventually earning around $3,000 a year. In 1870, he receives a $500 raise.⁴ William also achieves fame and notoriety as Warrington,
a columnist for the Springfield Republican.
Together, exercising thrift and hard work, the Robinsons buy a house, build a good life, and raise three of their four children, Hattie, Lizzie, and Warrie. Their older son, Willie, dies of typhoid fever soon after the move to Malden. Harriet practices her housewife’s craft with ingenuity and energy. She has the live-in help of her own widowed mother, who does most of the cooking; her daughters, who help with the sewing; and Irish women hired by the day to do the laundry and help with the housework. Harriet also hires male labor for garden work. She is confident and competent, at the top of her game. The Robinsons provide a stable, cultured household for their two promising daughters and surviving son, sending them to advanced schools and providing music lessons. They live a pleasant suburban life.
In 1870, Harriet is forty-five and has been married for twenty-two years. In this love match, the two appreciate and encourage each other, enjoying the fruits of their prosperity. Harriet reads good books and visits with her neighbors. She travels to visit with friends and relatives. But what she really does, and does with great pleasure, is to go to Boston.
MAR. 19–20 Went to bed early tired of my week’s dissipation, yet it has rested me. I don’t get into the Slough of Despond when I do plenty of going to Boston.
MAR. 21–22 I left [Boston] and came home well filled and refreshed, feeling truly that I had had a day out.
William’s work makes travel to the big city an affordable luxury. One of Harriet’s first reactions when he lands a steady job is, Now I can go to Boston.
⁵
Harriet recognizes that proximity to Boston will change her life, and she records how in her daily journal. She describes the incidents, the social events, the people, and the legal developments that encourage her introduction to a wider world.
In 1870, when we begin to trace her movements and her comments, Harriet is vaguely discontented. She is capable of more. What shall it be? What can she do? William, confident of his own skills, encourages his wife in her aspirations as a writer and an activist. In this lyrical prediction from 1868, William writes,
You have escaped immortality, being switched off the celestial railroad on to a side track, leading to an old coal yard. You shall be paid for it someday. If not here, hereafter. . . . You shall have a harp for music, or a pencil for painting and or a chisel for sculpture—and I will be your delighted proof reader and critic and take the money for your golden books. Seriously.⁶
William recognizes Harriet’s talent and knows that she has lived in his shadow. He pledges that when her day comes, as it will, he will happily trade places. He uses the railroad as a metaphor. She will board the celestial railroad and become a person of consequence. The railroad will take her to her future.
Harriet’s bright and lively natural prose, accomplished by any standard, portrays events and personalities in vivid strokes. She wrote lively letters, and published four accomplished books, two plays, and at least five articles. She also kept an extensive diary during most of her married life. She sets scenes, quotes speakers, refers to her reading in books and newspapers, and tells stories about her friends and acquaintances. This book concentrates on her life in 1870 as recorded in her diary of that year, a document worth reading.
New Women
In 1870, Harriet shows evidence of becoming one of the new women to enter public life after the Civil War. She is white, middle class, and married, with school-aged children. She is well informed and knowledgeable, though her education had been acquired haphazardly. She has strong interests in political matters, women’s activities, cultural affairs, and reform. She is smart and effective, and although she is happy in her home, she is also eager to absorb the city’s diversions. Harriet expands her space from hearth and home to the nearby big city, traversing a well-traveled route along the tracks of the Boston and Maine Railroad line to the city itself.
In discussing the advent of new women in the post–Civil War United States, historians make much of major dichotomies. Gender has been, and remains the major division, signifying not only segregation, but stratification and hierarchy. Men establish status for both sexes. Men act in public, allowing women the private sphere. What changes here is the move of some women from the private to the public sphere. They challenge their containment in the home and open new space outside of its bounds. They want membership in public life. Like Harriet, they aspire to gender justice and the equality of the sexes.⁷
Of the major Bostonian influences on Harriet during this year of her expansion, the first is the New England Women’s Club, where she is an early and active member. The NEWC is certainly a pioneer in changing the idea and reality of women’s space in the city. Harriet joins the club in 1869, its second year of organization. She has daily access to the rooms and attends meetings weekly. She finds friends in this female space and a broad and enlightening education. She compares herself to accomplished women, convincing herself that she really is as good as anybody.
The second of the three components of Harriet’s new life is Boston’s cultural scene. From the wide variety of public entertainments available, she chooses high-end dramatic, operatic, and musical events, a rich buffet where she nourishes her critical faculties. She attends concerts, operas, serious plays, and lectures, widening her interests and developing new ones. Then she goes home and reflects on these experiences in her journal.
Harriet’s third major influence is the Massachusetts State House. William works there, and through his political life, Harriet is acquainted with notable people. She attends political debates and conventions, mixes with and observes leaders, and becomes part of the women’s suffrage scene. Harriet claims space in this limited elite triangle, from the State House to the clubhouse to the theater. She also fits in shopping, dining, and visiting.
Through these exposures, Harriet Hanson Robinson, a somewhat privileged middle-class housewife from a working-class background, develops a vision of life beyond her front gate. Her mind travels from her suburban Malden home to the city where she broadens her world. These comparisons require easy access to dynamic urban space as it grows in area, population, and diversity. In 1870, the major year of her move from cloistered huswifery to the wider spaces of the active and cultivated matron, Harriet acquires an expanded female sensibility.
She mentally reconceives the city for her own use. The New Eng land Women’s Club is a major player in rezoning the city for women, challenging the status quo by the creation of a clubhouse, a woman’s place away from home, easily reached from the train station. Women own this space and make the rules, allowing men to participate. The State House is contested space, firmly directed by men; women can visit without privileges. The theater mixes the genders and the classes. The clubhouse is for women