Loom and Spindle; Or, Life Among the Early Mill Girls. with a Sketch of the Lowell Offering and Some of Its Contributors (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER VIII. BRIEF BIOGRAPHIES OP SOME OF THE WRITERS FOR THE LOWELL OFFERING. It remains for me to give, so far as I have been able to glean them, the life-stories of a few of the most important of these mill-girl writers, some of them brief indeed, others perhaps of wider significance, but all telling a tale of honest toil and earnest aspiration. I begin with Miss Curtis, as senior editor of the magazine. HARRIOT F. CURTIS, Editor of the Lowell Offering. Among all the writers, Miss Curtis stands out as the pioneer and reformatory spirit. She was fearless in her convictions; she wrote in advocacy of the anti-slavery cause when the real agitation had hardly begun, and in behalf of woman's right to equal pay for equal labor, five years before the first woman suffrage convention was held in this country. She organized the first known woman's club, and was one of the four women editors of her time. She was the novelist par excellence of The Offering, and had a bold and dashing pen that would have made her fortune in these days of women reporters and interviewers. But she was so startlingly original in her speech and in her writings, that it made talk, as Samantha Allen says, so different was she from the established idea of what a female should be. But she was self-centred, and bore with Christian philosophy as well as with pagan silence and stoicism, the slings and arrows of those who could not understand her brave and courageous nature. Her mind was intensely masculine; but her life had all the limitations by which the women of her time were bound, and these prevented her from doing the work for which she was best fitted, and from leading that life of freedom from care which is so necessary to the best literary work. Through...