These women were all self-made in the truest sense; and it is well to mention their success in life, that others, who now earn their living at what is called “ungenteel” employments, may see that what one does is not of so much importance as what one is. I do not know why it should not be just as commendable for a woman who has risen to have been once a factory-girl, as it is for an ex-governor or a major-general to have been a “bobbin-boy.” A woman ought to be as proud of being self-made as a man; not proud in a boasting way, but proud enough to assert the fact in her life and in her works.
All these of whom I speak are widely scattered. I hear of them in the far West, in the South, and in foreign countries, even so far away as the Himalaya Mountains. But wherever they may be, I know that they will join with me in saying that the discipline of their youth helped to make them what they are; and that the cotton-factory was to them the means of education, their preparatory school, in which they learned the alphabet of their life-work.
Such is the brief story of the life of every-day working-girls; such as it was then, so it might be to-day. Undoubtedly there might have been another side to this picture, but I give the side I knew best,—the bright side!
CHAPTER VI.
THE LOWELL OFFERING AND ITS WRITERS.
One of the most curious phases in the life of New England, and one that must always puzzle the historian of its literature, is its sudden intellectual blossoming half a century ago.
Emerson says, “The children of New England between 1820 and 1840 were born with knives in their brains;” and this would seem to be true, since during or very near that time, were born the majority of those writers and thinkers whose lives have been so recently and so nobly rounded out,—Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, John Pierpont,—they whose influence cannot be overestimated in bringing an ideal element into our hitherto prosaic New England life.
The seeds of this intellectual growth came suddenly, as if blown from some far-off cultured land, and were sown broadcast. Some found a resting-place in this little corner of New England, where were gathered together these daughters of Puritan ancestors, and they, too, feeling the intellectual impetus, were impelled to put in writing their own crude thoughts. Their desire for self-improvement had been to some extent gratified, and they now began to feel the benefit of the educational advantages which had been opened to them. As in “Mary Barton,” they “threw the shuttle with increasing sound, although Newton’s ‘Principia’ lay open before them, to be snatched at in work-hours, but revelled over at meal-time or at night.”
And the “literary” girls among us would often be seen writing on scraps of paper which we hid “between whiles” in the waste-boxes upon which we sat while waiting for the looms or frames to need attention. Some of these studious ones kept note-books, with abstracts of their reading and studies, or jotted down what they were pleased to call their “thoughts.” It was natural that such a thoughtful life should bear fruit, and this leads me to speak of The Lowell Offering, a publication which was the natural outgrowth of the mental habit of the early mill-girls, for many of the pieces that were printed there were thought out amid the hum of the wheels, while the skilful fingers and well-trained eyes of the writers tended the loom or the frame.
The idea of organization for literary and educational purposes was first proposed in 1837 by Miss Harriot F. Curtis, perhaps the most progressive of all the mill-girls. She with her immediate associates conceived the idea of forming a little society for mental improvement. In The Lowell Offering of January, 1845, is the following account of its formation written by Miss Maria Currier.