Harriet Jane Hanson Robinson
Harriet Jane Hanson Robinson was a notable figure in the 19th-century women's rights movement, known for her work as a mill girl, suffrage advocate, clubwoman, and author. Born in Boston in 1825, she faced early adversity, losing her father at a young age and contributing to her family's boardinghouse in Lowell, Massachusetts. Robinson began working in the mills at just ten years old and later chronicled her experiences in her book *Loom and Spindle*, where she praised the early mill girls despite participating in a strike in 1836. After marrying journalist William Stevens Robinson, she became actively involved in social reform, joining the Concord Anti-Slavery Society and later the suffrage movement in 1868, where she played a significant role in organizing conventions and founding rival suffrage groups.
In her later life, she focused on community engagement, establishing a self-improvement club that advocated for democratic leadership principles. Robinson's contributions to the suffrage cause were documented in her work *Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement*, and her legacy includes her lively accounts of various reform movements. She passed away at the age of eighty-six, leaving behind a rich collection of personal papers that provide insight into her life and the era she navigated. Robinson's literary works and advocacy efforts reflect her commitment to the social and political issues of her time.
Subject Terms
Harriet Jane Hanson Robinson
- Harriet H. Robinson
- Born: February 8, 1825
- Died: December 22, 1911
“Mill girl,” suffrage worker, clubwoman, and author, was born in Boston to Yankee carpenter William Hanson and Harriet (Browne) Hanson, the second of five children and the only daughter.
Harriet Hanson’s father died when she was six. Her mother, determined to keep the family together, took over a company boardinghouse in Lowell, Massachusetts. Young Harriet helped at home until she went into the mills at ten. Although she wrote glowingly of mill life in her retrospective account Loom and Spindle, or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (1898, 1976), she joined the strike of 1836. She was not active in the union, however. Praise of those early workers, together with a celebration of the mill periodical The Lowell Offering, was her purpose in the book.
Raised an orthodox Calvinist by Universalist parents, she was converted during a “come-outer” revival in Lowell when she was fifteen. She withdrew from the fellowship after baptism, and following some public flurry, was excommunicated from the Congregational church. Though she was devoted to the Bible as literature and eventually, in her old age, became a member of the Episcopal church, a rigidly anti-creedal attitude characterized her mature years.
She was allowed three months of school a year as a mill worker and later spent two full years in high school. In quest of learning she availed herself of lending libraries, lectures, and night schools.
She left the mills in 1848 to marry William Stevens Robinson, a bright young newspaperman from Concord, Massachusetts. Antislavery, prolabor, and outspoken, William Robinson was frequently out of work when his articles were too inflammatory to publish. He began his own newspaper, The Lowell American, after their marriage. The family soon included daughters Harriette Lucy (1850-1937) and Elizabeth Osborne (1852-1926), as well as Harriet Robinson’s mother.
After the paper failed, the family moved to Concord, and later to Maiden, Massachusetts. Two sons, Willie Elbridge (1854-59) and Edward Warrington (1859-1904), were born. Modest financial success came to the family when William Robinson was elected clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives (he served eleven years). He died in 1876; his wife spent thirty-five years as a widow.
Harriet Robinson had joined the Concord Anti-Slavery Society as much for its social possibilities as its aims. This attitude characterized much of her reform work. Happily married and an accomplished homemaker, she joined the suffrage movement in 1868, drawn chiefly by the articulate Lucy Stone and the socially prominent Julia Ward Howe. As president of the Middlesex County Woman Suffrage Association, she organized three successful conventions, but, slighted in praise by Stone and Stone’s husband, Henry B. Blackwell, in the Woman’s Journal, Robinson bolted from the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) and joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), setting up a rival suffrage group in the very shadow of Stone-Blackwell activities. Her book Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement (1881) chronicles her involvement. A dynamic orator and a person of rather regal presence, Robinson was an effective suffrage speaker. Not original in her ideas or strongly devoted to the cause, she left the movement in 1890 when the two wings combined.
An early member of the New England Club for Women, she delighted in her proximity to the wealthy and important, and then began to find fault in the secret leadership and snobbery she found. Along with her daughters, she founded Old and New, a Maiden-based self-improvement club that instituted democratic and rotating leadership. She later introduced this principle on the national level in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Founded in 1878, Old and New still carries on.
Robinson died at eighty-six in Maiden of pyelonephritis.
More radical in style than in substance, Robinson confined her public and literary careers to her years of widowhood. Her lively accounts of the movements she participated in are her most valuable reform legacy.
Robinson’s voluminous personal papers, housed in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, provided rich information on her life and milieu. Published work includes “Warrington” Pen-Portraits (1877), a collection of her husband’s pseudonymous political columns with a long biographical introduction, and two women’s rights plays, Captain Mary Miller (1887) and The New Pandora (1889). Two articles describing family background appeared in The Historical and Genealogical Register, “Descendants of Nicholas Browne,” July 1890, and “William S. Robinson (‘Warrington’),” October 1885. L. B. Merk, “Massachusetts and the Woman-Suffrage Movement,” unpublished doctoral diss., Radcliffe College, microfilm copy in Schlesinger Library (1961) comments on Robinson’s suffrage history. C. L. Bushman, A Good Poor Man’s Wife: Being a Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and Her Family in Nineteenth Century New England (1981) deals with several generations of Robinsons. See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1935) and Notable American Women (1971). An obituary notice can be found in The Maiden Evening News, December 22, 1911.