THE pleasure we found in making new acquaintances among our workmates
arose partly from their having come from great distances, regions
unknown to us, as the northern districts of Maine and New Hampshire and
Vermont were, in those days of stage-coach traveling, when rail-roads
had as yet only connected the larger cities with one another.
It seemed wonderful to me to be talking with anybody who had really
seen mountains and lived among them. One of the younger girls, who
worked beside me during my very first days in the mill, had come from
far up near the sources of the Merrimack, and she told me a great deal
about her home, and about farm-life among the hills. I listened almost
with awe when she said that she lived in a valley where the sun set at
four o'clock, and where the great snowstorms drifted in so that
sometimes they did not see a neighbor for weeks.
To have mountain-summits looking down upon one out of the clouds,
summer and winter, by day and by night, seemed to me something both
delightful and terrible. And yet here was this girl to whom it all
appeared like the merest commonplace. What she felt about it was that
it was "awful cold, sometimes; the days were so short! and it grew dark
so early!" Then she told me about the spinning, and the husking, and
the sugar-making, while we sat in a corner together, waiting to replace
the full spools by empty ones,--the work usually given to the little
girls.
I had a great admiration for this girl, because she had come from those
wilderness-regions. The scent of pine-woods and checkerberry-leaves
seemed to bang about her. I believe I liked her all the better because
she said "daown" and "haow." It was part of the mountain-flavor.
I tried, on my part, to impress her with stories of the sea; but I did
not succeed very well. Her principal comment was, "They don't think
much of sailors up aour way." And I received the impression, from her
and others, and from my own imagination, that rural life was far more
delightful than the life of towns.
But there is something in the place where we were born that holds us
always by the heartstrings. A town that still has a great deal of the
country in it, one that is rich in beautiful scenery and ancestral
associations, is almost like a living being, with a body and a soul. We
speak of such a town, if our birthplace, as of a mother, and think of
ourselves as her sons and daughters.
So we felt, my sisters and I, about our dear native town of Beverly.
Its miles of sea-border, almost every sunny cove and rocky headland of
which was a part of some near relative's homestead, were only half a
day's journey distant; and the misty ocean-spaces beyond still widened
out on our imagination from the green inland landscape around us. But
the hills sometimes shut us in, body and soul. To those who have been
reared by the sea a wide horizon is a necessity, both for the mind and
for the eye.
We had many opportunities of escape towards our native shores, for the
larger part of our large family still remained there, and there was a
constant coming and going among us. The stagedriver looked upon us as
his especial charge, and we had a sense of personal property in the
Salem and Lowell stagecoach, which had once, like a fairy-godmother's
coach, rumbled down into our own little lane, taken possession of us,
and carried us off to a new home.
My married sisters had families growing up about them, and they liked
to have us younger ones come and help take care of their babies. One of
them sent for me just when the close air and long days' work were
beginning to tell upon my health, and it was decided that I had better
go. The salt wind soon restored my strength, and those months of quiet
family life were very good for me.
Like most young girls, I had a motherly fondness for little children,
and my two baby-nephews were my pride and delight. The older one had a
delicate constitution, and there was a thoughtful, questioning look in
his eyes, that seemed to gaze forward almost sadly, and foresee that he
should never attain to manhood. The younger, a plump, vigorous urchin,
three or four months old, did, without doubt, "feel his life in every
limb." He was my especial charge, for his brother's clinging weakness
gave him, the first-born, the place nearest his mother's heart. The
baby bore the family name, mine and his mother's; "our little Lark," we
sometimes called him, for his wide-awakeness and his
merry-heartedness.(Alas! neither of those beautiful boys grew up to be
men! One page of my home-memories is sadly written over with their
elegy, the "Graves of a Household." Father, mother, and four sons, an
entire family, long since passed away from earthly sight.)
The tie between my lovely baby-nephew and myself became very close. The
first two years of a child's life are its most appealing years, and
call out all the latent tenderness of the nature on which it leans for
protection. I think I should have missed one of the best educating
influences of my youth, if I had not had the care of that baby for a
year or more just as I entered my teens. I was never so happy as when I
held him in my arms, sleeping or waking; and he, happy anywhere, was
always contented when he was with me.
I was as fond as ever of reading, and somehow I managed to combine baby
and book. Dickens's "Old Curiosity Shop" was just then coming out in a
Philadelphia weekly paper, and I read it with the baby playing at my
feet, or lying across my lap, in an unfinished room given up to
sea-chests and coffee-bags and spicy foreign odors. (My cherub's papa
was a sea-captain, usually away on his African voyages.) Little Nell
and her grandfather became as real to me as my darling charge, and if a
tear from his nurse's eyes sometimes dropped upon his cheek as he
slept, he was not saddened by it. When he awoke he was irrepressible;
clutching at my hair with his stout pink fists, and driving all
dream-people effectually out of my head. Like all babies, he was
something of a tyrant; but that brief, sweet despotism ends only too
soon. I put him gratefully down, dimpled, chubby, and imperious, upon
the list of my girlhood's teachers.
My sister had no domestic help besides mine, so I learned a good deal
about general housework. A girl's preparation for life was, in those
days, considered quite imperfect, who had no practical knowledge of
that kind. We were taught, indeed, how to do everything that a woman
might be called upon to do under any circumstances, for herself or for
the household she lived in. It was one of the advantages of the old
simple way of living, that the young daughters of the house were, as a
matter of course, instructed in all these things. They acquired the
habit of being ready for emergencies, and the family that required no
outside assistance was delightfully independent.
A young woman would have been considered a very inefficient being who
could not make and mend and wash and iron her own clothing, and get
three regular meals and clear them away every day, besides keeping the
house tidy, and doing any other needed neighborly service, such as
sitting all night by a sick-bed. To be "a good watcher" was considered
one of the most important of womanly attainments. People who lived side
by side exchanged such services without waiting to be asked, and they
seemed to be happiest of whom such kindnesses were most expected.
Every kind of work brings its own compensations and attractions. I
really began to like plain sewing; I enjoyed sitting down for a whole
afternoon of it, fingers flying and thoughts flying faster still,--the
motion of the hands seeming to set the mind astir. Such afternoons used
to bring me throngs of poetic suggestions, particularly if I sat by an
open window and could hear the wind blowing and a bird or two singing.
Nature is often very generous in opening her heart to those who must
keep their hands employed. Perhaps it is because she is always quietly
at work herself, and so sympathizes with her busy human friends. And
possibly there is no needful occupation which is wholly unbeautiful.
The beauty of work depends upon the way we meet it--whether we arm
ourselves each morning to attack it as an enemy that must be vanquished
before night comes, or whether we open our eyes with the sunrise to
welcome it as an approaching friend who will keep us delightful company
all day, and who will make us feel, at evening, that the day was well
worth its fatigues.
I found my practical experience of housekeeping and baby-tending very
useful to me afterwards at the West, in my sister Emilie's family, when
she was disabled by illness. I think, indeed, that every item of real
knowledge I ever acquired has come into use somewhere or somehow in the
course of the years. But these were not the things I had most wished to
do. The whole world of thought lay unexplored before me,--a world of
which I had already caught large and tempting glimpses, and I did not
like to feel the horizon shutting me in, even to so pleasant a corner
as this. And the worst of it was that I was getting too easy and
contented, too indifferent to the higher realities which my work and my
thoughtful companions had kept keenly clear before me. I felt myself
slipping into an inward apathy from which it was hard to rouse myself.
I could not let it go on so. I must be where my life could expand.
It was hard to leave the dear little fellow I had taught to walk and to
talk, but I knew he would not be inconsolable. So I only said "I must
go,"--and turned my back upon the sea, and my face to the banks of the
Merrimack.
When I returned I found that I enjoyed even the familiar, unremitting
clatter of the mill, because it indicated that something was going on.
I liked to feel the people around me, even those whom I did not know,
as a wave may like to feel the surrounding waves urging it forward,
with or against its own will. I felt that I belonged to the world, that
there was something for me to do in it, though I had not yet found out
what. Something to do; it might be very little, but still it would be
my own work. And then there was the better something which I had almost
forgotten--to be! Underneath my dull thoughts the old aspirations were
smouldering, the old ideals rose and beckoned to me through the
rekindling light.
It was always aspiration rather than ambition by which I felt myself
stirred. I did not care to outstrip others, and become what is called
"distinguished," were that a possibility, so much as I longed to answer
the Voice that invited, ever receding, up to invisible heights, however
unattainable they might seem. I was conscious of a desire that others
should feel something coming to them out of my life like the breath of
flowers, the whisper of the winds, the warmth of the sunshine, and the
depth of the sky. That, I felt, did not require great gifts or a fine
education. We might all be that to each other. And there was no
opportunity for vanity or pride in receiving a beautiful influence, and
giving it out again.
I do not suppose that I definitely thought all this, though I find that
the verses I wrote for our two mill magazines at about this time often
expressed these and similar longings. They were vague, and they were
too likely to dissipate themselves in mere dreams. But our aspirations
come to us from a source far beyond ourselves. Happy are they who are
"not disobedient unto the heavenly vision"!
A girl of sixteen sees the world before her through rose-tinted mists,
a blending of celestial colors and earthly exhalations, and she cannot
separate their elements, if she would; they all belong to the landscape
of her youth. It is the mystery of the meeting horizons,--the visible
beauty seeking to lose and find itself in the Invisible.
In returning to my daily toil among workmates from the hill-country,
the scenery to which they belonged became also a part of my life. They
brought the mountains with them, a new background and a new hope. We
shared an uneven path and homely occupations; but above us hung
glorious summits never wholly out of sight. Every blossom and every
dewdrop at our feet was touched with some tint of that far-off
splendor, and every pebble by the wayside was a messenger from the peak
that our feet would stand upon by and by.
The true climber knows the delight of trusting his path, of following
it without seeing a step before him, or a glimpse of blue sky above
him, sometimes only knowing that it is the right path because it is the
only one, and because it leads upward. This our daily duty was to us.
Though we did not always know it, the faithful plodder was sure to win
the heights. Unconsciously we learned the lesson that only by humble
Doing can any of us win the lofty possibilities of Being. For indeed,
what we all want to find is not so much our place as our path. The path
leads to the place, and the place, when we have found it, is only a
clearing by the roadside, an opening into another path.
And no comrades are so dear as those who have broken with us a pioneer
road which it will be safe and good for others to follow; which will
furnish a plain clue for all bewildered travelers hereafter. There is
no more exhilarating human experience than this, and perhaps it is the
highest angelic one. It may be that some such mutual work is to link us
forever with one another in the Infinite Life.
The girls who toiled together at Lowell were clearing away a few weeds
from the overgrown track of independent labor for other women. They
practically said, by numbering themselves among factory girls, that in
our country no real odium could be attached to any honest toil that any
self-respecting woman might undertake.
I regard it as one of the privileges of my youth that I was permitted
to grow up among those active, interesting girls, whose lives were not
mere echoes of other lives, but had principle and purpose distinctly
their own. Their vigor of character was a natural development. The New
Hampshire girls who came to Lowell were descendants of the sturdy
backwoodsmen who settled that State scarcely a hundred years before.
Their grandmothers had suffered the hardships of frontier life, had
known the horrors of savage warfare when the beautiful valleys of the
Connecticut and the Merrimack were threaded with Indian trails from
Canada to the white settlements. Those young women did justice to their
inheritance. They were earnest and capable; ready to undertake anything
that was worth doing. My dreamy, indolent nature was shamed into
activity among them. They gave me a larger, firmer ideal of womanhood.
Often during the many summers and autumns that of late years I have
spent among the New Hampshire hills, sometimes far up the
mountainsides, where I could listen to the first song of the little
brooks setting out on their journey to join the very river that flowed
at my feet when I was a working girl on its banks,--the Merrimack,--I
have felt as if I could also hear the early music of my workmates'
lives, those who were born among these glorious summits. Pure, strong,
crystalline natures, carrying down with them the light of blue skies
and the freshness of free winds to their place of toil, broadening and
strengthening as they went on, who can tell how they have refreshed the
world, how beautifully they have blended their being with the great
ocean of results? A brook's life is like the life of a maiden. The
rivers receive their strength from the rock-born hills, from the
unfailing purity of the mountain-streams.
A girl's place in the world is a very strong one: it is a pity that she
does not always see it so. It is strongest through her natural impulse
to steady herself by leaning upon the Eternal Life, the only Reality;
and her weakness comes also from her inclination to lean against
something,--upon an unworthy support, rather than none at all. She
often lets her life get broken into fragments among the flimsy
trellises of fashion and conventionality, when it might be a perfect
thing in the upright beauty of its own consecrated freedom.
Yet girlhood seldom appreciates itself. We often hear a girl wishing
that she were a boy. That seems so strange! God made no mistake in her
creation. He sent her into the world full of power and will to be a
helper; and only He knows how much his world needs help. She is here to
make this great house of humanity a habitable and a beautiful place,
without and within,--a true home for every one of his children. It
matters not if she is poor, if she has to toil for her daily bread, or
even if she is surrounded by coarseness and uncongeniality: nothing can
deprive her of her natural instinct to help, of her birthright as a
helper. These very hindrances may, with faith and patience, develop in
her a nobler womanhood.
No; let girls be as thankful that they are girls as that they are human
beings; for they also, according to his own loving plan for them, were
created in the image of God. Their real power, the divine dowry of
womanhood, is that of receiving and giving inspiration. In this a girl
often surpasses her brother; and it is for her to hold firmly and
faithfully to her holiest instincts, so that when he lets his standard
droop, she may, through her spiritual strength, be a standard bearer
for him. Courage and self-reliance are now held to be virtues as
womanly as they are manly; for the world has grown wise enough to see
that nothing except a life can really help another life. It is strange
that it should ever have held any other theory about woman.
That was a true use of the word "help" that grew up so naturally in the
rendering and receiving of womanly service in the old-fashioned New
England household. A girl came into a family as one of the home-group,
to share its burdens, to feel that they were her own. The woman who
employed her, if her nature was at all generous, could not feel that
money alone was an equivalent for a heart's service; she added to it
her friendship, her gratitude and esteem. The domestic problem can
never be rightly settled until the old idea of mutual help is in some
way restored. This is a question for girls of the present generation to
consider, and she who can bring about a practical solution of it will
win the world's gratitude.
We used sometimes to see it claimed, in public prints, that it would be
better for all of us mill-girls to be working in families, at domestic
service, than to be where we were. Perhaps the difficulties of modern
housekeepers did begin with the opening of the Lowell factories.
Country girls were naturally independent, and the feeling that at this
new work the few hours they had of every-day leisure were entirely
their own was a satisfaction to them. They preferred it to going out as
"hired help." It was like a young man's pleasure in entering upon
business for himself. Girls had never tried that experiment before, and
they liked it. It brought out in them a dormant strength of character
which the world did not previously see, but now fully acknowledges. Of
course they had a right to continue at that freer kind of work as long
as they chose, although their doing so increased the perplexities of
the housekeeping problem for themselves even, since many of them were
to become, and did become, American house-mistresses.
It would be a step towards the settlement of this vexed and vexing
question if girls would decline to classify each other by their
occupations, which among us are usually only temporary, and are
continually shifting from one pair of hands to another. Changes of
fortune come so abruptly that the millionaire's daughter of to-day may
be glad to earn her living by sewing or sweeping tomorrow.
It is the first duty of every woman to recognize the mutual bond of
universal womanhood. Let her ask herself whether she would like to hear
herself or little sister spoken of as a shop-girl, or a factory-girl,
or a servant-girl, if necessity had compelled her for a time to be
employed in either of the ways indicated. If she would shrink from it a
little, then she is a little inhuman when she puts her unknown human
sisters who are so occupied into a class by themselves, feeling herself
to be somewhat their superior. She is really the superior person who
has accepted her work and is doing it faithfully, whatever it is. This
designating others by their casual employments prevents one from making
real distinctions, from knowing persons as persons. A false standard is
set up in the minds of those who classify and of those who are
classified.
Perhaps it is chiefly the fault of ladies themselves that the word
"lady" has nearly lost its original meaning (a noble one) indicating
sympathy and service;--bread-giver to those who are in need. The idea
that it means something external in dress or circumstances has been too
generally adopted by rich and poor; and this, coupled with the sweeping
notion that in our country one person is just as good as another, has
led to ridiculous results, like that of saleswomen calling themselves
"sales-ladies." I have even heard a chambermaid at a hotel introduce
herself to guests as "the chamber-lady."
I do not believe that any Lowell mill-girl was ever absurd enough to
wish to be known as a "factory-lady," although most of them knew that
"factory-girl" did not represent a high type of womanhood in the Old
World. But they themselves belonged to the New World, not to the Old;
and they were making their own traditions, to hand down to their
Republican descendants--one of which was and is that honest work has no
need to assert itself or to humble itself in a nation like ours, but
simply to take its place as one of the foundation-stones of the
Republic.
The young women who worked at Lowell had the advantage of living in a
community where character alone commanded respect. They never, at their
work or away from it, heard themselves contemptuously spoken of on
account of their occupation, except by the ignorant or weak-minded,
whose comments they were of course to sensible to heed.
We may as well acknowledge that one of the unworthy tendencies of
womankind is towards petty estimates of other women. This classifying
habit illustrates the fact. If we must classify our sisters, let us
broaden ourselves by making large classifications. We might all place
ourselves in one of two ranks--the women who do something and the women
who do nothing; the first being of course the only creditable place to
occupy. And if we would escape from our pettinesses, as we all may and
should, the way to do it is to find the key to other lives, and live in
their largeness, by sharing their outlook upon life. Even poorer
people's windows will give us a new horizon, and people's windows will
give us a new horizon, and often a far broader one than our own.