Not always to be here among the looms—
Scarcely a girl she knew expected that:
Means to an end their labor was,—to put
Gold nest-eggs in the bank, or to redeem
A mortgaged homestead, or to pay the way
Through classic years at some academy;
More commonly to lay a dowry by
For future housekeeping.
They were “hungry to know!”
. . . O what questionings
Of fate and freedom and how evil came
And what death is and what the life to come—
Passed to and fro among these girls.
and antislavery by conviction:
When I have thought what soil the cotton plant
We weave is rooted in, what waters it—
The blood of souls in bondage—I have felt
That I was sinning against light, to stay
And turn the accursed fibre into cloth
For human wearing.
determined to prove they were not to be despised because they did factory work.
At the end of their fourteen-hour workday, they met in Lowell Improvement Circles to read, study—and write.
However, nothing of their long hours, conditions of work, or wages ($2.00 a week); their treatment as wards and potential delinquents in the boarding house system; was allowed to appear in the heavily (male) edited Offering. By 1845, it had died for want of contributions. Their own subsequent publications, The Factory Girl, Valentine Offering, and later The Voice of Industry (organ of the Female Labor Reform Association), received no attention in literary circles.
The Improvement Circles were transformed into the Association by 1844. It had 500 active members in six months, and actively organized all through New England; its mottos: “Union for Power—Power to Bless Humanity” and “Freedom—Freedom for All.”
The true “Mind Among the Spindle” account would make a fascinating book and film, including the life of Sarah Bagley, a mill girl from the beginning, one-time Lowell Offering contributor, later its most outstanding foe, first president of the Female Labor Reform Association, and editor for years of The Voice of Industry. She is one of the most vital, powerful, appealing figures in our country’s past.
Verse quoted above is from Lucy Larcom’s long poem Idyll of Work (who would write a poem so titled today?). She went to work in the mills when she was eleven, changing bobbins from five in the morning to seven at night, but left as a young woman to become a teacher; later, a well-known poet and intimate of Whittier. Her own reminiscences, A New England Girlhood, are hazed through nostalgia, but valuable.
ONE OUT OF TWELVE, P. 66
EXCERPTS FROM BAUDELAIRE’S MY HEART LAID BARE
(ABOUT 1860–1865)
Give me the strength immediately to perform my daily task and thus to become a hero and a saint.
Hygiene. Projects. The more one desires, the stronger one’s will. The more one works, the better one works and the more one wants to work. The more one produces, the more fecund one becomes.
After a debauch, one feels oneself always to be more solitary, more abandoned.
I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo and today, 23rd of January 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.
Hygiene. Morality. To Honfleur as soon as possible, before I sink further. How many have been the presentiments and signs sent me already by God that it is high time to act, to consider the present moment as the most important of all moments and to take for my everlasting delight, my accustomed torment, that is to say, my work.
Hygiene. Conduct. Morality . . . two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare (time): Pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes. Work strengthens. Let us choose. The more we employ one of these means, the more the other will inspire us with repugnance. One can only forget Time by making use of it.
No task seems long but that which one dares not begin. It becomes a nightmare.
Hygiene. In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it. . . .
Hygiene. Morality. Conduct. Too late, perhaps. My mother and Jeanne—my health, for pity’s, for duty’s sake!—The maladies of Jeanne. My mother’s infirmities and loneliness.
A summary of wisdom. Toilet. Prayer. Work.
[Quoting Chateaubriand] “Prolonged unhappiness has upon the soul the same effect as old age upon the body: one cannot stir, one takes to one’s bed. . . . Extreme youth on the other hand finds reasons for procrastination; when there is plenty of time to spare, one is persuaded that years may be allowed to pass before one needs to play one’s part.”
Hygiene. Conduct. Morality. Jeanne 300 my mother 200 myself 300–800 francs a month. To work from 6 o’clock in the morning, fasting at midday. To work blindly without aim like a madman. We shall see the result.
Immediate work, even when it is bad, is better than day-dreaming. A succession of small acts of will achieves a large result.
Every defeat of the will forms a portion of lost matter. How wasteful then is hesitation! One may judge this by the immensity of the final effort necessary to repair so many losses. Dreams and warnings of death. To make the pleasures of the spirit one’s passion.
Work engenders good habits, sobriety and chastity, from which result health, riches, continuous and strengthening inspiration and charity. Age quod agis.
Fish, cold baths, showers, moss, pastilles occasionally, together with the abstinence from all stimulants.
Hygiene. Conduct. Method. I swear to observe henceforth the following rules as immutable rules of my life: To pray every morning to God, the source of all power and all justice; to my father, to Mariette and to Poe as intercessors; that they may give me the necessary strength to fulfil all my appointed tasks and that they may grant my mother a sufficient span of life in which to enjoy my transformation; to work all day long, or as long at any rate as my strength allows me; to put my trust in God—that is in Justice itself—for the success of my plans . . . to divide all my earnings into 4 parts (expenses, creditors, friends, mother)—to obey the strictest principles of sobriety, the first being the abstinence from all stimulants whatsoever.
“Too late.”
Baudelaire died after a long syphilitic paralysis in 1867. He was forty-six. “L’irrémédiable, l’irréparable, l’irrécouvrable.”
TILLIE OLSEN’S READING LISTS
Between 1972 and 1974 Women’s Studies Newsletter, a publication of the Feminist Press, presented a four-part series titled “Tillie Olsen’s Reading List.” The lists represented the fruit of Olsen’s extensive reading and research in public libraries, where she discovered writing by women and working-class authors often out of print and not included in the literature curricula of the day. Olsen’s lists proved influential for the development both of women’s studies and of women’s publishing. By 1972 the Feminist Press had already, at Olsen’s suggestion, republished works by Rebecca Harding Davis and Agnes Smedley, and it went on to reprint works from her reading lists by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Sarah E. Wright, Jo Sinclair, and Paule Marshall. As other publishers followed suit, a corpus of women’s writing previously left in obscurity became available for study and teaching.
Tillie Olsen’s Reading List (Women’s Studies Newsletter, Winter 1972)
A Spectrum
Novels
Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Cement by F. Gladkov
Daughter of Earth by Agnes Smedley
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow
Ultima Thule by H. H. Richardson
Time of Man by Elizabeth Madox Roberts
Put off Thy Shoes by Ethel
Voynich
Stories
“The Revolt of Mother,” in Best Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman
“A Jury of Her Peers,” by Susan Glaspell in U. S. Stories ed. by Martha Foley
“Nor-Bibi’s Crime,” by Vera Inber in Short Stories of Russia Today
“A Wagner Matinee,” in Willa Cather’s Youth and the Bright Medusa
“Old Mortality” and the Old Order stories, in Katherine Anne Porter’s The Collected Stories
“Prelude,” “At the Bay,” and “Six Years After,” in Katherine Mansfield’s Collected Stories
“Babushka Farnham,” in Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Fables for Parents
“The Bed Quilt,” in Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Vermont Lives
“Story of an Hour,” in Kate Chopin’s Collected Works
“Between Men,” in Doris Lessing’s A Man and Two Women
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
“The Darling,” by Anton Chekhov
“The Sky Is Gray,” in Ernest Gaines’s Bloodline
Lives
Eighty Years and More by Elizabeth Cady Stanton
A Mortal Flower by Han Suyin
Literature
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Thinking About Women by Mary Ellman
Tillie Olsen’s Reading List II (Women’s Studies Newsletter, Spring 1973)
Women: A List out of Which to Read
MOST WOMEN’S LIVES: lives, history, realities largely absent from literature (read as balancer, corrective, of prevalent images of women as protected, passive, parasitic, decorative, narcissistic, primarily sex objects, “the other,” etc.). Each entry should be read with the following in mind. 1) The hard and essential work of women, in and out of the home (“no work was too hard, no labour too strenuous to exclude us”). 2) Limitations, denials imposed; exclusions and restrictions in no way necessitated by biological or economic circumstances. 3) How human capacities born in women—intellect, organization, art, invention, vision, sense of justice, beauty, etc.—denied scope and development, nevertheless struggled to express themselves and function. . . .
p [and pb] = paperback
h = hardcover
op = out of print
d = drama
f = fiction
b = biography or autobiography
Four 100-Year-Old Women (read, preferably, as a cluster, and with 1), 2), 3) above in mind.)
Grandmother Brown: Her First Hundred Years (1827–1927), ed. Harriet Conner Brown. b/op
Mountain Wolf Woman, Sister of Crashing Thunder: Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian, ed. Nancy O. Lurie. b/p
Autobiography of Mother Jones, ed. Mary Field Parton. b/p
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman, by Ernest Gaines. f/p
Fiction
Alcott, Louisa May. “Transcendental Wild Oats,” in Bronson Alcott, Fruitlands, comp. by Clara Endicott Sears. b/op
Cather, Willa. My Antonia. f/p
Childress, Alice. Wedding Band. d/p
Dinesen, Isak. “Sorrow-acres,” in Winter’s Tales. f/p
Ellis, Katherine. Life of an Ordinary Woman. b/op
Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. “Ann Story,” in A Harvest of Stories. f/h
Glasgow, Ellen. Barren Ground; Vein of Iron. f/p
Greenberg, Joanne. In This Sign. f/p
Hansberry, Lorraine. Raisin in the Sun. d/p
Hughes, Mary Gray. “The Thousand Springs,” in The Thousand Springs. f/p
Le Sueur, Meridel. “The Annunciation,” in The Annunciation. f/op
Lewis, Janet. The Wife of Martin Guerre. b/p
Mansfield, Katherine. “The Woman at the Store,” in The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield. f/p
Marriott, Alice. Ten Grandmothers. b/h
Murray, Pauli. Proud Shoes. f/h
Petry, Ann. The Street. f/p
Porter, Katherine Anne. “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” in The Old Order. f/p
Walker, Alice. The Third Life of Grange Copeland. f/p
Walker, Margaret. Jubilee. f/p
Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Children’s series, including By the Shores of Silver Lake—These Happy Golden Years. f/p
Woolf, Virginia. “Memories of a Working Women’s Guild,” in The Captain’s Death Bed. b/h
Wright, Sarah E. This Child’s Gonna Live. f/p
Slaveys, Servants, Servers
Anderson, Barbara. Southbound. f/h
Chekhov, Anton. “A Sleepyhead,” in The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. f/h
Childress, Alice. Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life. b/h
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Mary Moody Emerson,” in Lectures and Biographical Sketches, will have to represent the lives of countless unmarried girls and women spent in the hardest kind of service, whenever and wherever needed by any family branches. b/h
Hellman, Lillian. “Sophronia” in An Unfinished Woman. b/p
Hurst, Fannie. Lummox. f/op
Mansfield, Katherine. “The Child Who Was Tired,” “Life of Ma Parker,” and “The Tiredness of Rosabel,” in The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield. f/p
Parker, Dorothy. “Clothe the Naked,” in Collected Stories. f/h
Porter, Katherine Anne, Hatsy in “Holiday,” Collected Stories. f/p
Powell, Margaret. Below Stairs. b/p
Myth Dispellers
Peretz, Isaac Leib. “She Women,” in Stories and Pictures. f/op
Reyher, Rebecca H. Zulu Woman. b/p
Some Women in Works by Men
Agee, James. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. b/p
Chekhov, Anton. “In the Ravine” and “Peasants,” in Seven Short Novels. f/p
Clarke, Adam. Memoires of the Wesley Family. (Susannah Wesley, mother of John and eleven other children—a marvelous example of 3) above.) b/op
DuBois, W. E. B. Josie in “On the Meaning of Progress,” The Souls of Black Folk. b/p
Gorky, Maxim. Gorky’s grandmother in Childhood. f/p
——. Mother. f/p
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. f/p
Lawrence, D. H. Sons and Lovers, especially Part I. f/p
O’Casey, Sean. Collected Plays; “Mrs. Cassidy Takes a Holiday,” in Inishfallen Fare Thee Well. d/p b/p
Rolvaag, O. E. Giants in the Earth. f/p
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. f/p
Wright, Richard. “Bright and Morning Star,” in Uncle Tom’s Children. f/p
Zola, Emile. L’Assommoir; Germinal, (Section I, part 2). f/p
Tillie Olsen’s Reading List III (Women’s Studies Newsletter, Summer 1973)
Women: A List out of Which to Read
Most Women’s Lives (continued)
MOTHERING AND WIFEHOOD: Mothering (as distinguished from Motherhood) and Wifehood are rarely major or even minor parts of literature, although women have always been defined by them, and they are the major parts of most women’s lives. Women’s courses do not know, or do not understand, the necessity of including the relatively few works that tell something of what mothering and/or wifehood mean.
I. These titles repeated from the two previous listings are essential reading, preferably as a cluster.
Arnow, Harriet. The Dollmaker (pb).
Brown, Harriet. Grandmother Brown, Her First Hundred Years (biog., op).
Richardson, H. H. Ultima Thule (op).
Stead, Christina. The Man Who Loved Children (pb).
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse (pb).
Wright, Sarah E. This Child’s Gonna Live (pb).
Stories:
Cather, Willa. “A Wagner Matinee,” in Troll Garden.
Gaines, Ernest. “The Sky Is Gray,” in Bloodline (pb).
Mansfield, Katherine. “Six Years After,” in The Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield.
II.
Colette. My Mother’s House (pb) and other glimpses of Sido in Earthly Paradise (pb).
Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. Fables for Parents, especially “
The Forgotten Mother” (op).
Lessing, Doris. The section “Free Women II,” in The Golden Notebook (pb).
Paley, Grace. The Little Disturbances of Man (op but soon to be reprinted in pb).
Schreiner, Olive. From Man to Man (op).
Struther, Jan. “Three Stockings,” in Mrs. Miniver (op).
III. Add to the Agee, Gorky, Lawrence, O’Casey (Juno and the Paycock, Plough and the Stars), Wright, titles in “Some Women in Works by Men” in Reading List II, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (pb); that Jewish mother should be contrasted with Phillip Roth’s Sophie in Portnoy’s Complaint (Pb).
IV. The conflict mother/writer is written of in Storm Jameson’s autobiography, Journey to the North, and in letters in Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Annie Fields, ed. (op).
Tillie Olsen’s Reading List IV (Women’s Studies Newsletter, Winter 1974)
A List Out of Which to Read, Extend Range, Comprehension
* = a classic of its kind and essential reading
# = only part of the book is concerned with these years
j = merits adult attention, although usually classified as children’s book
t = written by young women (thirty or under)
Forms and Formings: The Younger Years
These books are listed in their own kind of order, arranged in a spectrum by the period of time they cover, or in clusters for special reasons.
The Younger Years: A Spectrum of Girlhoods
*Charlotte Brönte. Jane Eyre. pb/f/t
*George Eliot. The Mill on the Floss. pb/f
*Louisa May Alcott. Little Women. pb/f/j/t
*Benjamin A. Botkin. “Jenny Proctor’s Story” in Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery. pb/b
*Olive Schreiner. Story of an African Farm. pb/f/t
*Sarah Grand. The Beth Book. op/f
*Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Eighty Years and More. #/pb/b
*Nancy Lurie, ed. Mountain Wolf Woman. #/pb/b
*Laura Ingalls Wilder. Little House in the Big Woods to These Happy Golden Years (Pioneer Series). pb/b/j
*Mary Johnston. Hagar. op/f
*Agnes Smedley. Daughter of Earth. pb/f/t
*Vera Brittain. Testament of Youth. op/b
*Catherine Cookson. Our Kate. #/b/pb
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