|
"You may think me indelicate or wanting feminine reserve to speak so frankly," Harriot F. Curtis wrote to a suitor in 1836, acknowledging the shocking nature of her sentiments. In a time when well over 90% of all American women married, Curtis assured her correspondent that "matrimony is an ocean upon which I shall not probably ever embark," and anyway, "I am not what any person would want for a wife." Born in rural Vermont in 1813, Curtis defied her parents to join the thousands of young New England women who moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, to work in its textile industry. There, in addition to her work in the mills, she developed a career as an editor and bestselling author.
|
Letter from Harriot Curtis to Hezekiah Morse Wead, 1836 (click image to read full letter)
|
|
The fully processed and newly opened Harriot F. Curtis Papers include thirty-five lengthy letters in her own hand, full typed transcriptions of each, her two novels, and a volume of her wisdom. These thirty-five letters she wrote between 1836 and 1845 to her suitor, Hezekiah Morse Wead, descended through his family, several members of which aspired to write a biography, a screenplay, or a work of historical fiction about Curtis' life and relationship with Wead. Lila Wead Berman, in her research for the task, acquired not only Curtis' published works, but other works written by and about New England's mill workers. Curtis' letters, writings, and Wead Berman's research materials came to the Sophia Smith Collection earlier this year via Wead Berman's daughter, Maria Deforest McLeish.
Wead's family had reason to express such interest in Curtis' life, as she delighted in flouting convention whenever possible. In an era that bound women to the domestic sphere, Curtis left her family's home against their wishes to undertake paid work in Lowell's textile and publishing industries. "It is the very height of enjoyment for me to show what a dunce I dare be, of what foolish folly I dare be guilty," Curtis wrote Wead in 1845, summarizing her thoughts on public opinion. She scoffed at marriage, turned down proposals, explored spiritual practices like Swedenborgianism, and "nearly rendered my mother insane" by threatening to join Shaker communes. Strikingly, Curtis also studied the discipline of phrenology under one of its leading proponents and developed a short-lived public career as a lecturer and practitioner of phrenology in the late 1830s and early 1840s, though she lost interest in it before the end of her correspondence with Wead, whose phrenological reading did not reflect what she knew of him.
Selection of published materials from Harriot Curtis Papers
Curtis' marriage-critical novels Kate In Search of a Husband and Jessie's Flirtations, though they went through many editions and were wildly successful in their own time, are now extraordinarily difficult to find in print. Their presence in the Harriot F. Curtis Papers, alongside her remarkable letters, will prove a valuable addition to scholarship on US women of the era, particularly of working class women, New England's mill girls, and and female authors.
-- Adrienne Naylor, graduate student intern who processed the papers of Harriot F. Curtis, Summer 2012
View finding aid for Harriot F. Curtis Papers
|
