Curtis, Harriot F.

Harriot Flora Aurora Louisa Maria Curtis was born in Kelleyvale (now Lowell), Vermont on September 16, 1813, only a year after this Northeast Kingdom town incorporated, to Asahel (or Ashael) Jr. and Betsey Brigham Curtis. Her friend Harriet Hanson Robinson would later recall Curtis' unhappiness with her "lonely and isolated" existence in Kelleyvale. Like thousands of other young women in rural New England during the antebellum era, Curtis defied her parents and moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, to work in its burgeoning textile industry. She first appears on the Lawrence Manufacturing Company's payroll in 1833 as a harness knitter, considered one of the more skilled positions, staying through March 1838. Also a writer, the Lowell Casket, in which she had published, offered her an editorship position in 1837. In 1841 she began publishing in the corporate-sponsored literary magazine, Lowell Offering . Curtis became one of its two editors in 1842; responsible for soliciting subscriptions, she traveled widely. A year later, she and co-editor Harriet Farley bought the Lowell Offering, but the journal only lasted another two years and publication stopped in 1845. By then, Curtis had gained a measure of success after authoring the popular novel, Kate in Search of a Husband (1843), following it with the equally popular novel, Jessie's Flirtations (1846), and a collection of her wisdom, S.S.S. Philosophy (1847). Simultaneously, Curtis wrote for a number of newspapers including the Home Journal, the New York Tribune, the Lowell Journal, and the American of Lowell . During the 1830s and 40s, the open-minded Curtis maintained an interest in Swedenborgianism, threatened to join Shaker communes, and not only studied phrenology, but became a public lecturer on the topic and claimed eminent phrenologist O.S. Fowler as a mentor before disavowing the discipline by 1845. From 1854 to 1855, she served as editor of the Lowell weekly, Vox Populi . The antithesis of the Lowell Offering, the industry-critical Vox Populi spoke for workers rather than their employers. Curtis gave up her career after 1855, providing care to her ailing mother in Vermont. Curtis moved in with her sister Betsey's family in Needham, Massachusetts, upon her mother's 1859 death, living there for the remaining thirty years of her life. Writing in 1836 that "matrimony is an ocean upon which I shall not probably ever embark," Curtis never married, a lifestyle her friend and fellow former mill worker Harriet Hanson Robinson attributed to a shortage of suitable suitors. Writing in 2008 in the American Transcendental Quarterly, scholar Judith Ranta notes that "Curtis's fiction is striking for its critique of courtship and marriage, specifically the marriage market's oppressive effect upon young women." Styling herself a coquette, Curtis further reveals her critical ambivalence toward the institution of marriage in her lengthy correspondence with her suitor and friend, Hezekiah Morse Wead, whose proposals of marriage she rejected more than once.

From the guide to the Harriot F. Curtis Papers MS 692., 1836-1963, 1936-1963, (Sophia Smith Collection)