Rumors of Sainthood: Sarah Shedd of Washington (cont.)
by Ronald Jager

Here is the place in the tapestry where we must pick up the bright thread of the literary and intellectual efforts of the mill girls. Professor Peabody of Harvard, who lectured regularly at Lowell lyceums, reported in the Atlantic Monthly that four fifths of his audience were factory girls, each one of them reading a book when he came in! And there were very few, he said, "who did not carry home full notes of what they had heard. I have never seen anywhere so assiduous note taking. No, not even in a college class ... as in that assembly of young women." The Lowell Offering, a literary monthly (from 1841 to 1845) to which Sarah Shedd contributed, was distributed in Boston and Lowell and in other cities of New England, and in many of the rural communities from which the girls originated; it was written and edited entirely by the mill workers or, as they called themselves on the title page, "Factory Girls." This "factory girl"

In fact, several things were unique here: never before in Europe or America had young women as a class, and in such numbers, been working together in a factory. Moreover, women didn't usually write for publication, and they certainly didn't normally edit publications. And these writers are just self-described factory girls! What is going on here? Charles Dickens, visiting from London, took home copies and then saluted The Offering in his book American Notes: "Putting out of sight the fact of the articles having been written by these girls after the arduous hours of the day -- it will compare advantageously with a great many English annuals." President Felton of Harvard was in France and wrote that he had heard an entire lecture at the University of Paris devoted to -- of all things! -- The Lowell Offering, the point of which was to illustrate what women can do. (We can imagine the dramatics of the French professor: Women can't write you say? In America even factory girls write -- and publish, and edit!) Then a selection of Offering articles was published in book form in England. It may not be too much to say that this periodical made young women as a class historically visible for the first time, and not only as factory girls but also as budding young leaders and writers. In the 1840s there were at least seven self-improvement clubs in Lowell, and The Offering took its themes and its origins from such a society connected with a Lowell Universalist Church. Not surprisingly, some of the stories in The Offering were also thinly disguised critiques of the mill system -- the system which made the owners rich at heavy cost to young women.

Most alumnae of The Lowell Offering -- that is to say, most of Sarah Shedd's circle of friends -- left the mills within a few years, and some went on to conspicuous careers: poets, missionaries, novelists, teachers, lecturers, artists. The best known of these was Lucy Larcom, friend of Whittier and author of A New England Girlhood (in print today), An Idyll of Work, and other works. Eliza Jane Cate wrote five books, beginning with The Rights and Duties of Mill Girls, and Harriott F. Curtis, wrote many essays for the New York Tribune and also five novels. Margaret Foley became a well-known sculptor, in Boston and Rome, while Harriet Farley wrote and lectured prolifically in New York, and Lydia S. Hall, famous as a young poet in The Offering days, became a missionary among the western Choctaw Indians, keeper of a Kansas Temperance Inn, and briefly Acting Treasurer of the United States. Harriet Hanson Robinson became the author of the well-known mill memoir Loom and Spindle (in print today) as well as several other books, including the once famous poetic drama, The New Pandora. And there were others who did notable things. All this lay in the future, of course, but such was the circle of friends that surrounded and stimulated Sarah Shedd in Lowell. There she blossomed among Whittier's "flowers gathered from a thousand hillsides."

Harriet Robinson wrote "Miss Shedd was not a prolific writer, and her contributions for The Offering were always of a serious nature." Unfortunately, most of the material in The Offering was published anonymously, or with a pseudonym, so it is impossible to pick out Sarah Shedd's particular work. This submerging of individual women's voices reflects again, perhaps, the very powerful sense of community among the mill girls; it may also testify to simple modesty on their part, unsure as they were of their reception, unsure of their talents, sometimes insecure about their lack of education. The editors found that they got more and better material if it were made public without a name attached.

In Sarah's book of poems, only a few are direct reflections of her life as a mill girl. Rather, many of her poems are centered in Washington, New Hampshire, naming and meditating on particular people, or fields, or lakes, on Draper Hill or Lovell Mountain. Mill life too prosaic to inspire much poetry? Whatever the case, it seems that even if her mind was in Massachusetts, her heart was in New Hampshire. From her Washington home she could glance northeast across the village green and right there loomed the stately Town House. To that building she devoted the longest poem in the book, including lyrical lines like these: "Our Pilgrim fathers loved their God; / Their worship was sincere; / So our forefathers knelt to him, / And built this temple here."

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