From the crowded factory floors of Lowell, Massachusetts to the national stage, Harriet Hanson Robinson (1825-1911) both made, and recorded, history. A respected author and passionate women’s suffrage advocate, she wrote compelling accounts of life during the Industrial Revolution and the fight to obtain equal rights for women.

Born in Boston to Harriet Browne and William Hanson, her father died when she was just six years old, leaving her mother a widow with four small children. The family moved to Lowell, a leading economic and innovative force in America’s Industrial Revolution, where the city’s textile factories employed, and housed, thousands of local women known as “mill girls.”

Robinson’s mother worked as a boardinghouse keeper to support the family, cooking and cleaning for between 25 and 40 mill girls daily. To help make ends meet, Robinson worked in the mills. When the mills erupted into a full blown strike, or “turn out,” in 1836, one of the earliest in American history and led mainly by women, she was just eleven years old. Despite her young age, she rose up saying, “I don’t care what you do, I am going to turn out, whether anyone else does or not…,” leading the other mill girls out of the factory. She lost her job that day and the corporation terminated her mother as well.

Undaunted, Robinson pursued an education attending night classes at a local competitive high school and buying books and poetry to read while at work in other mills. She wrote for the Lowell Offering, a popular and well-reviewed collection of poetry and short stories published by other mill girls. Through her writing, she met her husband, journalist and abolitionist, William Stevens Robinson. They settled in Malden, Massachusetts, where she spent the rest of her life.

Inspired by the speeches of Julia Ward Howe and others in the New England Women’s Club, Robinson began lobbying for women’s suffrage in 1868. One of her primary efforts was fundraising for the cause, an activity that gave her life renewed purpose. She worked with Howe, establishing a Malden chapter of the club.

Robinson also worked closely with Lucy Stone, a leader in the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association until a misunderstanding led to a falling out between the two. Unable to reconcile, she aligned herself with the rival National Woman Suffrage Association led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. She wrote Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement, an account of suffragists’ efforts in the state, omitting the activities of Stone.

In 1898, Robinson published Loom and Spindle: or Life Among the Early Mill Girls, a largely biographical work that includes the stories of other mill girls, and the labor movements they were part of half a century earlier. She also wrote plays, short stories, and children’s literature.

Writing and fighting for suffrage until the end, Robinson died eight years prior to the passage of the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote.