Silences (57 page)

            
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. . . .