ROBINSON, HARRIET JANE HANSON

ne Hanson born Feb. 8, 1825, Boston died Dec. 22, 1911, Malden, Mass., U.S. writer and woman suffrage leader in the United States. Robinson was a mill operative for the Tremont Corporation at Lowell, Mass., beginning at the age of 10 as a bobbin doffer, and she later wrote poems and prose for the Lowell Offering, the mill operatives' newspaper that became nationally known. In 1848 she married William Stevens Robinson (died 1876), editor of the Lowell Courier and a Free Soil advocate. Robinson later became an advocate of woman suffrage, organizing the National Woman Suffrage Association of Massachusetts in 1881 and presenting a request to the U.S. Congress in 1889 for her enfranchisement. She was also a founder of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, serving on the first board of directors in the early 1890s. Robinson's writings include Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement (1881), The New Pandora (1889), a dramatic poem, and Loom and Spindle (1898), a memoir of her years in the Lowell mills. Additional reading Claudia L. Bushman, A Good Poor Man's Wife: Being a Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and Her Family in Nineteenth-Century New England (1981).