In the 1830s and 1840s, Harriet Hanson Robinson worked as a Lowell mill operative from the age of 10 until she married William Stevens Robinson, editor of the Lowell Courier, in 1848. After the Civil War, both Harriet and her husband became steadfast supporters of women’s suffrage. Her book, Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement, details the women’s suffrage campaign in Massachusetts from 1774 to 1881. The book includes a comprehensive 88-page appendix containing a detailed description of the Lowell mills, accounts of various attempts by women to gain limited access to voting rights, and statistical information on women’s employment.

Document C

The epigraph from Harriet Hanson Robinson’s Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement is excerpted from Book V of Plato’s Republic. Written as a Socratic dialogue and authored by Plato around 375 BCE, Plato’s Republic centered on the themes of justice, the order and character of the just city-state, and the just man. It is Plato’s best-known work and has proven to be one of the world’s most influential works of philosophy and political theory, both intellectually and historically.

“Plato: Republic. Book V. In the administration of a State, neither a woman as a woman, nor a man as a man, has any special function, but the gifts are equally diffused in both sexes…One woman has the gift of healing, another not; one is a musician, another not a musician; one woman is a philosopher, and another is an enemy to philosophy…The same education and opportunity for self-development which makes man a good guardian (or ruler) will make woman a good guardian (or ruler); for their original nature is the same.”