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As a poet, author, and keen observer of life in 1870s Boston, Harriet Robinson played an essential—if occasionally underappreciated—role in the women’s suffrage movement during Boston’s golden age. Robinson flourished after leaving behind her humble roots in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, deciding to spend a year in Boston discovering the culture and politics of America’s Athens. An honest, bright, and perceptive witness, she meets with Emerson and Julia Ward Howe, with whom she organizes the New England Women’s Club, and drinks deeply of the city’s artistic and cultural offerings. Noted historian Claudia L. Bushman proves a wonderful guide as she weaves together Robinson’s journal entries, her own learned commentary, and selections from other nineteenth-century writers to reveal the impact of the industrial revolution and the rise of women’s suffrage as seen through the experience of one articulate, engaged participant. Going to Boston will appeal to readers interested in both the history of Boston and the history of American progress itself.

A shrewd observer of 19th-century America, Harriet Hanson Robinson’s participation in important events and her salty comments, preserved and recorded in the poetry and books she wrote during her lifetime, offer a dramatic account of how one strong-minded woman, who first worked as a textile worker in the industrial town of Lowell, MA, turned to writing and politics to sustain her family after her husband’s early death. Harriet’s personal papers shed light on such topics as labor history, state politics, and the mechanics of writing and publication. Her best-known publications, Loom and Spindle, which deals with early factory life, and Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement, are often quoted today.