The girls there
were just such girls as are knocking at the doors of young
women's colleges to-day. They had come to work with their hands,
but they could not hinder the working of their minds also. Their
mental activity was overflowing at every possible outlet.
Many of them were supporting themselves at schools like Bradford
Academy or Ipswich Seminary half the year, by working in the
mills the other half. Mount Holyoke Seminary broke upon the
thoughts of many of them as a vision of hope,--I remember being
dazzled by it myself for a while,--and Mary Lyon's name was
honored nowhere more than among the Lowell mill-girls. Meanwhile
they were improving themselves and preparing for their future in
every possible way, by purchasing and reading standard books, by
attending lectures, and evening classes of their own getting up,
and by meeting each other for reading and conversation.
That they should write was no more strange than that they should
study, or read, or think. And yet there were those to whom it
seemed incredible that a girl could, in the pauses of her work,
put together words with her pen that it would do to print; and
after a while the assertion was circulated, through some distant
newspaper, that our magazine was not written by ourselves at all,
but by "Lowell lawyers.
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