ABSTRACT
This article explores the private letters of Harriot Curtis, former factory worker and coeditor of the Lowell Offering. It draws on the archival recovery of the “Harriot F. Curtis papers,” which were recently donated to the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College; the papers contain thirty-five letters over a nine-year period (1836–45) from Curtis to her suitor Hezekiah Morse Wead, whom she ultimately rejects. Wead's letters to Curtis are not included in the Collection. The topics to which the letters give the most attention are marriage and career. Intimate in nature, Curtis's letters to Wead offer insight into the value she placed on marriage and writing as waged labor and how those values were constructed in relation to one another. Given that Wead, the person with whom she discusses her career, is a potential though unsuccessful suitor, the circumstances are such that discussion of marriage and career are intertwined by default. Curtis's letters, therefore, are a significant resource for academic inquiry into the nineteenth-century working woman's conceptions of marriage, career, literacy, and class.
