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worked in their father's stores.

Lucy Larcom came down from the farm in New Hampshire to work in the cotton mills at Lowell because of the “great cultural opportunities.” The cotton mills were the seat of culture. They worked twelve hours a day, sometimes thirteen, but it was the seat of culture and they came for the culture. They had lectures at the lyceum, and music. It was perfectly wonderful to one from the New Hampshire hills where you saw nothing and heard nothing. She, of course, became a distinguished New England poet.

There had been a lot of that. The women had gone to work early as the cotton mills came in. Of course that was only following the pattern of the industrial revolution in England. That was at least two generations ahead of me. Lucy Larcom must have been in my grandmother's generation.

This business of woman's rights was not very important in my own thinking. I'm sure that except for the opportunities that came to women in the train of the movement for woman's rights and woman's suffrage, the opportunities that came to me wouldn't have come to me. I never will admit that it was solely because women had made an agitation for their rights and their vote that any of my opportunities came to me. But I'm sure that it entered into it and it was partly in the train of it. I've never been unaware of that.