Woman of the Century/Harriette Robinson Shattuck
SHATTUCK, Mrs. Harriette Robinson, author and writer on parliamentary law, born in Lowell, Mass., 4th December, 1850. She is the oldest child of William S. and Harriet H. Robinson. She was educated in the Maiden, Mass., public schools and had the advantage of several years of literary training under the supervision of Theodore D. Weld, of Boston. Since then she has continued to be a student on various subjects, philosophy and politics being the chief ones of late years.
HARRIETTE ROBINSON SHATTUCK.
Soon after leaving school, she began to write stories for children and articles for the newspapers on different subjects, mainly relating to women, and, until 1878, when she became the wife of Sidney D. Shattuck, of Maiden, she was clerk in the office of the American Social Science Association in Boston. During the five or six years of the Concord Summer School of Philosophy, she wrote letters for the Boston "Transcript," in which the philosophy of the various great teachers, such as Plato, Hegel, Dante and Goethe, was carefully elucidated and made available to the general public. "The Story of Dante's Divine Comedy" (New York, 1887) is the outcome of those letters from the Concord school. Her other book, are "Our Mutual Friend" (Boston, 1880), a dramatization from Dickens and "Little Folks East and West" (Boston, 1891), a book of children's tales. She was for ten years president of the National Woman Suffrage Association of Massachusetts, and is now president of the Boston Political Class, which she has conducted for seven years, and in which the science of government and the political topics of the day are considered. She is the founder of "The Old and New< " of Maiden, Mass., one of the oldest woman's clubs in the country. She is interested in all movements for the advancement of women, especially in the cause of woman's political enfranchisement. She made her first speech for suffrage in Rochester, in 1878. She has since spoken before committees of Congress and of the Massachusetts legislature, and in many conventions in Washington and elsewhere. She was the presiding officer over one of the sessions of the first International Council of Women, held in Washington, D. C., in 1888. She is a quiet speaker and makes no attempts at oratory. Her best work has been done in writing, rather than in public speaking, unless we include in this term the teaching of politics and of parliamentary law, with the art of presiding and conducting public meetings. When her father was clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representations, she was his assistant, being the first and only woman to hold such a position in that State (1871-72). Her most popular book is the "Woman's Manual of Parliamentary Law" (Boston, 1891), a work that is a recognized standard.