Woman of the Century/Hulda Barker Loud

LOUD. Miss Hulda Barker, editor and publisher, born in East Abington, now Rockland. Mass., 13th September, 1844. She attended the public schools of that town until she was seventeen years of age. At eighteen she began to teach school in her native place, and taught there most of the time until 1886, retaining for thirteen years the highest position held by a woman in that town, and receiving the highest salary, her salary always being the same as that of a man in the same grade of work. That was owing to her constant agitation of the question of equal rights with her school committee. In 1884 a new paper was started in her town, and she was asked by the publisher to take the editorial chair. She consented and named the paper the Rockland "Independent," of which she as always been editor-in-chief. In 1889 she bought the business, job-printing and publishing, and is now sole proprietor. That paper she has always made the vehicle of reformatory principles, social and political. In 1889, when it became her own property, she announced in the opening number that she had bought the business to help save the world; that it was not a business venture in any sense of the word; that the business would always be in charge of a foreman; that she desired a medium through which she could convey her best thought to the world, unhampered by worldly interests. She represented the Knights of Labor in the Woman's International Council, held in Washington in 1887, and her address was received with enthusiasm. At that time she spoke also before the Knights of Labor and Anti-Poverty Society of HULDA BARKER LOUD Washington. She has frequently spoken on the labor and woman-suffrage platform with success. She prefers home life, and her newspaper work is more congenial. She served three years on the school board of her town, and for many years she has addressed town-meetings, without question of her right from any of the citizens. In the spring of 1891 she adopted two boys, relatives, and, besides carrying on her paper and business, she does the work of her household. Her adopted children are governed wholly without force of any kind. She is an apostle of the new mental science, though recognizing the claims of her body. She may always be found at home, except for a few hours in the afternoon, which she spends in her office. She lives away from the village, in a retired spot, on her mother's farm, where she has built a house of her own. She boasts that she has never known a day of sickness in her life, and that through sheer force of will, as she has many hereditary weaknesses. Although she works from sixteen to eighteen hours a day, she was never physically or mentally stronger in her life than now.