Rebecca Dickinson

Rebecca Dickinson (sometimes spelled as Rebekah or Rebeca)[3] was born in Hatfield, Massachusetts, as the oldest daughter of six children born to farmers Moses Dickinson and Anna Smith. Named after her grandmother, Rebecca Barrett Wright, Dickinson entered a world of political and religious concerns. The relatively small town of Hatfield (which held a population of 803 in 1765)[4] had a history of “political, military, and religious upheaval” for more than half of a century before Dickinson was born. Surrounded by both Native American enemies and their French allies in Canada, the people of Hatfield from its founding through the mid eighteenth century worried about the possibility of war, as well as the state of their souls.[5]

Around the age of twelve, Dickinson “went to learn the trade of gownmaking”.[6] Her parents sent her to an apprenticeship at mantua making, also known as gownmaking. While ornamental needlework reflected a “degree of gentility” among young girls in elite families, artisanal work in clothing production for Dickinson and other women was a way to earn money for her family at a young age. Though many women had some knowledge of clothing construction and maintenance, given the expense of fabric, many women hired gownmakers to cut the pieces required to create a garment, since they could properly handle cutting and sewing the garment without ruining costly materials.[7] As an unmarried adult, Dickinson became a well-known gownmaker in Massachusetts. One of her more important clients, Elizabeth Porter Phelps, gave her business through her large estate, Forty Acres. Whenever Dickinson came to visit, some women “made it a point to come up to the Phelps house while [she] was there”. Fixing wardrobes for local families, however, made up most of her business.[8]

Dickinson went on to oversee apprenticeships for local children as well as her niece, Rebecca. For her, apprentices provided an extra set of hands for daily work and offered companionship. It is “possible that parents paid her for instructing their daughters”, but the “younger pairs of hands and eyes” made business go smoother, so she benefitted either way.[9] At the height of her career, Dickinson was part of a community of gownmaking women in the Connecticut Valley who were well known for their work in altering wardrobes and creating new and fashionable garments.[10]

Dickinson was born during a period of “rising level of female literacy” in the eighteenth-century colonies. This meant that she was among the population of young girls who were taught to read and write.[11] These skills are what allowed her to start her own diary. Dickinson began keeping a diary in her thirties. Because of her marital status, she referred to herself as an “old maid”, which was a popular derogatory term that categorized older women who never married.[12] After the Revolutionary War in New England, however, some young women felt a sense of pride to hold the “honourable appellation of [an] old maid”.[13] Rediscovered in the late nineteenth century by relatives, Dickinson’s surviving diary consists of her struggles with her faith. Although “Aunt Bek” was well liked in Hatfield and had a reputation of a “Saint on Earth”, her diary reflects a constant tone of sadness and despair.[14] Dickinson kept a journal for years but she burned each page that existed just before her forty-ninth birthday because “they were but poorly written” and she stopped caring about “such petty, earthly things” like motherhood and her possessions.[14] An example of her diary comes from her earliest surviving diary entry on July 22, 1787 where she wrote, “This day is the 22 of July 1787. Here alone in this house. There has been a thunderstorm here this afternoon, some hard thunder and rain. It is good to be where God’s voice is to be heard.”[15]

Although Dickinson was offered marriage at least three times, she chose to live alone for most of her life. Despite this choice, there were signs of both her regret and her embrace of singleness. “She cried herself sick, ‘that others and all in the world was in Possession of Children and friends and a house and homes while [she] was so odd as to sit here alone.’”[16] To push away these thoughts, she told herself “no other place would to wean her from the distractions of early comforts”.[17] Reflecting on a local newspaper in the summer of 1791, Dickinson wrote that an “old maid” who had died at the age of one hundred was given the status of “venerable”, which was a title she wanted to “live and die” by.[17] Dickinson’s first proposal of marriage came in the winter of 1777 or 1778, through her long-time client Elizabeth Porter Phelps. Phelps’s father-in-law, Charles Phelps, was in search of a new partner after his wife died the winter before.[18] The second proposal came in 1787 from an unknown person, however, no diary entries exist concerning the marriage proposal other than her minister's wife, Hannah Lyman, questioning her about “chang[ing] her name”.[19] The third proposal occurred in fall of 1788 by a physician named Moses Gunn. He intrigued her to consider him “more agreeable than [she] could think of” (as suggested in her diary), but she ultimately decided that she would “never change [her] name”.[20] In her diaries, Dickinson shows interest in both the single life and the married life, Her feelings grew after the death of her sister’s husband, which left her alone to raise a family.[21] Whether it is for her commitment to faith or her overall disinterest in having a family cannot be proven. But unlike most women of this time and place, Dickinson was able to keep herself financially stable through her gownmaking and tailoring to where she did not need a man in her life to support her.[22]

During Dickinson’s later years, she lived a life of Calvinist devotion. In September 1787, she came to the conclusion that wanting a family was what condemned her to a life of solitude. The time she used thinking about it took away from her time with God. In May 1789, she wrote in her diary that because there were no children, grandchildren, or household for her to preoccupy her time with, her “spirit [would] hold communion with God at all times”.[23] At times, she expressed anger and confusion when it came to her treatment and why God made her go through certain trials in life. Perhaps death in particular made her question her faith the most. She expressed a fear of dying after a nightmare she wrote about on her forty-ninth birthday, just three days after her earliest surviving diary: “Last night had a sad dream which I hope will never come to pass; me thought that I was in a place where I could not escape. [Noting that she felt weak in faith] why should I doubt? […] The God who made me will dispose of me in his own time and way.”[24]

Dickinson coped with death of loved ones by justifying the loss with God's plan to wean people away from distractions of faith. However, in May 1788, Dickinson became concerned with losing people to death in the community. “Why do I live while others die?” she wrote in her diary, either showing concern for death or frustration for her age.[25] Dickinson convinced herself that her lack of faith caused turmoil to herself and those around her (especially people that she loved). When her niece died at the age of one from “eruptive sores”, she told herself that God took her niece away so that she would avoid distractions from her faith. This belief stood reasoning for never having children. In April 1789, Dickinson wrote, “God knew my tender make and doomed my darlings to death before they was my own for which […] I give thanks”.[26]

On September 10, 1788, Dickinson chose to leave Hatfield for Bennington, Vermont where her sister, Martha, lived with her own family. While she was moving, Martha’s husband became sick, forcing Dickinson to return to Hatfield.[27] This event was followed by the marriage proposal of Moses Gunn on October 22.[20] The last mention of gownmaking or designing of any kind in Dickinson’s diary is in 1790.[28] In August 1795, Dickinson permanently moved to live with her sister Miriam Billings.[29] In her later years, she aimed to come to peace with her life alone. As she wrote in her diary on August 3, 1794, “Hoping, waiting, doing God’s will to the end of my mortal life is the desire of Rebecca Dickinson”.[30] In the next decade of her life she made very few diary entries, suggesting that the journal writings were a “source of companionship” in times of loneliness.[29] After the 1808 death of Silas Billings, Dickinson and her sister Miriam moved into Miriam's son Roswell’s home. In April 1810, Dickinson wrote her will. In it, “being of sound mind and memory”, she gave her land Williamsburg, Massachusetts to her nephews.[31] In March 1815, Elizabeth Porter Phelps, who also kept an extensive diary that survives in the collections of the Porter Phelps Huntington House Museum, wrote that she “rode to Hatfield to see Becca Dickinson” to find that she “hurt her hip badly”.[30] Nine months later, on December 31, 1815, Rebecca Dickinson died at the age of 77 of influenza. She was buried alongside her parents in Hatfield, Massachusetts.[32]

Although none of the garments she constructed are known to survive, a set of crewelwork bed furnishings decorated with vines and flowers are preserved in the collections of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library in Deerfield, Massachusetts, which also holds the manuscript diary.[33] A sketch based on Dickinson's headcloth, made by Margaret C. Whiting in 1905, is also among the PVMA collections. A piano scarf, embroidered by Mary Wait Allis Hurlburt in 1916, and based on an element of Dickinson's crewelwork, survives in the collections of the Hatfield Historical Society, as does a firescreen believed to have been made by Dickinson.