MARTHA MATILDA HARPER
AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
How
One Woman Changed
the Face of Modern Business
BY JANE R. PLITT
Copyright 2000 Jane R. Plitt
All Rights Reserved
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To Bess Rubin Plitt, my beloved grandmother, who was my first entrepreneurial role model. She demonstrated through words and deeds that women, regardless of age, should be taken seriously
and to Jim Bruen, my treasured soul mate and husband, who steadfastly encouraged me to heed my inner voice and continuously provided the support of his unconditional love with which to do it
Contents
1. Vanishing
3. Choosing Rochester and Christian Science
7. Pursuing Robert, for Business and Pleasure
10. Letting Go
Martha as successful entrepreneur
Farquhar—successful franchise owner
Fortieth anniversary celebration
A PROJECT OF THIS MAGNITUDE, uncovering a buried story over six years, takes enormous good fortune and assistance. Fortuitously, I had all this and more from countless people who were there at critical moments, redirecting, encouraging, and providing technical assistance to me. Space constraints do not allow for personal recognition of all of these wonderful colleagues, friends, and family members. I am, however, indebted to them all.
Special recognition does need to be given to the cosmic forces that led me to the newspaper clipping about Martha Matilda Harper and ultimately to this story. There was also Robert Bantle, bank executive, whose love of history and community provided the corporate forum for me to uncover the story of Martha Matilda Harper.
Centa Sailer and Betty Wheeler, devoted Harper shop owners, shared their extraordinary hospitality, Harper connections, memories and skills, mementos, and photographs with me. Betty’s now deceased husband, Warren, also deserves enormous thanks for his dedication, initiative, and perseverance in 1972 for saving and transporting boxes of Harper records with Betty’s help; those documents were essential in understanding the Harper business and Martha’s values. Many others in the Harper network (Harperites) gave me much time and critical information, among them Winifred Hines, Sally Knapp, Jim McGarvey, Hans Neumaier, Marie Personte, Jane Reed, Dorothy Ricker, Nancy Wise Smart, Martha Sweeney, Eunice Van Alystyne, Beryl Wickings, and Alice Wright. There were also delighted Harper customers and their families, including Helene Pancoast, Allyis D’Amanda, and Gene Van Voorhis, who shared their memories.
The Harper and MacBain* families welcomed me with open arms as I called, visited, and took away their treasured stories and letters. Each of them made me feel like an honorary member of the family. Of special note is Fausta Alirens, Robert MacBain’s ninety-year-old niece, who tenaciously saved and then shared her grandmother’s, mother’s, and uncle’s correspondence with me. These letters provided precious insight. She also urged me to use them freely to tell the story honestly. Similarly, Jack and Robert Hoskinson provided me with their family’s letters and stories, as did Douglas MacBain and his now deceased father, Robert, Esther MacBain Meeks, Merry MacBain Kruse, Bertha Hickey, Catherine O’Leary, Peggy Rettie, and Doreen Shosenberg.
The local newspapers, Democrat & Chronicle, Rochester Business Journal, and Brighton Pittsford Post, aided the treasure hunt by running stories about my search and enabling former Harper neighbors and friends, as well as Harperites and their family members, to connect with me. Those calls, clippings, and letters were essential stepping-stones.
My appointment as a visiting scholar at the University of Rochester was invaluable; particular thanks go to Nan Johnson and the Susan B. Anthony Center for making it possible. The University of Rochester’s library staff gave caring help, particularly Karl Kabelac in the Rare Books division and Sally McMaster in the Interlibrary Loan division.
Community people also responded. John Hudak, owner of the former Harper headquarters, and Joanne Nulton, then owner of the former Harper mansion, enthusiastically opened their buildings to me. Cynthia Howk of the Landmark Society of Western New York documented the Harper home and laboratory. Linda Drummon provided access to the membership records of First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Anne E. Norris shared her spiritual insight into being both a Christian Scientist and an entrepreneur. Dr. Alice Rubenstein, psychologist/partner, Monroe Psychotherapy Center, freely gave her time and professional skill to help me better understand Martha and her emotional evolution. Jacqueline and Robert Sperandio, former business colleagues of mine, edited an early version of the book.
Dr. Mary Ellen Zuckerman, Professor of Marketing at the State University of New York at Geneseo, an absolute stranger, became a generous professional mentor. Terry Richman, Esq., connected me to the revealing will file of Luella Roberts. James Stewart, Esq., taught me how to use Surrogate Court records. The staff of the Monroe County Surrogate Court generously helped me locate and understand various court documents. The Monroe County Board of Elections opened its voting records to me. The Rochester Museum and Science Center and its staff warmly welcomed the opportunity to become the caring repository of all the Harper materials I discovered.
Historical agencies, including the Clarke Museum & Archives, the Charlotte-Genesee Lighthouse Historical Society, the Oakville Historical Society, and the Rochester Historical Society, shared their precious collections with me. Librarians at the New York Public Library, the Catherwood Library at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, the Library of Congress, and the Oakville Public Library provided valued support in finding fragments of the story. Simpson College shared its revealing MacBain files with me.
Karen Thure, a Harper essayist, graciously provided her records and encouragement. Dr. George Ritzer, Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, reviewed an early draft of my book. Dr. Carol A. Kolmerten, Professor of English at Hood College and editor of Syracuse University Press’s Writing American Women series, gave critical early support to this story, which led to its publication, and her careful editing strengthened it.
Judy Columbus, Dr. Mimi Doi, Linda Joffe, and BJ Mann, devoted friends, tirelessly read, reread, coached, corrected, and supported me through multiple versions of the story. Sebby Wilson Jacobson and Steven Schaefer each urged me on at critical moments. Claire McGuire and Colleen McColgan provided invaluable assistance in proofing and indexing respectively.
Jim Bruen, my husband, and my children, Brett and Beth Plitt Bruen, patiently and lovingly endured the six-year journey of sharing me with Martha.
Finally, I am indebted to Martha Matilda Harper, who lived a life worth documenting and whose spirit will not die.
* For purposes of consistency, all MacBains are referred to in this book using this spelling, even though only some of the relatives followed this Scottish tradition.
I FIRST MET MARTHA MATILDA HARPER nearly fifty years after her death.
She appeared to me in the form of an old newspaper clipping that I came across while researching a business project. Momentarily impressed with her accomplishments as a nineteenth-century businesswoman and captivated by her floor-length hair, I was more focused on completing my business assignment. After all, deadlines and deliverables were what kept my business going.
And yet, over the following months, I kept ruminating about her. Here was an early woman entrepreneur who created the first American retail franchise and was a pioneer in the beauty industry. Why had I not heard of her? Where was she recorded by history? And why had our first “encounter” created such a lasting—and intriguing—impression?
As I continued to focus on my growing business, my thoughts kept returning to the mysterious legacy of Martha Matilda Harper. How had an undereducated servant girl built an international franchise network of shops, complete with manufacturing and training centers, only for it to disappear into thin air? Why were Presidents, heads of state, and First Ladies her devoted customers? Naively I wondered how important she could be if the history books did not record her accomplishments. Then, more cynically, I asked who writes the history of such women.
After a year of such musing, my midlife curiosity pushed me over the edge. 1 decided to close my business and uncover Martha Matilda Harper’s story, believing it would be a short, personal treasure hunt. I was to discover that the story would take six years to complete and was much larger than an individual portrait. In fact, Martha’s story fit into a broader tapestry of women’s business history, much of which remains only partially understood because, quite frankly, it is not known.
Digging into Martha Matilda Harper’s past, I discovered a compelling if not disturbing trend: that certain lessons of history needed to be repeated simply because they were taught the first time by a woman. Over a hundred years ago, Martha Matilda Harper was a crusader for customer satisfaction and quality products and service. Her success was based on concepts that today determine business’s cutting edge. She also believed in doing business ethically. As I discovered fragments of her life, I was astonished by how much she still has to teach us. Where might our country be today if we had built on Martha’s business acumen, rather than having to re-create her vision?
It soon struck me that allowing Martha Matilda Harper’s story to vanish was a metaphor for how undervalued women’s lives have been in our society. In fact, its burial has hidden Martha’s revolutionary attempt to change options for working-class women like herself. Her concept of retail franchising was not simply a brilliant business model, but a concrete means to offer ownership and female consciousness to her working-class sisters. She was redefining her own destiny and that of thousands of other women. Once I saw her journey in a broader context, my interest in this story grew.
Martha Matilda Harper’s story is more than a triumphant personal life history. At some critical point, input from colleagues helped me connect her story to those of other innovative female entrepreneurs: dressmakers, milliners, beauty moguls, inventors, each of whom seized her limited opportunities and succeeded in her own way.
Success is such a personal benchmark. Martha’s financial wealth was established simultaneously with raising the earning potential of thousands of her Harperites. She was not choosing to amass great wealth, but she was delighted to share it. Her new entrepreneurial scheme enlarged the economic pie of opportunity for the working-class segment of our country.
Blazing new paths for working-class women, Martha created the franchise system to share wealth at a time when the robber barons were destroying lives to enrich themselves. She wanted people to believe that if they were healthy, they were naturally beautiful. Her philosophy ran counter to the largely male-dominated beauty industry, which convinced women (and now men) that their beauty is dependent on their purchase of image-enhancing products.
Martha’s life also reflected a society that arbitrarily limited opportunities by gender and class; even now, we still struggle to break down these artificial barriers. That she succeeded—in spite of being a servant for twenty-five years, and in the face of classand gender-based obstacles—is compelling.
Martha’s legacy is also written in the lives of the people she touched. It was revealing to discover that nearly fifty years after her death, men and women still revere her. She profoundly affected the lives of franchise owners, employees, and customers, and in that process, her story has stayed alive, waiting to be told. Having heard their voices, my mission was clear—to weave a living talc out of this veiled web of disjointed facts and memories, allowing a fuller appreciation of women’s accomplishments in the past.
I learned that piecing a life together is different from writing a business plan with known assignments and deadlines. It requires patience, persistence, curiosity, an openness to discovering, not to mention interpreting nontraditional artifacts and a willingness to embrace the unknown. Numerous problems arose as I tried to uncover her story: the lack of historical citation, the challenge of finding living people who knew her, and contradictory memories, perspectives, and statements of facts. Like an archaeologist on a dig, I tried to unearth that which had long since been buried. I was fortunate to be welcomed into people’s homes and worlds simply because I wanted to talk about their Martha.
Because so little of Martha’s story was traditionally recorded, this biography blends recorded fact with treasured memories, letters, tangible remnants of business records, and the unwritten history found in walking the land where Martha and her family lived, experiencing the tradition-based Harper facial, or hearing the unspoken messages from Martha’s and her husband’s gravesites. Re-creating a life, especially the life of a woman who lived at a time when women’s history was rarely valued, has been a major challenge. I made judgments about conflicting dates and stories based on the credibility of sources, consistency, and reasonableness. By example, although the New York Times’s obituary of Harper recorded her age as eighty-two, in fact she was ninety-three. I established her birth date from a tombstone and court testimony.
There was also something about Martha’s life and work that touched me on an intensely personal level. Though separated by ninety years, each of us started her businesses at the age of thirty-one and was a champion of women’s rights. Despite the passage of ninety years, each of us launched her enterprise at a time when women entrepreneurs were few and not highly regarded. Would Harper’s business experiences have helped me and other business owners, male or female, in our quest for success? Could they still?
While I searched for details and practical payoff, it was Martha’s soul that reverberated throughout the journey. It was her ability to maintain a humanity in her enterprise; to pioneer business practices and a franchise system that today dominates our retail economy; to think outside the box; to be consistent and principled; to persevere under circumstances most of us would have withered under; to make purposeful connections to both society’s most prominent members and the more needy of our society, whose livelihoods and loyalties were inherently linked to the remarkable Martha Matilda Harper, that still captivate me.
MARTHA MATILDA HARPER
AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
Vanishing
WHEN MARTHA MATILDA HARPER DIED on August 3, 1950, she was famous. The American media recognized her as a female Horatio Alger. Among the obituaries included by her firm in the Obituary Compilation Of Martha Matilda Harper, one declared, “Too little,. . . has been said of women whose achievements have rivaled or outdone [men]. A book surely could be written about Martha Matilda Harper who built an international business” (Obituary Compilation Of Martha Matilda Harper 1950, 3).
Destined to be a poor nineteenth-century servant, Martha transformed her life into that of a successful businesswoman. She was not remembered for what she looked like—the woman with ravishing, floor-length chestnut hair—nor as the woman P. T. Barnum once tried to lure into his circus because of those phenomenal tresses. Instead, when Martha Matilda Harper died, it was her pioneering influence in the beauty industry that was recalled in the obituaries published in major newspapers throughout the country. This was highly unusual in the 1950s, when “women’s stories” appeared on the society or women’s page of newspapers. After her death, Martha’s life was no longer a “woman’s story”; she had achieved an equality with successful men.
Among the many obituaries compiled by the Harper business was a compelling statement by the New York Times. In its August 5, 1950, write-up, it called Harper: “one of the pioneers in the beauty business in the United States. . . . Susan B. Anthony, the pioneer suffragist, extolled Miss Harper’s courage and initiative from many lecture platforms” (Obituary Compilation Of Martha Matilda Harper 1950, 3).
Hundreds of community leaders and Harper Shop owners and staff (Harperites) arrived in Rochester, New York, to pay homage. Their “Miss Harper” had died just as the annual Harper Reunion began. The Harper Method was a worldwide network of shops devoted to Martha’s healthy approach to hair and skin care. At Harper Reunions, franchisees and their staffs were introduced to her new products and techniques while their skills were refreshed. In an interview, Centa Sailer, current owner of Martha’s Harper Founder’s Shop, recalled Martha’s death and that memorable reunion this way: “We were there for the Reunion and we all went to the funeral parlor. She was larger than life even though she was physically small. Martha Matilda Harper was with you all the time” (1995).
Seven decades before Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique encouraged women to embrace careers and break down sex-stereotyped boundaries, Martha Matilda Harper created a million-dollar business to provide economic choice for herself and other working-class women in a new field, the beauty industry. She seized opportunity, saved pennies, and with Scarlet O’Hara spunk she wrote a new tale for women. As recorded in the 1950 Obituary Compilation Of Martha Matilda Harper, the Associate Editor of the Constitution, Doris Lockerman, wrote:
No respectable woman entered a beauty shop, nor would a respectable office building house one, when Martha Matilda Harper opened her first cosmetic business in Rochester, N.Y., using her own floor-length hair as advertisement.
Miss Harper’s death last week-end in the same city ended a success story that unfolded like a melodrama with a rags-to-riches plot, as one of the earliest cosmetic sagas. (2)
Truth be told, the newspapers got only half the story. In its obituary, the New York Times reported that Martha Matilda Harper was eightytwo years old. Martha was, in fact, ninety-three years old, but since she had married a much younger man, she misled people about her age. The press also neglected to credit her with creating the first American business format (retail) franchise in the United States. (At its peak, there were over five hundred shops worldwide.) Nor did they explain why she was so bold and different. Dismissing the traditional capitalist approach of owner-take-all, Martha shared her profits with other women, particularly former servants like herself, in order to expand their life options; she believed that economic independence was the key to women’s freedom. Her creativity, practicality, and principles were woven into her unique Harper franchise template.
Martha Matilda Harper tangibly changed women’s lives. As Harper women described in their in-house newsletter, the Harper Method Progress, because of Martha they possessed economic security—money to travel, buy a car or a home, put their children and themselves through school, and the choice of whether to marry or not (Harper Method Progress 1926, 18). In that same newsletter, these women described their sense of pride that came with achievement and control. Marie Johnson experienced a new joy when she became the Carmel, California, Harper Shop owner. She said she felt “terribly important! It’s a grand and glorious feeling” (Harper Method Progress 1926, 76).
Martha Matilda Harper, a little woman who stood less than five feet tall, gave her “girls” a feeling of hope and choice. She empowered them to take responsibility for themselves and their lives. She gave them a career, self-confidence, and a profession.
While Martha took on society’s mores and the power establishment, even breaking Victorian tradition by rejecting society’s preassigned roles for women, her persona was that of the ultimate lady. Though widely known for her gentle and kind nature, Martha, unlike most women of her day, stated quite clearly what she was doing and why. Forthrightly, in the Harper Method Textbook, required reading for all her “girls,” she spoke about how consciously she built a worldwide business empire “brick by brick, woman by woman” (1926, 3). Martha knew exactly how bold her feat was, and in that textbook she shared her vision and pride with them.
Long after Martha’s death in 1950, her business continued. In the 1960s, according to former Harperite Betty Wheeler, Jacqueline Kennedy had Harper Method treatments in the White House, and a May 22, 1968, White House check from Lady Bird Johnson to a Connecticut Harper shop indicates that she and Mrs. Laurance Rockefeller enjoyed such treatments, too. In the 1990s, many women, like Mrs. (Helen) Lee Shaffer and Alpha Jones, still valued their former Harper Shop affiliation. Shaffer’s Reading, Pennsylvania, newspaper announcement of her fiftieth wedding anniversary, (March 7, 1993) proudly recalled that she was a retired Harper Shop owner. An obituary in the August 12, 1996, State Journal Register (Springfield, 111.) highlighted Jones’s achievement— owning a Harper Shop for more than forty years.
To be a Harperite was a significant life experience that Sally Knapp, of the Baltimore area, described during an interview as “a life-giving opportunity with career options I never would have had and social connections that made us feel like family” (Knapp 1997). At age eightythree, Jane Reed, Harper Shop owner in Florida, continues to serve customers including the great-granddaughter of Dr. Alexander Graham Bell. During an interview with Jane Reed, she explained, “It is my life” (Reed 1997). The lives of those women and thousands of others were fundamentally altered by Martha Matilda Harper.
Martha was a consistent, appealing person, at work and at home, who revolutionized the American way of doing business, women’s right to control their economic late, and our image of beauty. Following her deep commitment to Christian Science, she integrated her spiritual beliefs into her day-to-day supportive demeanor. Honor, lair play, wholesome respect for others, honesty, and her faith in God were unwavering principles that governed her daily behavior.
Martha treated people kindly. As Esther MacBain Meeks, a niece who lived with her during the 1940s, recalled in an interview, “She was genuinely nice, living her Christian Science faith” (1997). Now in her eighties, Meeks poignantly recalled when Martha visited her family in Iowa and gave her 75 cents. With Martha’s money, Meeks promptly bought jewelry from the five-and-ten-cent store; her parents insisted that she return it. Seeing her pain, Martha instantly took off her necklace and placed it around her niece’s neck (1996c). Caring, sensitive, and willing to share with children, family, friends, and her Harperites— that was Martha.
Mysteriously, as if caught in an information warp between Harper customers and owners and the rest of the American public, Martha Matilda Harper’s story vanished after her death. Its fate was not unlike other women’s entrepreneurial accomplishments. As a woman and wife of a plantation owner, Catherine Littlefield Green in 1794 shared her idea for separating cotton with guest Eli Whitney. He is remembered as the inventor of the cotton gin, and she is not. According to Martha Louise Rayne, author of What Can a Woman Do, a nineteenth-century book on women’s careers:
The spherical shape of the bullet is the result of a woman’s experimenting. . . . Miss Louise McLaughlin . . . invented a method of under-glaze upon pottery, and desiring that all artists should share its benefits, explained her process to everyone who asked. . . . Mrs. Ann Harned Manning in 1817-1818 perfected [a reaping and mowing machine] which was patented by her husband. . . . [Other women invented] the baby carriage, [the] deep-sea telescope, [was invented] by Mrs. Mather and improved by her daughter, for bringing the bottoms of ships into view without raising them in dry-dock,. . . inspecting wrecks,. . . examining for torpedoes. (1884, 115-17)
Those were real nineteenth-century inventions, but the inventors’ names and gender were forgotten.
In Martha’s case, she was once famous. What happened?
Uncovering Martha’s Roots
MARTHA MATILDA HARPER was born in 1857 in Munn’s Corner, a shadow of a village on the outskirts of prosperous Oakville, Ontario. Being the daughter of Robert Harper was trouble enough, but she was also born poor and female. For most ordinary people, this unenviable circumstance would have been an insurmountable life sentence. But Martha, a willful young girl, was not ordinary, and neither was her life.
The hardships she faced were fundamental. Because of Canada’s class and gender structure, Martha’s life was subject to male domination and decision-making. Her livelihood was tied to a family economy where the money generated was dependent on household activity. In many midnineteenth-century households, men dominated these sites of production. As a result, women’s personal and productive lives were often determined by their husbands, fathers, or brothers, who controlled both the household and the means of production.
In such an environment, Martha could see her future reflected in her mother, Beady, sad-faced and thin, her dark hair pulled back in a severe bun. Beady’s hair symbolized her life: controlled, onedimensional, and tightly pulled into its proper place. Beady Gifford Harper’s accomplishments were similar to those of other poor rural women; she married, gave birth, and died. Little more is known about her, other than that she was Robert’s third wife; the first two having died of complications in childbirth. The most fertile of the wives, Beady died at the age of fifty-one on June 11, 1885, after bearing ten children.
Martha was born on September 10, 1857, the fourth child, preceded by two sisters, Sarah and Elizabeth, and a brother, Ephriam. Like all her siblings, according to Martha’s corporate memoir, Golden Memories, she arrived without fanfare, destined to be a burden (1938, 2). Martha’s insistent personality emphasized her painful presence. The crude reality was that she was one more mouth to feed, one more body to clothe. Two siblings born later, Nellie and James, died in infancy. For the Harper family, life and death were part of a harsh natural rhythm.
Not far from the giant oak forests surrounding the Harpers’ oneroom cabin, life was different for others. By chance of birth, Martha was an impoverished Harper; other local women, born into wealth, faced different challenges of societal constraint. Hazel Matthews, author of the authoritative history of Oakville, described the pampered experience of a local upper-class bride at the time. “The bride, who is often a young girl from sixteen to twenty years of age, is doomed for [a week] to sit upon a sofa, or recline in an easy-chair dressed in the most expensive manner, to receive her guests. Well she knows that herself, her dress, the furniture of her room, even her cake and wine, will undergo the most minute scrutiny, and be the theme of conversation among all the gossips of the place for the next nine days” (Matthews 1953, 230). Such was the gentler, but still confining, world of upper-class Oakville women.
Martha’s life in Munn’s Corners stood apart, like a poor relative. Her village, just a few miles north of Oakville, offered a much humbler world, with each day’s survival being an accomplishment. From a distance Martha spied the Georgian brick homes and businesses of Oakville, a bustling port. As Martha later recorded in Golden Memories, “Hidden from the passerby, back on its outskirts, Oakville ignores many a different home of a different sort, where hardship and privation are the rule” (1938, 1).
In 1857, the year that Martha was born, Oakville became an incorporated town with a population of one thousand. With the recent advent of a rail system and ports linking Toronto and Hamilton to Oakville, the village changed from an industrial hub to a recreational center, a convenient retreat for wealthy Toronto and Hamilton residents (Matthews 1953, 222). Oakville also had a thriving community elite, many of whom were relatives of its white founder, William Chisholm.
In her local history of the area, Matthews noted that the Mississauga Indians originally inhabited the area and occupied the banks of Sixteen Mile Creek. In fact, in 1827, that 960 acres, known as the Reserve of the Sixteen, was sold, for $4.25 an acre, to the enterprising William Chisholm, an established storekeeper, banker, public leader, and shipowner. Envisioning a dramatically expanded community, he saw the commercial potential of this area and realized its growth could be fueled by traffic generated from a port on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, and fed by Sixteen Mile Creek (Matthews 1953, 5-12). With money, determination, business savvy, and political connections, he successfully planned and created the Oakville community, and by 1833 his dream had come true. He and his heirs prospered, playing a leading role in the affairs of the community.
Martha’s father, Robert, wanted such wealth and success. His problem was that he did not want to work for it. As a child, Martha was dependent on her father—an irresponsible man, consumed with himself and his woeful laziness. Robert had a reputation as a dreamer, not a doer. He preferred to fantasize himself a gentleman, riding to the hounds like his English ancestors, rather than earning his living by tailoring (Thure 1976, 94). Robert was lured into believing he could become a rich landowner by a local teacher, Arthur Cole Verner, who also wanted to join the affluent of the area.
Verner served as master of the Oakville Common School in the 1840s and 1850s. Matthews postulated that when Verner saw the amount of farm produce moving from the north, passing along the 7th Line Plank Road, to Oakville Harbor, the idea grew of a planned community near Oakville with a church, a school, and even an English village green. He hoped that his new community, Vernerville, three-quarters of a mile north of Oakville, would attract people and make him wealthy (Matthews 1953, 195-96).
Martha’s father was a perfect candidate for investing in Vernerville. With the help of an innovative mortgage scheme, small farmers and tradesmen like Harper had an opportunity to purchase their land on time. In November 1862, Robert bought 4.5 acres in the southwest corner of Verner’s community for $170. On that land may have been the Lyon’s Cabin, presently on display in the Oakville community; on the basis of the local Hawley Records, it may have once been the Harpers’ home. This one-room home of hand-hewn logs was dark, simple, confining, even depressing; but to Robert it held promise. As it turned out, neither Vernerville nor Robert was ever successful.
A tailor by trade, Robert listed his profession as “gentleman” on the deed of sale for his Vernerville plot (Hawley Records). Such an overstatement was not a momentary lapse of honesty. In fact, it signaled his discomfort with who he really was. Ultimately, that discomfort led to a spiraling lack of responsibility and honesty that would soon traumatize Martha’s life.
Robert lacked character. Martha, always one to find good things to say about anyone, described her father as “stern, unflinching English pioneer. . . too pre-occupied with his daily struggle to pay much heed to . . . [her]” (Golden Memories 1938, 2). The truth was that Robert was selfish and fickle, unable to face reality or his responsibilities. He could not reconcile his English family’s well-to-do past with his pressing financial burdens.
Two years after Robert began paying off his Vernerville plot, he faced a major financial crisis and made a fateful decision to abandon his fatherly responsibilities. Choosing to hold onto his land, he bound out seven-year-old Martha to bring in extra money for the family. She was simply sent away, far from her family—particularly her mother, who gave her whatever love and security she had known. So ended Martha’s childhood, as eventually it ended for all of her siblings. According to Catherine O’Leary, Martha’s grandniece, her Great-Grandfather Robert gave away all of his children (1996b).
Years later, Martha reflected on her mother’s inability to keep her family together. In Golden Memories, Martha used a phrase that described her mother’s helplessness: “Beaten at last in her heroic battle for her children” (1938, 2). Her words suggest that Martha saw her mother as a powerless victim, just as she was. Her servitude and her mother’s defeat were her father’s doing.
Although known for her kind and Christian ways, Martha eventually got even. Twenty years after her business was launched, she erected a sizable tombstone in the Oakville Cemetery, Centre Lot #59, for her mother and her two infant siblings. Her father received no such tribute; in fact, no record has been found of his burial. Martha Matilda Harper appeared to have cut him out of her life, just as he cut her out of his.
Meanwhile, seven-year-old Martha was taken to the community of Leskard, to become a servant. It was a village more than sixty miles east of Oakville. Situated on three streams, by the mid-1850s Leskard was bustling with milling and farm activity, and had a growing population of 250 people. Soon it would become a village and call itself Rochester. (Ironically, Martha eventually moved to Rochester, New York where she made her fortune.) However, in 1856, the community’s name was changed to Leskard, because another Ontario community had already claimed the name Rochester.
By the time Martha arrived in Leskard, she was among strangers. She was introduced to the people she was to serve. John Gifford, her mother’s brother, was a huge man who, according to family records, weighed over three hundred pounds. Then she met John’s wife, Elsie Maria, and her two spinster aunts, Roby Ann and Rannie. Martha was to attend to their demands. Her grandmother, Thursay Pickle, who lived in the area until 1873, was true to her name; she looked like a sour pickle (Hickey 1996).
Martha’s head must have swirled with bewilderment. This was not a warm extended family outreach. Instead, Martha committed to a serious business proposition. She was expected to earn her keep. As a young child in Munn’s Corner and Vernerville, life had been hard for her, full of exhausting tasks, but buffered by her mother; in Leskard, life would prove heartless. Her three strict aunts demanded service and provided little love. When Martha reflected on her life and its various struggles in a June 6, 1914, interview with Marjory MacMurchy, a writer for The Toronto, she commented that it was only during her childhood that she really endured hardships (1914, 21); then she was alone and dependent on others.
According to Canadian historian Marjorie Griffin-Cohen, it was highly unusual for a girl Martha’s age to be put into service; in the nineteenth century, Canadian teenage girls often engaged in such work before marriage (1988, 85-86). Domestic service was one of the few work options available to these poor girls. While men’s wages rose in the early 1850s, female servant wages changed little, reflecting the lack of earning alternatives available to women. In all likelihood, Martha made less than three or four dollars a month.
Expectations for her were clear. In their history of nineteenth-century Ontario women, Acton, Goldsmith, and Shepard concluded that “A good servant was clean, celibate, obedient, respectable, hardworking, and an early riser” (1974, 83). In Canada, general servants were in great demand. There was never an end to Martha’s tasks—cooking, cleaning, sewing, and taking care of the house and farm.
Martha’s lost childhood fundamentally altered her. It changed more than her location. Roles reversed, and Martha became the caretaker of her family. To help her parents survive, according to Golden Memories, she sent them all of her meager earnings (1938, 2). Despite, or because of, her abandonment, Martha, though young, believed she had to make things right and that she was the family glue. Later, when she built her business, she assumed the role of responsible and powerful mother, becoming almost a Mother Superior. In her letters to Harper staff, known as Harperites, she referred to them as “My dear girls.”
Psychologist Dr. Alice Rubenstein suggested that Martha’s success at surviving her childhood trauma created her backbone; Martha learned she could avoid emotional vulnerability by relying only on herself. Her abandonment resulted in her gaining an inner strength that she tried to pass on to her “children,” the Harper Shop owners (Rubenstein 1997b). Years later, a Harper Shop owner from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, recalled in the Harper Method Progress that part of the Harper training included a discussion about Martha’s motto: “Be equal to any problem that arises. Never give up. Be the master” (1926, 9).
Faced with forced servitude, Martha learned how to make it, alone, in spite of her seemingly powerless condition. Bright, quick-minded, and physically adept, she did what she had to do. She mastered the ability to read people: Would they be kind or cruel? Could they be trusted or not? She learned the art of pleasing others, fulfilling their needs, and managing her needs on her own. She was, after all, a servant. Submissiveness was the unwritten code for domestics. Passivity and deference became her mask, but underneath was a rebellious mind desperately searching for a way to end her misery. Though her childhood had been destroyed, she persisted in dreaming about a different life.
Such a dream was unrealistic. Martha should have assumed she would marry, like her mother, and like the overwhelming majority (86 percent) of Ontario women in their thirties who in 1851 were wives (based on the data compiled by historian Griffin-Cohen [1988, Appendix 165]). Yet Martha perceptively understood that marriage would more than likely put her husband in charge of her future.
Even though there was legislative progress for women in the mid1800s, their options were still limited. Prior to 1859, there was little legal protection for married women in English Canada because of the English common law premise that in marriage a woman and man were one and the one was the man. In 1855 an act was passed in Ontario that gave women the possibility of obtaining custody of their children under twelve years of age, with the caveat that it would occur only “as the judge saw fit” (Griffin-Cohen 1988, 46). Further, Griffin-Cohen documents that in 1859, when Ontario women won the right to own property they had held before marriage, there were many hitches. For instance, the property had to have clearly been in their name. Simply put, a wife still “belonged to her husband and while the law legally entitled her to make a will, her heirs could only be her husband or her children” (Griffin-Cohen 1988, 47).
In 1872, married women in Ontario were allowed to keep their own earnings. However, the law excluded a wife’s earnings where her husband had a fiscal interest, such as work in a family farm. In addition, the wife needed permission to work outside the home for wages or in her own business.
Choice, then, was not a part of most Ontario women’s lives, and especially not part of Martha’s early life. In general, there were only limited opportunities for all Canadian women, and even fewer for poor ones. In 1881, there was one female servant for every 16.2 Canadian households. For poor Ontario women, servitude was a dismal way of life, as documented by Acton, Goldsmith and Shepard: “long hours of work, lack of freedom, and lack of privacy must have made domestic service seem like a kind of modern-day slavery. . . . Servants . . . had very little time off; except for one afternoon a week and the occasional Sunday. The domestic servant was tied to her workplace and her employer’s supervision twenty-four hours a day” (1974, 57).
Living in their employers’ homes, servants had little privacy, dignity, and control over their lives. Martha worked from dawn to dusk. At night she probably retreated exhausted to her snug sleeping area, where she brushed her locks to calm herself. She wrote in Golden Memories that she latched onto a friend’s prediction that “some day your hair would make your fortune” (1938, 3). Likely she thought of herself as a Rapunzel, abused, exhausted, imprisoned, ready to be freed. Over the years, when no one rescued her, perhaps Martha realized that only she and her beautiful hair had remained steadfast. Her locks, thick, chestnut-colored, and long, became almost a banner of presence. They declared, I exist. Notice me.
Likely Martha came to recognize just how invisible women were in her new world. While she labored, it was men’s lives that seemed to matter, to be recorded in local newspapers and history books. Few specifics can be found about Martha while she worked in Leskard. What we know about her life is simply the reality thousands of other girls experienced as general household servants. We can also glean details from what was recorded about her Uncle John, a powerful community force.
Local township records compiled by John Squair reveal that besides owning a farm on poor land, John Gifford had a clover mill and a grain elevator. In addition, he conducted auctions (Squair 1927, 508, 561). He was an energetic worker, doing what he had to do to generate a living. In sharp contrast to her father, Uncle John worked hard and seized opportunities.
During these years, Martha likely observed entrepreneurship in action. Watching her uncle, she saw how hard he worked, and how he reaped the profits from his efforts. In contrast, she saw herself working hard, too; she lugged water, swept floors, and washed clothes. Her payoff was room and board and meager earnings that went to her parents. There was little hope that on a servant’s wages she could ever accumulate wealth. Slowly, Martha Matilda Harper came to understand that servitude was a doomed female destiny. She would spend almost twenty-five years trying to change it.
As reported in Leetooze’s township history, her Uncle John must have been a showman. The history recalled early newspaper coverage that stated, “Leskard is not as lively as it used to be when the late John Gifford was ‘head toot’ in the Orange Society and wore a long red cloak, on the glorious twelf [sic\ [commemorating the defeat of the Irish Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne], that the boys all admired. Those were the days when Leskard took her turn having the annual Orange celebration” (Leetooze 1988, 151).
Township records report that Gifford displayed regalia everywhere, even at temperance meetings. He was a passionate man who publicly celebrated the defeat of the Irish Catholics and his strong abhorrence of drink. What these records also reveal is Gifford’s inclination to join with others for a cause he believed in. The idea of creating a network of people who shared a common bond of beliefs seemed both alien and intriguing to Martha. As an isolated servant, the thought of a family of believers must have warmed her, as must her uncle’s underlying belief in women’s rights and his demonstration of the power of business. While her Uncle John was often outlandish, dressed in his costumes, he was bold and a believer in causes. While his clownish antics were not a behavior pattern Martha would mimic, his passion about women’s rights surely captivated her. These were radical ideas that needed time and opportunity to fully gestate within Martha.
Some time after the age of twelve, Martha went to work for a physician who would alter her life. Although we know this occurred through a December 6, 1948, letter written by Martha’s husband, Robert MacBain, we lack the name of the physician. Evidence suggests it was Dr. Weston Leroy Herriman, son of the township’s first resident doctor, Dr. Luther Herriman.