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They knew it would not do to attach her to a school in the poorer parts of the city, because the ignorant foreign element, of which these schools were largely composed, would resent the idea of being taught by a colored woman, so she was given a position in the Agassiz school, which is largely attended by the children of the University professors and that choice coterie which makes up Cambridge’s most delightful social element.

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XLI.
HOW A GIRL MAY WORK HER WAY THROUGH COLLEGE.

HE desirability of a college education for girls is less frequently questioned at the present time than it was a few years ago. It has become natural to ask, when a girl completes her public school education, “Are you going to college?” Perhaps in a few years the question may be, “To what college are you going?” Every year the number of girls who answer, “Yes, I am going to college,” increases, but the increase is largely due to the fact that many of these girls are obliged to add to the words, “if possible.” To wish to go is easy; to plan and determine to go is not difficult; but how to carry out the plan is the question that presses upon the girl whose purse is light. The first thing to decide is, of course, the particular college one wishes to attend. Among several institutions, offering equal advantages in the matter of instruction, it is wise for the young woman who must get her higher education by her own efforts to choose that one which offers her the best opportunities for such work as she is fitted to do.

Having made her choice, there arises the puzzle of providing the money for the expenses of the first year. After entering college one may perhaps win scholarships, or earn her way term by term; but, for the first year, it seems necessary to provide a moderate sum, sufficient to pay one’s entrance fees, and to guarantee a portion of the year’s expenses.

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If the plans for college life have been made several years before the time comes to put them into effect, a sufficient sum of money may be in hand from vacation earnings. Or some friend may be found who is willing to loan what is necessary, to be repaid when the student has been graduated and is earning her own livelihood.

Lacking these resources, our girl will probably have to give a year to this preparatory stocking of her bank, and the question of what to do is often very perplexing.

One bright girl, as she was studying this problem, with her gaze fixed on the toe of her boot, discovered the answer right there, and a room, furnished with all the appurtenances for cleansing and blackening ladies’ boots and shoes, is putting into her purse the money for her first year at Vassar.

The year of teaching in the country school, which many girls make their stepping-stone between high school and college, is not to be despised as a means of income. Of course the amount so earned will be moderate. Were it large, young girls would have no chance at all in such places.

No girl should try this means of earning, however, unless she has some aptitude for teaching. The country school has some rights, and is not to be regarded purely as a source of income.

With willingness to do any kind of honorable work, the chances of success are reasonably sure.

Now let us suppose the entrance fees paid, and the young girl fairly launched on her four years of college life.

At the very outset let her be sure to be perfectly frank about her needs with the college officers. It will not do to be too shy or too proud to ask for work, hoping that in some way it may be offered without the asking. Too many girls are in need to expect that.

“A penny saved is a penny earned,” says the familiar old proverb. Economy must be a cardinal virtue with the girl of small means. It is not necessary to specify the little ways in which economy can be practiced. Great neatness and order in taking care of one’s apparel must be a matter of course.

It is useful to know that sometimes a chance is offered college girls to do their own laundry work. Quite a sum may thus be saved.

The first thing that occurs to most students as a way of earning money is tutoring. This is natural, and the upper years in college give opportunities for doing this work.

The remuneration is usually excellent, a fact which makes tutoring especially desirable. But it is not every student who is fitted for this work. One must have some aptness for teaching, and must have gained some reputation as a thorough student, During the first year some other kind of work is more easily obtained.

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In some colleges domestic work used to be meted out to the students as a part of their daily task. As the amount of mental work required has increased this practice has fallen into disuse.

Domestic workers are all hired at present, and the girl who is willing to wait on tables, or to assist in running the domestic machinery in any of the ways allowed by those in charge, can earn reasonable payment for doing so.

The superintendent of domestic work often needs assistance in her office, and some girl is almost sure to find her place there.

Her fellow students may furnish a means of income to our would-be earner. Not all who attend school are poor, and those who have plenty of spending money, or even but a reasonable amount, usually prefer to spend their leisure hours in some other way than in sewing on buttons, rebinding the frayed skirt bottoms, or mending hose.

If the college bulletin board contains the notice that Miss A. will do such work at reasonable rates, Miss A. will probably find her spare moments filled and her purse filled also.

Do not let any girl think she will be despised for doing such work as this. It has come to be a matter of course in college life; and the girl who is modest, kind, cheery and ready to use whatever talent she may have to add to the social life and enjoyment of those about her, will find herself liked and respected, even though she post her advertisement as “mender.”

To many, library work is especially attractive. All college libraries need assistants, and several girls may usually find work in this line.

Any one who has been a teacher will appreciate the fact that the pressure of really important work on a college professor leaves little time for the correction of the numerous recitation papers passed in by students. Upper class girls are often employed to correct the papers of lower class girls, and to do the clerical work for their teachers.

When a college is situated in or near a large city a way of earning money is in vogue that cannot be used in schools distant from a city. This is newspaper reporting. Society events, theatre, opera, concert and lecture, all are served up by these young workers, who are thus adding to their experience as well as their money.

Scholarships need hardly be mentioned. It is well understood that these exist, and are open to all.

But one may be a very excellent scholar, and yet fail to get a scholarship, since these are limited in number. In most well-endowed colleges, however, a girl who has shown herself deserving in every way, may obtain some help from the college funds, on the plan of returning the money sometime, if she is ever able to do so. If never in a condition to return it, she may consider it a free gift.

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It is not to be supposed that an exhaustive list of the methods of earning money during college life has been given. In actual experience the willing girl with eyes and ears open, would probably find many other ways. The methods mentioned are not theories, but have all been actually practiced at such colleges as Wellesley, Vassar and Boston University.

The only condition necessary to receive aid at any college seems to be that a girl shall be deserving, and shall be willing and able to help herself.

If the needs for work are not too pressing, she who saves a little time to take some part, however small, in the social life of an institution is doing a wise thing. She will gain needed variety, make pleasant friendships, and add to her education what books can never give her. Some very definite qualifications are needed by one who would work her way through four years of study.

First of all is health. To the strong, so many things are possible. And there must not be simply health at the beginning, but a constant care to keep in a healthful condition. Usually, a careful supervision of the pupils, and the gymnasium work and outdoor exercise required of them, keep them in excellent condition. But only the girls themselves can guard against overwork.

In anxiety to maintain a good class standard, and yet do work enough to earn the much needed money, the temptation to overtax one’s strength is great. But it is worse than useless to yield to this temptation. Precious health once lost, one’s plans and hopes for advancement go with it.

Two ladies were discussing a successful teacher in our public schools. “Her brilliant mind,” said one, “has given her success.” “Her perfect health,” replied the other, “has been as great a factor. She is a beautiful example of a sound mind in a sound body. Her perfect poise gives her power that her pupils feel though they may not recognize its source.”

The young woman who takes up any line of work must show herself trustworthy. If she engages to do a certain thing, it must be done thoroughly, promptly and ungrudgingly.

If one has not the quality of courage, cultivate it. Not merely the dogged persistence that will finish a task begun, but the sunshiny courage that can transform even drudgery.

Above all else, there must be perseverance. It will not always be pleasant and easy to lose many of the good times going on around one, sometimes from lack of means, again from lack of time. There will come moments when the question, “Is it worth while?” will rise to torment one: hours when life seems all work, with no pleasure openings at all. Then is the time for a discouraged girl to tighten her will fibres; look at all the bright places to be found in her daily life; set before herself very clearly again the results she hopes to gain, and then work steadily on, putting into life all the good cheer possible.

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The results that she hopes to gain:—What are they?

A rich harvest of knowledge, of course. But it is to be hoped that something more is expected and obtained than knowledge of books.

The college graduate should have gained knowledge of herself, of her own capabilities, and of the place she was meant to fill in the world. She should know how to carry herself in society, how to entertain, how to lose herself in consideration for others.

Through the distinguished musicians and lecturers who favor our colleges, she has gained glimpses into the worlds of art that have helped to polish her mind.

From the precept and example of Christian teachers she has learned the beauty of unselfish work; and has come to see that success in life is not to be measured by fame or money.

The college graduate should be able to refute the common complaint that higher education is unnecessary for the girl who is not to enter a profession, but is to have the management of a household.

She should feel, and be able to show, that the executive ability gained in college can be turned to the ordering of domestic comfort, as well as to the teaching of the classics. Her knowledge of chemistry and sanitation should give her household proper food, and keep her home in purity. And all the knowledge she has gained will not be too much for the guiding of a little child’s mind. Sometimes it will not be enough to answer his questions.

“Frances is younger at twenty-five than she was when she entered college at nineteen,” said a mother, speaking of her oldest daughter. “She was prim and old-fashioned then, and very one-sided in her views. Has she not changed?” Indeed she had. One saw a charming woman, easy in manner, interesting in conversation, and with that subtle something about her, that would certainly make any one describing her say, “A woman of character.”

There was good material to work on in this case, but almost any prominent educator can recall instances of crude, unformed girlhood, that four years of college life have softened, rounded and developed into gracious womanhood.

To become a noble, cultivated, helpful woman! Is not that a high ideal for any girl? And if college life will help in the attainment of that ideal, then it is worth the glad giving of work and sacrifice.

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XLII.
WOMEN AS TEACHERS.

“I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.”—Alexander the Great.

EXT to the woman in the home, guiding and training her own little ones at her knee, stands the woman in the schoolroom teaching and leading thousands of little souls from the homes of others. Next to marriage there is no vocation for which woman is naturally better fitted than for that of teaching. She it is who guides, inspires and elevates. The safety and perpetuity of our national life is largely dependent upon a living, loving, womanly teacher in every schoolroom of our country.

In America the first lessons in English history, literature and composition were taught by the colonial mothers. These women teachers, by the fireside or spinning wheel, encouraged their children to keep up a close intercourse with the friends of the old home, and these early lessons from women of sterling character left their influence upon the later teachers.

Long after schools for boys were maintained, the girls were still at home with their “samplers;” for “educational opportunities for children” meant educational opportunities for boys—and boys only. “Samplers” and “manners” should make a girl content.

Ambitious girls then, as at present, found a way to attain their desires, so in groups they quietly sat on the steps of the schoolhouse to hear the boys recite. How much they learned is not recorded, but there is mention that the “act was frowned upon and in some instances met with proper punishment.”

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In 1761, when the school at South Byfield, Mass., admitted girls, it was regarded by the conservative as a “foolhardy act,” one man saying of the girls, “It will make them less healthy, less domestic, less useful.”

“Women must be educated; they must be!” exclaimed Mary Lyon, as she walked the floor with flushed cheeks and flashing eyes. Her mother wrote: “Mary will not give it up.” This young woman’s determination was a realization and the founder of Mount Holyoke College represented the culture of the early New England and New York schools.

“Added opportunities for culture means added power for usefulness,” and that every woman might have this was the plan, labor and prayer of Mary Lyon’s work as a teacher.

In all these schools girls proved their ability as pupils and with the increasing number of schools came the demand for women teachers.

The importance of deciding this question of woman’s ability to teach is evident from the accounts of an old meeting. The arguments, favorable and unfavorable, were given thoughtful attention. One man sought to convince the others that woman was incompetent, lacked the physical force, and closed his remarks by arguing: “She can never thrash the boys.”

Others brought forth the argument that woman had “directed and guided her little family with a gentle hand, tender love and sympathy; if able to teach the few, can she not teach the many?”

This argument won. Those who doubted and disliked the innovations of progress were convinced as they always will be.

The charge to the woman teacher was given hesitatingly, distrustfully, by the people. Among these teachers the struggle for bare existence and subsistence was severe. They received almost nothing for their labor of love; discouragements were met at every step and this new path was made even more thorny by prejudice than by necessity. The early women teachers met and conquered every difficulty.

In the little school kept by Elizabeth Peabody, at Lancaster, Mass., America early saw exemplified the principles of Plato, Plutarch, Luther, Rousseau, Pestalozzi and Froebel. The brothers and sisters whom she taught, as well as the daughters of the farmers and traders, here learned the meaning of Froebel’s truth, “harmonious growth through self-activity.”

Miss Peabody moulded the life of each pupil, and, above all, showed herself to be the true teacher in teaching others how to live. “Throughout my teaching life, I always made human life, as such, a leading study,” said she. To-day every teacher who will “educate the soul” and follow the examples of Elizabeth Peabody and her sister, Mary Peabody Mann, will not fail in her work. These two devoted sister teachers skirted the borderland of the present kindergarten 264 method, but it remained for Froebel to evolve the practical methods that put children in possession of their faculties before they are contaminated by the world.

The call for more schools of this character and for more women teachers increased.

In America, after the war, when the work of the reconstruction of the South was progressing, it was largely due to the corps of devoted women teachers that the colored people were brought into subjection and trained for industrial pursuits. These women exerted their influence along the lines where service demanded and duty called.

The history of every country shows that the very flower of womanhood has entered the ranks of teaching.

The girl of the present feels this truth.

The faculty of Wellesley College was and is largely composed of women. When Miss Alice Freeman, the young alumna of the University of Michigan, became Wellesley’s second president, a great and marked development was apparent. To know the ideals of Wellesley was to know the ideals of Miss Freeman. When she became Mrs. Palmer, Miss Shafer made a strong permanent impression and left her influence on hundreds of teachers in the country.

Mrs. Irwine, Cornell’s graduate, has exemplified the same high standard of womanhood, being an example of the motto on the college walls: “Non ministrari sed ministrare,” and woman’s highest honor has ever been found in faithful service.

We can trace the work of women as teachers in our colleges of Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, and thousands attest to the deep ethical influence, direct or indirect, exerted by Emma Willard, Catherine Beecher and Mary Lyon.

To-day thousands of young girls, encouraged by what has been done, are saying: “I intend to teach when I am through school.”

This is one of the highest and noblest of ambitions, but she must carefully consider the requirements, the preparations, the struggles and the chances of her success.

Let a girl ask herself these questions:

Have I good health and strong nerves?

Have I broad education?

Do I love children?

Am I patient to a remarkable degree?

Am I sympathetic?

Have I tact, good judgment, common sense and governing power?

Have I originality and comprehensiveness of view?

Have I the faculty of imparting to others the knowledge I possess?

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Am I able to awaken interest in children?

Am I willing to give up my present pleasures, privileges and freedom for those of a teacher?

These are among the requirements, and who is sufficient for all these things? The girl who teaches must be, and if these questions are inwardly answered in the negative, then the girl has no right to indulge in the dream of teaching. In this work there should be no experiments. Uncertain experiment upon human souls is tragedy of the worst kind. There is a fitness—a divine, inborn fitness—a wisdom of heart and soul required in shaping souls that is not essential to possess in shaping clay or fashioning draperies.

To the girl who is conscious of possessing the requisite traits of character comes the question: “What preparation is necessary?” “Get the best training and the highest education at any cost,” were the words of an eminent teacher. Too much depends upon our schools to accept anything in a teacher but the most careful training, the broadest culture and the best womanly development.

One of our foremost women teachers said: “If you are strong and healthy, strong of purpose and determination, do as I did: borrow the money, go to a college or at least a training school, and in two years after the completion of your course you will have paid your debt and made yourself an heiress of the world’s greatest riches.”

Send for circulars of the various training schools, study and compare them, decide upon your work, and train—train as the athlete trains for the victory he hopes to win. Exert every effort in daily toil for the place you aim to fill.

Do not seek to become the average good teacher, but seek to make of yourself a most superior teacher.

Every child in the land demands the best work, the highest character in every teacher.

Our whole nation demands it and must have it.

A course at a training school is not long, nor is it expensive. In nearly every instance after the first term the weekly expenses may be reduced by assistance given in some line of work.

The only department of teaching which is not overcrowded is that of the kindergarten. In this field there is still room for hundreds of teachers. This is acknowledged to be the most important branch of the work and, as a natural corollary, the training is of the greatest importance.

Energy and time must be devoted to the study of every possible improvement adopted in the teaching of child-culture and child-development. A full understanding of its methods means the conviction that the best hope for the future of the world lies in the kindergarten and most of all in the kindergarten teacher.

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Each year the training schools are sending out women teachers who for months have given their attention to the fundamental laws of psychology and all that vitally concerns the development of tender, tiny child-life.

In all other grades professional preparation is demanded. The Normal College of New York, which furnishes ninety per cent of its public school teachers, is a free institution. From this college about four hundred girls are annually graduated, and five-sixths of these become teachers.

In the School of Pedagogy of New York the work lies beyond that of the normal schools. Here degrees are granted and advancement and success await those teachers who are able to acquaint students with the scientific investigations and principles of professional preparation.

After the decision is made and the preparation is accomplished, there will be many obstacles and struggles for the young teacher.

“Why do you select teaching as a field of work?” was asked a graduate.

“Oh, because the hours are shorter, and the vacations are longer than in other vocations; besides,” she added, “you know the salary is assured, it is a permanent work if one shows ability, and one meets the most cultivated people.” Six years later at a late hour one evening two hundred examination papers were closely packed on a table before her. These had taxed her physical, mental and nervous forces, and with eyes, head and heart aching, she was closing her day’s work at eleven o’clock at night. Had she found the hours short?

Had she found an opportunity to meet the people she had hoped to meet? She had put her strength and vitality into the lives of others. She had been making men and women. She had made the reputation of being a rare teacher; but was she? She had never learned how to retain her forces for the benefit of those under her charge, and had a mistaken idea of her calling and its demands. Her life had been one of devotion but not true devotion; hers was not the ideal of duty-doing. Hers had been a complete self-surrender, an heroic self-sacrifice, but it had been a suicidal self-surrender and a mistaken sacrifice.

“It is all a struggle,” said a teacher of three years’ experience. “What is not?” Your realization of the deficiencies that cause the struggle, the responsibilities that increase it, is the strongest proof that you will become a better teacher.

“There is so much of pedagogy, so many scientific principles to grasp!” she continued.

Yes, but does all this resolve itself into simplicity when once mastered? Be thankful that a science of education has been formulated, adopted, and that you are commissioned to impart it to others.

The girl who contemplates teaching should clearly picture to herself the contrast between life as a student and life as a teacher. As a pupil she spent the 267 greater part of her time sitting undisturbed in quiet halls, thinking of the one lesson before her, and of her individual desires. As a teacher she spends the greater part of the time standing or walking about a schoolroom, often noisy with street sounds, and she must think not only of the one lesson, but the many on her day’s program, and adapt each to the minds of not one but the forty, fifty, or even sixty pupils before her.

When at school she talked only occasionally, was surrounded by congenial faces and enjoyed her freedom at recess. When a teacher she must expect to talk a greater part of the time to a class whose faces represent all sorts and conditions of people, and at recess her care and responsibility is not lessened.

As a student her work was planned, the interest was created and her liberty was enjoyed.

As a teacher she must plan for every moment, she must create and sustain interest, and her liberty becomes confinement for at least a portion of the day.

A disheartening, discouraging outlook, is it? No. On the contrary, it is inspiring, it is full of incentive, full of love, engaging heart and soul. No vocation is capable of producing grander results, no work is more comprehensive, no work well performed is so soul-satisfying than this of leading and teaching living, breathing, human souls.

Whatever preparation is necessary, whatever struggles are encountered, she must make up her mind that she will succeed.

Once a timid-spirited woman ventured to suggest to Lydia Wadleigh that failure might attend her proposed plan. “Failure!” exclaimed Miss Wadleigh, flashing her large black eyes in defiance and scorn, “I fail! Never!” She carried this principle through her girlhood days among the New Hampshire hills at Sutton; it helped her to mount the heights at the New Hampshire Literary and Scientific Institution; it was the foundation of her success in the early Twelfth street school in New York City, and finally won for her that glorious thirty-two years’ record as New York’s ablest woman teacher, closing with eighteen years as first lady superintendent of the Normal College in New York. Many a teacher to-day has felt the influence of Miss Wadleigh’s “I fail! Never!”

Every girl who would teach successfully must be in herself all that she desires to communicate to those in her care. The traits of her own character stand out far more clearly to the intuitive minds before her than the chalk marks on her blackboards. If she would teach honesty, she must be honest; if she would teach truth, she must be true; if she would teach conscientious duty, she must be conscientious to her own duties. A teacher cannot be one thing and teach her children to be another. Childish minds are quick in detecting the slightest imposture and quick to resent it. Any trace of hollow pretension is supremely abhorred by a child. A child’s perceptive and discriminating faculties have been 268 underestimated. A model of pure thoughts, high ideals and noble aspirations will be loved and faithfully copied by the pupils.

The new education lies rather in the spirit of the teacher than in the subject taught; for, underlying all, permeating all, and paramount to all else in the school is the character of the teacher.

The great aim of the teacher should be to develop character. “Moral education is the essence of all education,” said Elizabeth Peabody. Apply all your energy to make a high, liberal, justice-loving manhood and womanhood, and the result will be a success.

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XLIII.
COLLEGE PRESIDENTS, PROFESSORS AND PRINCIPALS.

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These early colleges, by the conservative, were regarded as a source of amusement. In 1870 the first lectures for women, resident in Cambridge, England, were delivered by university men. To these lectures the women came, eager for a higher, broader education than had hitherto been offered. Soon, from another part of England, came an application from a woman anxious to come to Cambridge and receive the instruction. The request was considered and after much deliberation it was granted. As a natural consequence more women applied, and in 1871 a house was opened for students under the charge of Miss Clough, who afterward became the principal of Newnham College.

In 1874 the first women students were admitted. Among those who attended during the first fifteen years, five became professors and lecturers in American colleges, one became principal of the Cambridge Training College for Women, and hundreds became teachers.

In the educational movement in our country there were brave pioneers. The names of Mary Lyon, Emma Willard and Catherine Beecher signify broad ideals, early struggles and complete victories. It is largely due to their efforts that young women were placed side by side educationally with men. When the subject of a college course was mentioned to a conservative it was met with remarks similar to:

“Who shall cook our food and mend our clothes if the girls are to be taught philosophy?” or, “Think of a wife who forced you to talk perpetually about metaphysics or to listen to Greek and Latin quotations!”

Emma Willard early began to plan for a higher education of women, and with her to plan meant to accomplish. Her mastery of her girlhood’s lessons, whether Milton, by the sheltered fireside, or astronomy from the exposed horse-block, proved that in her mind the difficulties should and would be overcome. This principle urged her forward through the schools of Miss Royce and Misses Patten in Connecticut, on to the position of assistant in Westfield Academy, to the full charge of a school in Middlebury, Vermont, and at last to the realization and establishment of the Academy for Female Education at Waterford, and later to more commodious quarters at Troy, N. Y. Popular sentiment was opposed to her “visions.” At her school “in Waterford, in 1820, occurred the public examination of a young lady in geometry. It was the first instance of the kind in the State, and perhaps in the country, and called forth a storm of ridicule.”

Miss Willard’s path was not strewn with flowers; it was made extremely thorny; but her one purpose was to succeed.

What did it mean to her, how was it to be accomplished? It meant study and work from ten to fifteen hours a day, a constant effort to remove public prejudice, to rise above ridicule, to overcome indifference, and to explore new fields. It could only be accomplished by skillful teaching, patient drilling, the 271 wise addition of new studies to the old, the slow winning of the co-operation of leading minds, submitting plan after plan to eminent educators, by arousing philanthropy and calling upon benevolence. All this Emma Willard did. She patiently and zealously prepared the way for a new era in woman’s education. Troy Seminary was the result of her life-work.

To her, as to scores of other noble women at the head of schools, devolved the labor of arranging, re-arranging, simplifying, methodizing and leading as well as the responsibilities of the financial management. In all this work she was a power in that first of American schools for young ladies. The five thousand young women who were under her training have left rich legacies of her active, wide-reaching work.

Can one ask for a prouder, grander monument?

It is to such women of wide intellect and resolute determination that America owes much for its educational advancement of women.

Oberlin, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Smith and Wellesley are indebted to the many noble women who pointed out the path and shed their own light upon it for the guidance of others. Many of the obstacles met and overcome by Emma Willard have been encountered by other women.

In Holyoke, Elizabeth Blanchard, its principal for five years and president for one, largely gave her energies for its present advancement. She arranged new schedules, secured extra funds and aimed to have the school a realization of the expressed purposes of its founder, Mary Lyon: “A permanent institution consecrated to the work of training young women to the greatest usefulness.” To-day its present president, Mrs. Elizabeth S. Mead, is striving to develop these principles, and to her devotion, her love, is largely due the high standard of the work accomplished.

Mrs. Marianne Dascomb, when appointed principal of the ladies’ department of Oberlin College, Ohio, established and sustained the fullest curriculum of studies for women which, in the history of our country, had, previously, never been reached. Here, in the forests of Ohio, in 1833, was established that first mental discipline equally as thorough and severe as that which had been and was then required of young men.

This college was an early example of the movement which accomplished so much toward supplying the wide West with great and efficient institutions for the higher education of women.

The early foundations of that educational movement were, to a great extent, laid by Marianne Dascomb, who, at the age of twenty-four, in the interests of literature, religion and humanity, accepted her responsible position. As the Western forests were gradually swept away, this institution became more of a power each year and to her judicious management, wise judgment and noble 272 womanhood the college at Oberlin largely owes its safety, its wisdom and its early success.

Another girl struggling under adverse educational conditions was Sophia Smith. Eager for study, confronting meagre opportunities for education, realizing popular prejudice, indifference and opposition, she resolved to build a college for women. While the brother was gathering gold this sister’s heart was preparing to dispense it. Her munificent gift of $400,000 was called forth by her inmost feeling and thought: “There is no justice in denying women equal educational advantages with men. Women are the natural educators and physicians of the race and they ought to be fitted for their work.” Again she said, “We should educate the whole woman, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual.” The Greek motto over the entrance door at Smith-College, “Add to your virtue knowledge,” was and is a principle nobly exemplified in its women professors.

A Vassar College woman will recall with feelings of pleasure and almost of reverence the names of Professor Maria Mitchell, Professor Braislin and Dr. Webster, who were early members of the faculty.

The magnetic influence, intense individuality and helpful spirit of Maria Mitchell, who for twenty-three years was Vassar’s professor in astronomy, were long felt after her pupils had entirely forgotten zenith, azimuth, all the 273 mathematical mysteries of eclipses, precession of equinoxes and the management of the sidereal clock in which this gifted woman was so thoroughly informed, and all of which were so loved by her.

She once said, “I had only ordinary capacity but extraordinary persistency.” Her early familiarity with Nantucket’s wide-bordering sea, the deep, blue overarching dome, her father’s telescope, her books and this “extraordinary persistence” incited her to reach forth into the mysteries of creation and the outer universe, to earn for herself the gold medal from the King of Denmark, the copper one from San Marino, to accept the position of professor of astronomy at Vassar College when it was opened in 1865. Later it was this same persistency that completed her important scientific essays, her contributions on astronomy in the Scientific American, and most of all that made her work at Vassar, strong, vital, lasting and successful.

The homelike appearance inside the observatory, with its quiet, country-like surroundings, its windows half-hidden by roses and overlooking the garden, all proclaimed the woman, not the professor. Inside, the bust of Mary Somerville, the pictures of home friends, the china, books, souvenirs of foreign travel, all were evidences of womanly love and feminine taste.

The picture on instruction nights was that of the stately professor with piercing black eyes, her strong face softened by snow-white curls, seated like a queen among the beautiful, bright-eyed, laughing girls. Practical, mathematical work, drawings, photographs, records of meteorological matters and calculations beside the great telescope, was a part of the work required and accomplished; but greater, grander than all this was her earnestness, inspiration, strength, truth and justice which she imparted to every girl in her class. For such a professor a young woman has a reverence almost approaching worship.

The grandeur and breadth of her life-work seemed a part of herself; the quality of greatness always seen in the unfathomable spaces seemed reflected in her character; the great sums entering into her daily calculations were symbolic of the greatness of her daily duties.

The lives of such women as professors are not measured by the work accomplished by brain and figures.

A professor is not only loved because she can penetrate nebulæ, detect impurities in minerals, discover new specimens in science or develop a new method in literature or history, but because she can penetrate aspirations, detect thoughts, discover talent and develop character and womanhood.

Mr. Durant, the founder of Wellesley College, said, “Educated Christian women have more to do in forming the opinions and making the character of men than all other influences combined; I will build a hall large enough to accommodate three hundred girls.”

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While these plans were maturing a conscientious girl in the West was diligently studying all that nature gives so freely and all that schools gave.

Her desire for a higher education was increased by the opening of the doors to women of the Michigan University.

Here Alice Freeman entered, and after graduating in 1876 and spending two years in teaching, she was called, at the age of twenty-four, to the chair of history at Wellesley College. Her character, her work at once gave rise to the prophecy that she would some day be its president. In 1881 the summons came. She won all hearts.

Her ready sympathy, her sincerity, her conscientious devotion were an inspiration to every young woman to lead the same pure, earnest, noble life. To her untiring energy and conscientious devotion was due the higher standard, the broader work, the nobler womanhood.

Her example has been followed by Mrs. Shafer and Mrs. Irwine. Others at the head of our seminaries and academies have a record glorious in its execution and grand in its influence. From the East to Mrs. Mills, president of Mills College, California, noble examples of women are found in our institutions whose influence each year is broadening.

Included in the faculty of Standard University, California, is Miss Mary McLean, who has the distinction of being the youngest woman in the faculty of any Western college. The young lady is twenty-five years of age, an only child, 276 and has been carefully reared. Her father is Rev. J. K. McLean, D. D., who has been in California for thirty years, and is known all over the West. He is the leading Congregationalist in California. Miss McLean, after graduating at the University of California, went first to England, where she entered the Oxford College annex. Later she studied in Berlin and traveled extensively. At Stanford Miss McLean is an adjunct to the chair of English literature. She will introduce a number of European methods, culled from the great colleges, all of which she has visited, into her new department.

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The first normal school of which a woman was principal was founded in St. Louis, Anna C. Brackett, a graduate of the Framingham Normal School, being at one time its efficient head.

Not until within a comparatively recent time have colleges recognized pedagogics as a science. The first professor of pedagogics in America, Miss Bibbs, was appointed in the University of Missouri.

Few people outside of those in the educational circles realize all that is required in the character and ability of our woman principal. She must always be hopeful, cheerful, courageous; she must possess superior sense, keen insight, wise judgment; she must show skill and tact in managing the infinite number of college affairs, must meet every duty with devotion and zeal, must hold herself and hundreds of others in her care with a gentle hand yet with the firmest strength of will, and often sacrifice her own happiness for that of others.

In her daily work, in personal interviews, in consultations with teachers, matrons, parents, pupils, in assigning daily exercises and studies, in delivering her course of lectures to her girls, in general class instruction and in her ever watchful supervision does she not add each moment some new gem to her well-earned crown? Is she not entitled to the highest place of honor and power in the hearts of the college girls?

Many instances are cited in which comparatively unknown teachers of superior, natural ability and rare excellence have suddenly been called to assume the professorship or principalship in some institution of learning.

The teachers of the highest merit are raised from obscurity into the brightest light, she who was unknown in her work becomes known, the weakest becomes the strongest. Many of our women professors in Vassar, Smith and Wellesley received the call to greater, broader work when discharging the daily work in a field less known. True merit will find its place.

The filial-like devotion and affection which never ceases to exist between the student and the woman principal is the uniform and highest testimony to the high esteem in which these women are held. Their noblest work is written in the career of the thousands of young women whom they have fitted for life’s highest and best service.

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XLIV.
IN THE LECTURE FIELD.

N these days of women’s clubs and the much-talked-of “woman’s movement,” the lecture field offers great opportunities for women with the necessary qualifications. These are, first, a thorough knowledge of the subjects chosen; second, a talent for public speaking; third, a cultivation of that talent, and fourth, a great many other things. Too many women are trying to get before the public who are poorly equipped. A woman is asked to prepare a paper for a club, perhaps, she does it by looking up in an encyclopedia her subjects, and copying direct from that, instead of trying to put life and enthusiasm and fresh thought into her paper. But when she comes to read it before a friendly, small audience, who, perhaps, could not do as well, she is praised and told that her effort is “masterly,” “scholarly,” “learned.” She is fired with ambition, in consequence. If she says to herself “I know, if they don’t, that I could do a great deal better than that,” and goes to work to improve with all her might and main, she will succeed. But if she is satisfied and accepts the praise of well-meaning but ill-qualified friends, and then goes before a larger, critical audience with her patchwork, encyclopedia-ized paper, woe be unto her! For she can only fail. In this, as in all things, earnest, thorough study tells, and in this field, almost more than any other, it is suicidal to a woman’s best interests to venture without a thorough equipment.

Many women in America are succeeding along this line, however. The W. C. T. U. and the suffrage movement are to be thanked for this development of opportunities for women. When the pioneers in these movements began, what a hue and cry there was! Now it is safe to say there is not a town in the United States, not even in the most remote backwoods district, where a woman may not 278 go on to the platform or stand before an audience without being sure of a respectful hearing. All honor, then, to the pioneer women!

Fifty years ago both the woman who spoke in public and the woman who listened to the speech were maligned and vilified. They were characterized as “strong-minded,” “blue stockings,” “visionaries,” “unsexed,” “atheists,” “unscriptural,” “revolutionaries,” and to-day there are lecturers of all possible kinds in every part of the country. They do a wonderful and beneficent work in the education of the American people, and more especially in supplementing the training derived in schools and in bringing education down to date with those who have been too busy to pursue their studies after graduating from some scholastic institution.

The lecturers and their topics afford the means of determining the varied tastes of American women. A talented speaker might have a superb address upon any topic, but if the latter does not appeal, the lecture itself is almost certain of being a failure. If it does not succeed after two or three trials the lecturer gives it up.

It would be impossible to even name all the women who have made a reputation in this calling. The list with necessary comments would fill a large volume, and all that can be done is to select a few representing the various fields of thought and work.

Of the many prominent ones, a capital example is Miss Harriet Keyser, of New York. She is a woman of great ability who has made a special study of political and economical subjects for many years, and who lectures regularly before large audiences. One of her finest efforts was entitled “The Economic Value of Woman to the State,” and beyond its great rhetorical beauty and value it was a remarkable collection of statistics on the subject which had never before been put together. Then there are the marvelous lectures by Miss Charlotte Hawes, of Boston, upon music, and those of Mrs. Mary H. Flint upon architecture. The former were entirely out of the beaten path; one was upon bells and belfries, chimes and bell music, and gave a succinct history of the subject from the earliest times, along with illustrative music ranging from the simplest bob major to the greatest compositions by the Italian masters; a second was upon ancient and classic music; and a third upon the music of birds, and the musical element of natural life. Such work could not be obtained in any book, or even in any ordinary library. Put together in book form it would be invaluable to the musician and the general student. Mrs. Flint’s lectures brought architecture down to date. The latest discoveries in the East, the newly found and explored ruins of both the Old World and the New; the newest creations of modern architects were all ably handled and brought together in compact, concise form. Her full course of talks would make a hand-book of remarkable value to the reading public.

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Five distinguished specialists are Madam Eva Alberti, the president of the New York College of Expression; Professor Mary Williams, Professor Angeline Brooks, Miss Mary Proctor, and Professor Cornelia C. Bedford, the president of the New York Society of Teachers of Cookery. Madam Alberti is so versatile and accomplished that it is difficult to restrict her to any one class. In her college, which is a post-graduate institution, she devotes the most time to philosophy, psychology, pedagogy, and the art and science of physical culture, in all of which fields she is a recognized authority. Professor Brooks is the great master of kindergarten science. Professor Williams makes a specialty of woman’s education and the education of women’s educators. Miss Proctor is the distinguished daughter of the famous astronomer, Richard A. Proctor, and inherits much of his matchless talent in making astronomic truths easy of grasp and popular to the public mind.

Madam Kleppisch has devoted many years to modern painters and paintings, has a superb collection of photographs of all the more important ones, and a remarkable fund of anecdote and incident respecting both the workers and their works. She has traveled through Europe several times, visiting the studios and galleries, and has utilized the knowledge thus gained for her addresses.

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Three public speakers who add to high culture and many accomplishments, great personal beauty and remarkable oratoric power, are Mrs. Mercedes Leigh, of New York, Miss Mary Haviland Sutton, of Chappaqua, and Miss Mary C. Francis, of Gotham. They are all young, graceful, enthusiastic and brilliant. Mrs. Leigh is seen at her best in the highest class of poetry, such as Shakespeare, Emerson, Goethe, and Omar Khayyan. Miss Sutton tends toward æsthetic thought, and Miss Francis to the literary spirit. It is a treat to hear Mrs. Leigh upon the “Rubayyat,” Miss Sutton on “Beauty in Daily Life,” and Miss Francis upon the “New Woman.” These three represent the incoming generation and show that there is no dearth of splendid material for the speakers of the coming twenty years.

The field of literature is very well covered by women lecturers. While all of them are possessed of the broadest literary culture, yet either their own taste or the public fancy has identified nearly every one with some particular poet, playwright, school or period. Mrs. Abby Sage Richardson, although a finished Shakespearian scholar and a learned political economist, is best known by her magnificent lectures upon the Arthurian romances; Mrs. Sarah Cowell Le Moyne enjoys a national reputation, but it is as the exponent and student commentator and transcriber of Robert Browning; Mrs. Anna Randall Diehl is associated in the public mind with Shakespeare and nothing else; Mrs. Alexander Kohut, of New York, one of the superb leaders of the modern Jewish women, by Semitic literature, of which, as a matter of fact, she is a great master. A lecturer who belongs to no class, but is a class unto herself, is Madam Hanna Korany. She 281 comes from Syria, in Asia Minor, where she was born and raised. She came to this country the first time as a delegate to the World’s Fair at Chicago. Here her oriental beauty and eloquence, exquisite manners and remarkable knowledge soon attracted attention and made her famous. At the suggestion of the newfound friends she tried the lecture platform, and won an immediate and gratifying success.

Miss Jane Meade Welch, of Buffalo, N. Y., came into popularity first as a writer and then as a lecturer upon American history and literature. She began her work in her native city. It was of so high a character as to receive the highest praise of the press and pulpit, and to make her name known in the great cities. She took advantage of invitations to address various societies and lyceums, from which she rose to the highest step in the profession by being appointed a special lecturer of many women’s colleges.

While law may not seem a very attractive field, it nevertheless has produced some very able women lecturers. At least five have already attained distinction in this part of the country. Mrs. Cornelia K. Hood, Miss Stanlietta Titus, and Miss Kate Hogan, the two latter belonging to New York, and Mrs. Hood to Brooklyn; Miss Mary E. Greene, of Providence, and Mrs. Alice Parker Lesser, of Boston, are all exceedingly popular, and in lecturing before mixed audiences or before women’s clubs, they have shown great tact and wisdom, avoiding all technical terms, explaining delicate and 282 difficult points, using as examples the questions which come up in the every-day life of private individuals.

In this line of opportunity is it not gratifying to think that these women occupy the positions they hold by reason of the demand of hundreds of thousands of men and women, principally women, in every part of our great country, who see something in life greater and better than wealth, frivolity, or pleasure?

They indicate that a revolution has occurred in the present century such as our ancestors never dreamed of, and that the twentieth century will start upon the basis of a mental, moral and spiritual plane, higher than any the world has yet known.

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XLV.
NEWSPAPER WOMEN.

HE women that we are going to talk about are not the literary workers, pure and simple,—those who write for magazines or story papers; nor those who in the shelter of their own home write letters for daily and weekly newspapers. The girls we are talking about are those who go into the newspaper office, have regular desks there, “take assignments,” and go out to attend to them; going to their work as the young men go to theirs and working side by side with them.

Among all the professions that have been opened to women during the past few years none seems on first sight so tempting as that of newspaper work. Not “journalism,” for that term is too dilettanti, too little expressive of the real thing. Your genuine newspaper worker is an honest worker; there is no make-believe about him or her. As for your “journalist,” he is very likely to think more of his title than his achievement. One of the best American editors has a fashion of saying, if any one speaks of a journalist to him, “Oh, a journalist, is he? Well, I’m afraid he won’t suit me; what I’m looking for is a good, wide-awake newspaper man.”

I have in mind a young woman with “journalistic” aspirations. She had had no experience, but she made up her mind to begin her work as an art or musical critic; or she might consider reviewing books. She found all such places occupied, but she could not see why the people who had grown up to a knowledge of work and were of value to their papers shouldn’t be set aside and give her a chance. With the insolence of inexperienced and uninstructed youth, she really thought that her claim for consideration was greater, because she was “new and fresh”—very fresh, if one may drop into newspaper slang—and that those people 284 who had the wisdom born of experience and were valuable workers, whose opinions were sought for and respected, should be put to one side in favor of her youth. She was quite indignant because it was suggested that she win her place by showing her ability to do any kind of newspaper work first. Now, a girl like that will never become a good newspaper woman; she will never gain the position she desires. While she is standing outside with folded hands, waiting for somebody to die or resign, and so leave an opening for her, another woman—or a man, maybe—is fitting for the place which shall be hers or his because he has won it. Positions don’t come by way of legacy in a newspaper office, I assure you.

There is more than one reason why this profession should be regarded as a pleasant one, although it is a question whether the reasons are “good and sufficient.” In most cases they are based on wrong premises, and arrived at through ignorance. In the first place, many think it an easy way to earn a livelihood; they imagine the remuneration to be greater than it really is; others think it a work that brings influence with it, and still others regard it as a somewhat less objectionable mode of work than that done with the hands, and they are very fond of setting off mental against purely manual labor. Others, again, are ambitious of position, and think it a fine thing to have, as they term it, “the public ear.” Now, any one, man or woman, who takes up this profession with ideas of this kind, will make a speedy and signal failure. It is one of the best professions in the world, even if less remunerative than the other professions. It catches and holds the enthusiasm of the workers as nothing else does. It opens possibilities of attainment that are undreamed of when the first steps are taken, but it is a profession that must be undertaken with humility of spirit, and treated with the highest respect. It cannot be used as a makeshift; it will do nothing for one who takes it up carelessly or to serve a mere purpose, intending to drop it after the purpose is served, or some other position won. It gives much to its honest workers, but to the selfish and shirking it refuses its best gifts.

After twenty-five years of constant work in the profession which I chose when very few young women had dreamed of adopting it, I believe that it is a profession well suited to the woman who suits it. Not to all women, for all women will not make successful newspaper workers, any more than all men will. It is not an easy work, albeit it is fascinating. It, more nearly than any other I know, will answer to the description of woman’s work in the old doggerel which ran,

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This is true of newspaper work. Literally, it is never done. Your newspaper goes on through everything; it is printed every day, and sometimes several times a day, as in the case of the paper with which I am connected, the Boston 286 Herald, which has eight daily editions. Can you understand what that means? Something fresh and new in every one. The last incident caught in its happening, chronicled in white heat, and put before a waiting public before it is two hours old. Nothing must escape; every class in the community must be looked after, from the merchant prince to the rag-picker. Do you realize what this requires? Quickness, alertness, and if you will permit the use of a specially coined word—aliveness. A readiness to do whatever may come to you, to turn out an interesting story on any subject, to make the most of trifling incident—in short, to give value to every piece of work put into your hand to do.

In regard to any personal gain of influence or recognition, that comes slowly. In taking a position on a newspaper you are but one of many workers, and you have your own place to make. First of all, you must make yourself of value to your employers, your editors. You must show them that you have within you the qualities which will, when you have had experience, develop into good working power. This you must prove in small ways before you will be given large opportunities. The mere fact that you have been taken on to a paper on trial does not make you a newspaper woman. You must prove your mettle before you are admitted fully to the inner circle and recognized as an accepted worker. Some young women who have an ambition to be journalists imagine that the whole thing is accomplished if they can secure the publication of something which they have written, and then have personal notes of themselves put into other papers, saying that “Miss Featherbrain, of the Tattler,” says so and so. Nobody knows who Miss Featherbrain is, but what difference does that make? She has been in print, and she calls it being famous. It seems silly that persons should be content to pose on such very slim pretences as these, but there are many who do. Please, dear girls who are reading this, don’t any of you join this army of incompetent hangers-on and make-believes. If you are ready to become honest, conscientious newspaper workers, consider something beyond the negative side which has been presented to you.

Having made up your mind that the work is not easy, but that it is exacting and insistent, convinced that although you may make a fairly comfortable living if you work hard enough, you will not make a fortune, and knowing perfectly that your personality is to be swallowed up in the paper for which, nevertheless, you are willing to do your best work, you are ready to hear the affirmative side of the question.

You must possess the ability to write well—that is to express yourself in good English free from all redundancies, with clearness and conciseness. Fine writing is not wanted. By fine writing is meant the tendency to the use of excessive metaphor, flowery language, and long words of foreign extraction. It may not be easy for you to believe, but it is perfectly true, as you will admit after a 287 few trials, that the simplest mode of expression, that which is elegant and refined in its directness, is the most difficult of attainment. If you watch yourself, you will find that the tendency is to amplification and redundancy of expression rather than to simple conciseness. You would learn the lesson very quickly could you be an invisible listener to the criticism of the “desk editor” on a piece of work over which you had spent much time, and of which you felt very proud. Every dash of his relentless blue pencil through lines over which you had pored and which had given you most exquisite satisfaction as you read and re-read them, would pain you. You would writhe in mental agony to hear this brain labor of yours characterized as “gush” in a tone of unmistakable contempt. But you would most certainly grasp the idea that what the news paper wants is lucid statement, a clear bit of description, and an idea understandingly presented. Not careless work, or work without thought, but the work which has to be most carefully done and so well written that no one can find fault either with the essence or the mechanical construction. To be a successful newspaper woman—versatile, and who can be put to do work of any kind on any copy—one must be fairly well read, up in historical subjects, have some ideas about the movements of the time, and quick to catch the spirit of events. There are many well-read, highly educated women whose ideas are worth a great deal, but who would never make 288 good newspaper workers simply because they never can be made to have any idea of relative values of happenings. They do not know how to take the public pulse; they have no genius for selection; and so, while they are most valuable friends for newspaper workers to have, they can do no practical work themselves. It is not always the person who knows the most who can best impart information. One must know how to give out, as well as to take in, to make a good teacher; and the same qualities, in a great degree, are necessary to make a good newspaper woman.

It requires perfect physical, as well as good mental endowment, to make a newspaper career successful. The girl who has not a good constitution, unimpaired health and a perfect nervous system, should never think for a moment of entering this profession. In no profession does one have to meet so much in the way of physical disadvantage as in this. No matter what the weather may be, if a piece of news is needed, it must be secured. Daily papers do not wait on the weather clerk’s convenience. Often there is great irregularity in eating. Hours of labor are uncertain; you are at the behest of others, and you must always be ready to respond. It is only right to put all this before you, for it is far better to know that there is a “seamy” side before you undertake the work, than to fancy it all smooth and even and find out your mistake afterward. If you have splendid health and no nerves; if you are ambitious to learn your profession and willing to begin with 289 the alphabet of it; if you will understand that your remuneration will be small at first; and that severe economy will be necessary in order to get on; if you are free from nonsense—then you may undertake the work, feeling sure that there is no more delightful profession in the world, even though it is the most exacting.

You must be content to begin at the very beginning of things. You may be inclined to turn up your nose at being sent out to describe a shop window, or to make a paragraph about a removal. But it is all in the way of your education, and when your superior officer, your city editor, finds that you do the small things understandingly you will be given larger things to do, and it rests with yourself to make your work valuable and advance your own position. The trouble is, so few are willing to begin at the beginning; they want to strike in somewhere along in the middle; or they will make a bound for the very top—and usually come down quite outside the limits of the profession. Having once obtained the opportunity to make a trial of your powers, it rests with you to make the trial a success and your position a permanency. In the first place, do everything as well as you can. Put as much good work into a report of the most trifling nature as you would into an important editorial. Carry your conscience with you all the way along. Never let a feeling of private pique or private personal interest influence your work. You are a part of the paper which you represent and you must give to your work all the dignity 290 and impartiality that belongs to the paper. There is nothing a good editor resents so quickly as the feeling that any member of his staff is using the position occupied as a means of carrying out private schemes, whether it be of advancing an interest or pulling down a reputation. Above all things, do not try to enhance your own value by writing about yourself and your own affairs and accomplishments. There is nothing which so quickly opens a person to ridicule as this habit of constantly writing about herself. It is simply the most palpable and laughable kind of self-laudation, and no girl of refinement or good breeding will show such a lack of taste as to permit herself to make this pitiful bid for notoriety.

In regard to remuneration, which is what every possible worker wishes to know about—it is much less than is generally imagined. There have been so many sensational stories written concerning the money earned by newspaper workers, that they raise high hopes in the heart of the ambitious girl. But here is the truth to be told. The number of women who are earning less than a thousand dollars a year in newspaper work is very much greater than those who are earning that amount, and all who are earning one thousand dollars and over are women who have served a long apprenticeship. A girl has to work a long time, unless she has an unexpected piece of good fortune, before she will earn as much as a school teacher, and she will work all the time, day and night—with a possible two weeks’ vacation—instead of having the long vacation and the off days which the teacher has.

Within the last few years there has crept into women’s work a tendency which one cannot but regret to see; that is, the habit of many of the leading city papers to give to the young women in their employ tasks to do which no self-respecting young woman should permit herself ever to undertake. It more often happens than not that the young woman to whom such work is given is a country girl, unaccustomed to city ways, who is anxious to “make a hit” with her editors and who, in her ignorance, undertakes something which the editor would never dream of giving to the city girl who would understand its full import. The very ignorance of the country girl is her shield from harm in the beginning, but this ignorance cannot be of long duration, and the knowledge comes to her in a most bitter awakening, often with the loss of self-respect, if not of honor itself. If any girl who reads this is ever tempted to make her entrance into newspaper work through this unclean path, let her put aside the temptation and give up her fondest hopes of becoming a newspaper woman if they are to be attained at such a cost.

There is an honor list of newspaper workers which should be given to the world, but it is so long that only a few names can be mentioned. First and foremost is Mrs. J. C. Croly, the woman who, as Jennie June, was the pioneer 291 woman to enter the newspaper office as a regular worker on the same terms with men. Her story is so well known that it will be needless to tell it, but all newspaper women honor her for what she has been and are grateful to her for what she has done to open the way for them. Other newspaper women deserving special mention are Mary Krout, of Chicago; Adeline E. Knapp, of San Francisco; Catharine Cole, of New Orleans; Grace Sheldon, of Buffalo; Eliza Archard Connor, Cynthia Westover-Alden, Harriet Holt Cahoun and Eliza Heaton Putnam, of New York; Helen Winslow, Estelle M. H. Merrill and Elizabeth Merritt Gosse, of Boston; these are a few out of the multitude of women who have stood side by side with men and done honest, noble and conscientious work in the newspaper world, not as editors or special writers—although all have done special writing and editorial work—but as everyday workers—real newspaper women.

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XLVI.
EDITORS, MAGAZINE WRITERS AND PARAGRAPHERS.

T used to be commonly said in the newspaper offices that women could never make good paragraphists. That would hardly be said to-day in the face of the success which has been achieved by the few women who have seriously taken up that line of work. One only has to point to the clever work of Mrs. Welch, Mrs. Kidder and Mrs. Cahoun, of New York; Mrs. Wakeman, of Chicago, and more brilliant than any, Miss Josephine Jenkins, of Boston, to prove that a woman can write as spicy a paragraph—one as free from ill nature, with a clever touch of humor, as a man. A few years ago Miss Mildred Aldrich, of Boston, set everybody talking over her Harlequin column in the Boston Home Journal. It was a column of paragraphs, short, pithy and scintillant. Such work as has rarely been equaled. It is true that the usual training of women upon a newspaper is not such as to develop the power of pithy paragraph writing. All through their apprenticeship they are given more or less descriptive work and work of a purely personal nature, such as interviewing and writing biographical sketches, none of which are exactly the schools for successful paragraph writing. Another objection which was brought against women in the capacity of paragraphers was that they could not keep their personal feelings out of their writing, and were apt to be satirical or spiteful to those whom they wished to punish, and unduly gracious to those whom they favored. There might have been an atom of truth in the objection in the earlier days, but as the minds and ideas broaden, this quality becomes less apparent, and the woman paragrapher of to-day is as strictly impersonal as is the 294 man. Not that she does not deal in personalities, for as the subjects of the majority of paragraphs are individuals, there must of necessity be more or less personality about them, but there may be, as there should be, an entire absence of personal prejudice. It is a mistake to believe that cleverness and ill nature must go hand in hand, or that criticism must be cruel, or that satire must of necessity be ill-natured. The paragrapher who wishes to keep a reputation, as well as to earn it, must have an abundant flow of the milk of human kindness. Never yield to the temptation to say stinging things because they chance to be bright and raise a momentary laugh. The wound never heals and the exercise of this power oftener than not leaves a self-inflicted sting in the mind of the writer that causes constant pain.

Paragraphing is one of the newspaper fine arts, and the man or woman who can do it successfully is almost sure of permanent employment. It is much more difficult than one would imagine to write a paragraph that shall be short and yet carry a vital point. It is easy enough to write long descriptions or dissertations, but to get a chunk of truth wittily set in the space of a dozen lines is a feat which not one out of a hundred men can accomplish, and so far the proportion of women who have been discovered as adepts is far less; yet that fact need not be a drawback to any bright girl who feels it borne in upon her that she would succeed in just this line of work. All she must do is to put herself in training, writing and rewriting, until she has attained such a degree of cleverness and ease as will give her the courage and the confidence to approach some newspaper editor with a sample of what she can do.

Some of the most successful editors during the last decade have been women. Harper’s Bazaar, since its inception, has been in the editorial charge of two women—Miss Mary Booth, who brought out its first number and held the position as editor until her death, and Mrs. Margaret Sangster, the present editor, who succeeded Miss Booth, and who has not only kept the paper up to the high ideal which Miss Booth established for it, but has added new features and given new strength and impetus to it. Mrs. Sangster is not only the successful editor, but the brilliant, helpful writer. Her poems are full of the most delicate feeling and womanly sympathy. Her prose is strong and helpful and she always says the one wise word that some woman is waiting to hear.

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Another woman who seems born to be an editor, so keen is her sense of literary values, so exquisite her taste, and so delightful her methods of dealing with those associated with her, is Mrs. Ella Farman Pratt, who is best known as the editor of the magazine Wide Awake, which is now merged into the St. Nicholas. Indeed, to most of the contributors to that delightful little magazine, every page of which bore evidence of Mrs. Pratt’s keen oversight, Wide Awake was Ella Farman and Ella Farman was Wide Awake. She was living 296 on a Michigan farm, writing books for girls, when Mr. Lothrop carried her away to Boston to become the editor of the projected magazine. For years she continued its editor, being assisted during the latter part of the time by her husband, Mr. Charles Stuart Pratt, who attended to the art side while she had exclusive control of its literary department. She left Wide Awake to edit the young people’s publication for Mr. S. S. McClure, but the magazine was never the same, and shortly after was swallowed by St. Nicholas. Mrs. Pratt is now editor of Little Men and Women, and is bringing to the preparation of this wholesome little magazine all the devotion, all the conscience, and all the thought that she gave to Wide Awake. There are few editors, either men or women, who so thoroughly know the needs and the wishes of their readers as does Mrs. Pratt. She rarely makes a mistake, and if she does, she is the first to see it and correct it. Loyal to those whose interests she represents, strong in her personal convictions of what is best and right, kindly disposed toward the world, generous and thoughtful of those whom she employs, she is indeed an editor in a thousand.

The St. Nicholas is happy and fortunate also in having a woman at its head. Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge has occupied the position of editor of this favorite magazine from its very start and no one would ever dream of the magazine going on without her guiding hand. Mrs. Dodge has also written some of the most charming children’s books, foremost of which stands that unequaled story, “Hans Brinker and His Silver Skates.” That volume may be placed well up in the list of juvenile classics.

The story has been told and told again of how Mrs. Nicholson, of New Orleans, was left a young widow with a big newspaper, the Picayune, on her hands, and how she developed it until it became one of the finest pieces of newspaper property in the country.

One never thinks of the Times-Democrat without also thinking of Lilian Whiting, who has been for many years the Boston correspondent of the Times-Democrat, and who was also for some time the editor of the Boston Budget, and still remains its literary editor. Newspaper women everywhere should be proud of Lilian Whiting’s record and should take her for an example. Beginning as a reporter on the Cincinnati Commercial under Murat Halstead she gradually worked herself up to the highest point which she could attain on that paper, then without a friend or even acquaintance she made a dash for Boston, and by her persistency, her womanliness, and the quality of her work, gained a foremost position in the ranks of the newspaper workers of the country. No woman connected with newspapers ever had higher ideals and none has ever maintained them as has Lilian Whiting. She is staunch, loyal and fearless, having the courage always of her convictions, and yet never saying one word 297 that shall wound a person, no matter how undeserving or how ungenerous one may have proven himself.

Those who know Lilian Whiting well and have been admitted to her friendship never think of her without thinking of another one of America’s most brilliant women, Kate Field, special writer, correspondent, paragraphist and editor. Kate Field is a unique figure in the history of American journalism. She began writing when still in her teens, and her letters to the Springfield Republican of Massachusetts, and other papers, over the signature of “Straws, Jr.,” were always eagerly looked for and as eagerly read. She wrote from Washington, from New York and from Europe. She saw things through the rose-colored glasses of youth, and she portrayed them with a girlish enthusiasm and exuberance that was simply irresistible. She was one of the few successful paragraphists, and her criticisms of art, music, and the drama, were just, brilliant and good-tempered. She was both editor and publisher of her paper, Washington, and it was but natural that when she gave it up she should quietly have laid it to one side, trusting to no other hands the work which she had carried to such a successful issue. Kate Field’s personality shone in every page of the paper. No one who cared for her could have borne to have seen it in other hands, reflecting other opinions, swayed by another personality.

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The Woman’s Journal, the organ of the woman suffrage movement, has as its editor Miss Alice Stone Blackwell, the only child of that well-beloved pioneer woman, Lucy Stone. Miss Blackwell has taken up the work left by her mother as a legacy and brings to it all the devotion of a daughter allied to strong principle and a brilliant mentality. Papers devoted to any one idea are rarely highly successful, but Miss Blackwell, in her work on the Journal, as nearly approaches success as it is possible to do.

Miss Katherine E. Conway is the associate editor of the Pilot, the Catholic organ of New England. Miss Conway received her training as reporter on a daily newspaper in Buffalo, N. Y., where she so thoroughly proved her ability and her wisdom, as well as her keen sense of news value, that she attracted the attention of the late John Boyle O’Reilly, who secured her as his assistant on the Pilot, a position which she still holds. Miss Conway is a rare poet as well as editor, and has published two or three books of dainty verse which have met with the approval of the critics and the appreciation of the reading public.

Miss Helen M. Winslow has been for some time one of the editors of the Beacon, of Boston, and has just launched a beautiful periodical of her own, the organ of the National Federation of Woman’s Clubs—the Club Woman. Miss Winslow writes clever verse, is a good paragraphist, and a special writer of more than ordinary ability.

Among the other women who have succeeded as editors are Mrs. Ella Ford Hartshorn, of the Household, who comes naturally by her ability for editing, being the only daughter of Mr. D. T. Ford, the editor and publisher of the phenomenally successful paper, the Youth’s Companion; Mrs. A. E. Whittaker, associate editor of the New England Farmer; Miss Helen A. Clark, editor of Poet Lore; Miss Anna Barrows, editor of the American Kitchen Magazine; Mrs. Mary Sargent Hopkins, editor and proprietor of the Wheelwoman; Miss Annie M. Talbot, editor for the publishing house of Silver & Burdett; and Mrs. Emily McLaws, editor of the American Queen. The field for women’s work here is bounded only by their own ability and desire, but in almost every case the successful editor first served the apprenticeship of reporter and special writer.

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XLVII.
IN THE DRAMATIC PROFESSION.

HE list of professions which are open to women would not be complete if the dramatic were omitted. When one considers the number of women who are making a living in the ranks of that much abused profession, it is difficult to realize that it is but a little over two centuries ago since they were permitted to appear on the stage. When Shakespeare wrote and acted all the female parts were taken by young boys, and it was not until about the time of the Restoration that women Juliets and Ophelias and Desdemonas were seen on the English stage. The condition of things was then precisely what it is to-day in the Chinese theatres, where, except in markedly isolated cases, the drama is in the hands of men for representation.

The women who have won distinction, and at the same time made a place for themselves in the memories and hearts of the public, are too numerous to be given in the limits of a chapter like the present, but a few can be quoted whose names are held in pleasant remembrance. Such a one was Charlotte Cushman, whom the whole world delights to honor, as well as the city of her birth, Boston, which has given her a memorial, such as she gives only to her best beloved, in naming a school for her. The Cushman School, in the old historic North End of Boston, within a stone’s throw of the old North Church, where John Pullen hung the lanterns to signal Paul Revere on the night of the 18th of April, 1775, and but a short walk from the wharf where “Old Ironsides” was built and launched, is on the site of the house where Charlotte Cushman was born, and it was in the district where she went to school. When the school was dedicated Miss Cushman was the guest of honor of the city, and she made a very beautiful speech, her words to the 301 girl pupils of the school being most uplifting. If the girls of the North End, educated at the Cushman School, could live up to the high ideals of character and womanhood which Miss Cushman set for them, they would, indeed, be representative women. In all her work on the stage, all her success as an artist, Miss Cushman never forgot her womanhood, and she held herself to all the ideals which she gave to the girls in her talk that September day a quarter of a century ago.

Success did not come easily to Charlotte Cushman, she had many a hard fight to conquer adverse circumstances, but every struggle not only brought her nearer to the goal for which she had started but it added to her strength of character, and helped to develop her into the grand woman she became. After she had won renown and money she left the stage and lived in Rome for many years, where she became the friend of the magic inner circle there which included the Brownings, Robert and Elizabeth; the sculptor, William Story, and his delightful wife; Harriet Hosmer, and all the list of English and American celebrities who made Rome a delightful spot during the ’50’s and ’60’s. But even amid all these brilliant and congenial surroundings she often longed for America, which she dearly loved, and early in the ’70’s she came home to live. It was shortly after her return that she had the honor paid her of having the school for girls named for her, a fact which made her prouder and happier than all her professional success. She had not 302 intended to appear again on the stage, but so great was the desire to see her once more that she agreed to give a few performances in the leading cities, and so once more the American public had an opportunity of seeing her as Meg Merrilies and Lady Macbeth. Her farewell tour was an ovation, but it was as much for the woman as for the artist. During her residence in Rome she crossed the ocean to act in Philadelphia one evening for the benefit of the sanitary commission. She was a devoted patriot, as she should be, born among the scenes of the early struggle for independence.

Miss Cushman was a deeply religious woman, and a constant attendant at church. Wherever she was she found out a church and attended it, and she had many of her closest friends among the clergy. She was naturally devout and her thoughts were reverential. Here is a short extract from one of her letters, written to a very dear friend. “To-morrow will be the last day of the year. I sometimes stand appalled at the thought of how my life is passing away, and how soon will come the end to all of this probation, and of how little I have done or am doing to deserve all the blessings by which I am surrounded. But that God is perfect, and that my own love for Him is without fear, I should be troubled in the thought that I may not be doing all I should, in this sphere, to make myself worthy of happiness in the next.”

Another American woman who won for herself distinction in the dramatic profession, but who left it while she was at the very height of her career and the fullest flush of her youth and beauty, is Madame Navarro, of England, but whom the world remembers as the beautiful Kentucky girl, Mary Anderson. Miss Anderson made her success at a very early age, being but about seventeen when she undertook the professional career of an actress of Shakespeare’s plays. It was a tremendous undertaking, and she says herself had she realized all that it involved she should have never dared to face the ordeal. But her youth and her enthusiasm and her love for the poet whose characters she desired to portray made her oblivious to anything else, and she was intent only on one thing, putting Shakespeare’s heroines before the world as she thought they should be portrayed. Her youth, beauty and devotion to her ideals carried her through and won success for her, and her own beautiful character gained her the love and respect of the great public. There are very few women who could deliberately cut short a successful career, as Mary Anderson did, leaving it in the flood tide of triumph, but she was, after all, more of a woman than an actress, and home life had for her the stronger attraction. Nor has she ever been tempted to return to the stage. Inducement after inducement, all of the most flattering, have been offered her, but she has always firmly persisted in refusal, and nothing short of a financial stress, which does not seem likely to occur, would bring her back.

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She loved her profession, and yet her advice to girls who are thinking of entering it is to pause and take a second thought. It required something more than talent and enthusiasm to make a career which one can look back to without regret, it needs strength of character, singleness of purpose, a firm religious conviction to keep one from yielding to the temptations by which every public path is surrounded, this one the most thickly of all, perhaps. It needs just such mental and moral qualities as Charlotte Cushman and Mary Anderson possessed, and which, just as much as their dramatic talent, contributed to their success.

In the same rank with these two, both as a woman and a probable artist, when she shall have had their experience, is Mrs. Julia Marlowe Taber, who is fast winning her way to the very front rank. And another, who stands for all that is sweet and true among the women of the stage at the present time, is Miss Maude Adams. It is comparatively easy to gain a sort of reputation on the stage, but that kind is not an enviable one, and the girl who risks her character to obtain it, finds, in the end, that she has something it would be far better for her to be without. She is like the girl in newspaper work who descends to “gutter” methods to win fame, and wakes up to find it unsavory notoriety. But to come to the place which Miss Adams occupies means hard work, steadiness of purpose, loyalty to ideals, and, above all, a true womanliness of character, which forbids her doing anything unworthy 304 of the profession which she has adopted, or her own personal ideals. It must not be supposed that in singling out these few to mention specially that there are no others in the dramatic profession worthy of consideration; that supposition would be incorrect. But these women, representing different periods, with the exception of Miss Marlowe and Miss Adams, who are of the same epoch, but who represent different schools and methods, stand for all that is best worth following. They are representative of what the women in the profession should be, in art and character. Besides they are attractive examples, and they are American girls. To be sure Miss Marlowe, or rather Mrs. Taber, was of English birth, but she was educated in America, and her professional career has been identified with this country, so that she seems to belong to us.

All these women agree in declaring that the dramatic profession is one of the most exacting of all, and the most ungrateful, if the artist does not meet with every demand. No girl should undertake it unless she has unquestioned ability, and a strength of character which will place her above all influence for wrong, nor unless she has proper protection. There is often a glamour about it which is deceptive, and the loss of the illusion is painful. It is, oftener than not, a profession to be avoided, for, in its best phases there is much that is unpleasant about it, even to the successful actress. If you are inclined to doubt this, you should read the story of Mary Anderson’s life, told by herself, and you can then get a glimpse of stage life from the inside, free from all the fascinating glamour of the footlights. And it is told, too, by a reverent lover of the dramatic art.

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XLVIII.
WOMEN AS DRAMATISTS.

The last named play is by one of the woman dramatists who are coming to the front, and it was in view of the success made by Mrs. Martha Morton, who wrote this play as well as the one in which Mr. William Crane played during the same season in which Mr. Russell appeared in “A Bachelor’s Romance,” which induced Mr. Russell to give the bit of advice to the young girl who was consulting him about giving up literature for the stage. He felt very sure that if she had the dramatic instinct and ability wedded to the literary power that she had the mental outfit for a playwright. Of course neither Mr. Russell nor any one else can predict success with any degree of certainty, for, in this line, as in many another, success is elusive, and does not crown effort when it is plain that she should.

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Still, women have written plays which have proven successful, and which were not only good acting plays, appealing to the best of the emotions, but were literary productions of absolute merit.

First and best in this line, standing on a plane high above that of the average drama, are the two plays of Miss Anna Dickinson, “The Crown of Thorns,” in which Miss Dickinson made her own ill-starred attempt at acting, and her superb picture of Roman life in the full flush of imperial power, “Aurelian.” This play has never been produced, although, previous to her retirement, Miss Dickinson gave several readings from it. Mr. John McCullough had the play in contemplation when it was first written, but through some misunderstanding with the author, he decided not to attempt it, even though it was quite in his line, and he had only the highest praise for it. Those special friends to whom Miss Dickinson permitted the pleasure of reading this play, were amazed at it. Its classic tone, upheld through the whole, the strong, beautiful language, the steady increase of dramatic interest, reaching to the climax, without one lapse, the sustained power were remarkable, and made this the drama of the century. It seemed almost impossible that one so essentially modern and up-to-date in all her ideas and beliefs could so enter into the spirit of a period so far removed. It was the truest test of the genius of which Miss Dickinson’s bitterest opposers could never deny her the possession. It is a great pity that the American stage can never have the benefit of this work, as Miss Dickinson has absolutely refused to allow it to pass out of her keeping. The same is true of “The Crown of Thorns.” After she had given up playing it, she was approached by several persons who desired to use the play, but she would never permit it, although she stood in her own light financially. No one should play the character of Anne Boleyn except herself while she lived, and she has been consistent and firm in keeping her word. This is not the place to review Anna Dickinson’s work as an actress, but if every woman who adopted the profession would come to it with the reverence which she did, and bring to it the same devotion and respect, the stage would be one of the strongest educating influences that the world could have which was purely secular.

Another of Miss Dickinson’s plays, “An American Girl,” was produced in New York by Miss Fanny Davenport, but was not a great success. However she might meet modern topics and treat them in her lectures and books, she was not so successful with them in her plays. She needed the heroic to make her dramas; the trivialities of the nineteenth century society were underneath her comprehension, and she could not treat them with the lightness which belonged to them, and which gave them their grace. But, if Anna Dickinson’s dramas are ever given to the world in a printed form, they will take high rank in literature, and stamp the woman who wrote them as a genius beyond question. 307 If ever this time comes it will be too late for her to know the verdict, and to realize that the recognition and the justice, for which she so longed, was hers at last. Without doubt, had Miss Dickinson so willed it, had she given her plays to the world instead of hoarding them away, she might have taken rank as the first of the women dramatists.

At present the most prominent women who have taken up this line of writing are Mrs. Martha Morton, who has already been mentioned; Mrs. Madeline Lucette Ryley, who has written several plays for the Frohmans; Miss Marguerite Merrington, a young woman who gave Mr. Sothern one of his best successes, “Captain Letterblair,” and who has written still other plays, and is still writing; and Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett, who has dramatized her story of “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” making it one of the most delightful plays that has ever been seen, and whose latest play, “A Lady of Quality,” is placed on the list of permanent successes.

There is another rising playwright who belongs to the class of which Anna Dickinson has been called the head, the class of writers who do not sacrifice anything of literary beauty or merit to mere dramatic intention. It is often said that it is not difficult to write a play which shall be correct from the literary standpoint alone, but which will never make an “acting” play. One has only to look over the long list of literary men who have made pathetic failures in the attempt to write for the stage, to realize the truth of this. What they write is delightful to read, and fulfills every canon of literary law, but it cannot be put upon the stage successfully. It has not the life principle. It is the description of people and event, it is not the people themselves, nor the event. But the woman who can so write that her play when put upon the stage is so full of life, so true to humanity, that all who see it accept it as the genuine bit of human nature, and who with all this can keep it up to the high literary plane which stamps the writer as belonging to the guild of authors as well as of playwrights is the truly successful one, whose work shall attain something more than the ephemeral popularity of the moment.

Such a one is Mrs. Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland, of Boston. Mrs. Sutherland is first of all a newspaper woman and a critic, successful in her profession, but with a taste for dramatic writing which could not be held down by the harness of daily newspaper drudgery. She has written several plays in collaboration with Mrs. Emma Sheridan Fry, who was once a player, but who left the stage for the, to her, more congenial profession of letters; but more recently she has been working by herself, and has produced some most interesting plays. She is versatile, portraying the scenes of modern life, or catching the spirit of the middle ages. She delights in army incidents, and has made a spirited dramatization of Captain Charles King’s story, “Fort Frayne.” Mrs. Sutherland has by no 308 means achieved her best work yet, but with her high ideal of the stage and its possibilities, she will do something by-and-by which will surprise every one, except her best friends.

The writer of the successful play has an assured income as long as the play runs, for she is paid a royalty on every performance which is given of it. Sometimes she is paid an arbitrary price, so much every evening; again, and the most frequent way, she receives a certain per cent of the manager’s receipts nightly. The contract settles which way it shall be.

Many young women make a regular income by writing for amateur companies. Miss Rachel Baker has made a specialty of this kind of work, succeeding her father, Mr. George M. Baker, who was the pioneer in it. Mr. Baker’s little parlor plays have been produced by nearly every school and society in the country, and his daughter’s are achieving the same degree of popularity. Miss Furniss has written several which have proven very popular for amateur clubs, and Miss Caroline Ticknor has also written some exceedingly clever ones. Other young women have contributed to this class of literature, and while they have tried, as yet, nothing so ambitious as writing for the professional stage, there is no question but some of them might attain a degree of success, should they give their attention to this class of work.

As a rule, women’s work in this line is pure and wholesome, and a relief from much of the foreign spirit which pervades the larger part of the modern drama. It is surprising that managers still cling to the argument—probably it is from force of habit, and the inability to see indications—that 309 the public cares most for the plays of foreign life, in the face of the immense success which has attended, for years, the simple plays quoted at the beginning of the chapter, and such idyls as “Alabama” and “The Professor’s Love Story.” The public does like sweet, pure, clean things, and the people who are making up the attendance upon the best class of drama are the ones to be considered, and it is for this class that the women dramatists write.

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XLIX.
WHAT THE BLIND CAN DO.

HERE is no name in the American roll of honor which should be more venerated than that of Dr. Samuel G. Howe. His devotion to the cause of the education of the blind, thus opening to them the world of opportunity and self-support which had been so hopelessly closed, ranks him foremost among American philanthropists. It was through his untiring effort that the Massachusetts School for the Blind was established and placed upon an enduring basis. During his whole life he gave his personal attention to this school, and on his death left it in the hands of his son-in-law, Mr. Michael Anagnos, the present director, whose unselfish devotion to the work for the blind has been second only to that of Dr. Howe himself.

Formerly the blind boy or girl was considered an incumbrance, a lifelong care to be supported by the family if their means would allow, if not, to become a dependent upon the bounty of the State. It was a hopeless outlook for these afflicted ones, but with the opening of the schools came a new hope, a new light, into the darkened lives.

At first the industrial training was of the simplest kind; knitting, bead work, the plainest of sewing, and the simplest of household avocations were taught the blind girls, and their mental education went hardly beyond the simple grammar school training, while those with musical gifts were taught to play on the piano and organ. But even with simple training the girls who went out from the school were able to assist in household duties at home, and to earn a small 311 income which met their own frugal wants. Knitting stockings and mittens, crochetting collars and laces, making toy furniture from wire and beads—these various things contributed to the support of many a blind girl.

But as the years went on, and the ability of the blind to learn was demonstrated, the scope of the teaching was enlarged and new industries were added. If any one who reads this has a doubt as to what these girls can do, she should visit the School for the Blind in South Boston and see them running sewing machines, doing the most exquisite work without ever a mistake, modeling in clay, carving in wood, and running typewriters with the facility of an expert operator. Indeed, these blind girls are so phenomenally quick of ear and touch that they can follow the most rapid dictation when once they have learned their instrument. They use the needle with dexterity, and it is the boast of many a blind girl that she makes every article of clothing that she wears. In their studies there seems nothing too advanced for them. They take the sciences with avidity, and their mathematical work is wonderful. Nothing could be more interesting than to listen to a class of children reciting geography. They have raised maps and globes, and with their fingers will find localities much more quickly than the average child with its eyes. Their geography examinations are wonderful displays of perception and memory. Dissected maps of different countries are placed in a basket, the teacher mixing the parts with her hands, until Europe, Asia, Africa and America are in a hopeless jumble. She then calls the children one by one to take a piece from the basket and tell her what it is. Almost as quickly as the piece can be drawn the little intelligent fingers have answered the question, and the reply comes almost before the hand is raised to the level of the shoulder to show the teacher what it holds. In no case is the name of the country on the piece; the child tells entirely by the shape. Dr. Howe himself would be surprised, could he listen, for instance, at a recitation in physics, chemistry, botany or physiology, where the most complex tests and analyses are given by the means of models in the two latter studies, and of the special apparatus in physics and chemistry.

In music many of them attain a remarkable degree of efficiency and become teachers and composers. The late Miss Cornelia Roeske, who was during its first years a teacher of music in the Kindergarten for the Blind, published several quite ambitious pieces of music and many settings for children’s songs and simple orchestral pieces which were used in the Institution. Miss Roeske was a fearless, independent little body, with shrewd business sense, and she made all her arrangements for the publication of her music personally with the house of Ditson & Co., Boston.

Blind people have attained eminent positions in the world of literature. Probably there are few of you who are not familiar with the beautiful hymns and religious poems of Fanny Crosby, the sweet blind singer.

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Another woman who attained to a fine position in literature was Mrs. Helen Aldrich De Kroyft. She was born in Rochester, N. Y., October 29, 1818. Early in her life her father lost a fortune by endorsing for a friend, and when only fifteen she conceived the idea of achieving a higher education by teaching winters and attending what has since become the Syracuse University summers, and finally graduated, as may be imagined, with no small degree of honor.

Shortly after leaving school she was married to a young physician to whom she had been long engaged; but owing to a carriage accident, four hours after her marriage, she was a widow. As if the fates had not left her life sufficiently desolate, not quite a month had elapsed when she awoke to find that the darkest of all earth’s misfortunes—blindness—had also fallen to her lot. Confronted now with the necessity of doing something to maintain herself, she entered the New York Institution for the Blind to become an organist. In a few months, however, a card invented in Paris for keeping the lines straight was placed in her hands, and in less than three years her first work was written, entitled: “A Place in Thy Memory.”

Having no name as an author, no publisher would undertake to bring out her work without being secured for half of the first edition; and with a courage that has been compared to that of Napoleon crossing the Alps, she wrote a prospectus and personally solicited subscribers enough in New York to bring out her work with two engravings, all paid. Delivering the book to her subscribers, she saw that she had in her hand the means of travel by everywhere introducing her own work; and engaging a young lady companion, she went first to Washington, D. C. Several of the New York papers announced her there, and one of the directors of the Institution gave her letters to his friends, Mr. Henry Clay, Mr. Samuel Houston, Mrs. Commodore Aulic, the Chaplain of the Senate, and so forth. During her stay in Washington, her charming personality, her brilliant conversation, and her consummate address, to which her misfortune only added interest, won her so much favor that on leaving for Charleston she was overwhelmed with letters of introduction, among them one from President Zachary Taylor, in the name of his family presenting her to all his friends in the South.

So, under the auspices that she had won for herself, through forty-eight years she has been almost constantly traveling, exploring the world that in the morning of her life was veiled from her eyes. Meantime, though, her pen has not been idle, and there are seven volumes in the world that call her their author. One has been quoted from in five elocutionary collections, the second has been abridged in Johnson’s “Classics,” a third was pronounced by Dr. J. G. Holland “an immortality,” and four others are yet in manuscript.

One always associates with the name of Dr. Howe the thought of Laura Bridgman. Her story of achievement in spite of the fact that three avenues of 313 intercourse with the world were closed to her—those of sight, hearing and speech—has been told all over the world in nearly every spoken language. And yet, wonderful as it was, it is far surpassed by the records of achievement of Helen Keller, Edith Thomas and Willie Elizabeth Robin, all three deaf, blind and dumb. Helen Kellar is almost a miracle of attainment. Told in the old days, her story would read like a fairy tale. As it is, it is regarded with wonder and almost awe by those who have watched the growth and development of this brilliant girl of seventeen, to whom until she was eight years old, the world was a sealed book of whose pages she had not the faintest comprehension. Her story has been so often told that it seems almost superfluous to give it here, but lest there are those among you who have not heard it, just the merest detail will be given. Helen Kellar was a little Southern girl, born in Alabama, and until she was nearly two years of age, was in possession of all her faculties. A severe attack of cerebral meningitis, from which she barely recovered, left her without the senses of sight or hearing, and naturally she never exercised that of speech. But with all this deprivation of sense, her brain was as active as ever, even more active than that of the average children by whom she was surrounded. When she was eight years old her father sent to Mr. Anagnos, having heard the story of Laura Bridgmau and what had been done for her—to know if a teacher could be sent to his little girl.

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Mr. Anagnos at once decided upon Miss Annie Sullivan, a former pupil and a graduate of the school, who had by a successful operation upon her eyes regained her sight. Miss Sullivan was an exceptionally brilliant scholar with a rarely sympathetic nature and affectionate, sunny disposition, just the sort of young woman that one would choose to be a companion to such a child as Helen Kellar. It took but few months of special study to prepare Miss Sullivan fully for the position, and as soon as she was ready she went to Alabama and began her teaching. The little girl proved amenable and learned with a quickness that was surprising. When once she found that intercourse with the world was possible for her, there was literally no end to her eagerness for attainment. Now, at the age of seventeen, she is a regular student at Radcliffe College and is doing the most brilliant mental work. She has a positive genius for learning languages, and Latin and Greek possess no terrors for her, while she is already proficient in French and German. She has even learned to play the piano, and since she has learned to speak in the mechanical manner by which the dumb are taught, she expresses herself as anxious to study singing.

Her letters show a wonderful power of composition and an understanding of social and moral questions far beyond that of the average young woman of her age. Her belief in the goodness of humanity is positively touching. She has the 315 sublimest faith in the possibilities of men and women that can he imagined. It would be a pure and lofty soul that could live up to Helen Kellar’s ideals, and it is not too much to say that she finds the inspiration for them and the embodiment of them in her teacher, Miss Sullivan, who is as marvelous in her way as Helen is in hers. In fact, whatever Helen attains will be through the instrumentality of her teacher, who learns everything that Helen learns and is a constant source of encouragement and helpfulness. One cannot think of these two apart, who has ever seen them together.

The sensitiveness of Helen’s touch is almost incredible. With the tips of her fingers resting lightly on a speaker’s lips and throat, she understands all that is said to her, and she enjoys the music in the same way, always detecting the slightest discord. She can tell the color of the flowers which she holds; but more wonderful than this, she can detect a mistake in her typewriting by passing her hand over the paper, not even a misplaced punctuation mark escaping her.

Dancing is another of her accomplishments. Though she cannot hear a note of the music, she keeps perfect time and moves gracefully, with no guide but her partner’s motions. It has been said that she cannot hear the music, and yet, by some sense, she knows what is being played and feels the rhythm, probably, through the vibrations in the floor. When Miss Sullivan first went to her and she had begun to speak in sounds, she used to frequently ask to be taken to 316 church; on being questioned as to why she wished to go, she invariably said, “Because I so love to hear the organ.” Experiment after experiment was tried, proving conclusively that she could not hear, and yet, by some subtle sense, she could feel and enjoy the music.

Similar experiences have been noted with Edith Thomas, another girl a year or two younger than Helen, who has also lost the senses of seeing and hearing. On opening a door into a room which contains a piano, she can tell at once if it is being played upon, and will ask quickly, “Who’s at the piano?” Edith Thomas, like Helen Kellar, was born with all her faculties, but lost them by scarlet fever when she was between two and three years of age, just as she was learning to talk. After her recovery she was blind and deaf, but retained the habit of speech for some weeks, until, failing to hear the sound of her own voice,.. she gradually dropped the habit and soon forgot all the words that she had learned. And yet, strange as it may seem, the very first word which she spoke when she began to learn mechanical articulation was the last word that she ever spoke when she finally, as a child, gave up speaking. The word was “kitty.” Edith Thomas, although not possessing the mental brilliance of Helen Kellar, has a remarkable mechanical genius, and her work in wood-carving is very beautiful. It is already so finished and so original in design that there is every prospect that she may be able to earn a good income by the practice of this art.

Willie Robin is the youngest of the three, and as yet has not indicated her special bent. She is exceedingly bright, learns quickly, both in her mental studies and in the industrial branches. If the need ever comes for her to be a bread-winner, she will find some way out from among her list of attainments.

Surely no girl in full possession of her senses should ever allow herself one moment of despair, nor yield for an instant to discouragement, when she thinks of how much more she ought to get out of life than these other girls who are so heavily handicapped, and yet are so bright, so brave, and so courageous.

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L.
WOMEN IN SCIENCE.

HAT would have become of me if I’d delayed a bit?” asked the Irishman, who was born on the last day of the year, and Josh Billings declared that it “would have been money in his pocket if he had never been born.”

Had the girl with a predilection for science who was born fifty years ago “delayed a bit,” it surely would have been “money in her pocket.”

No road which leads to success is an easy road, but the woman scientist, in whatever line, finds far fewer obstructions in her path to-day than she did during the years when her mother or grandmother or aunt was striving to make a way in the sterner pursuits which had hitherto been monopolized by men. It is with awe and admiration that one thinks of those women who hewed a way through the blocked highways of half a century ago.

The story of Maria Mitchell, the child of the Quaker school teacher of Nantucket, is too well known to need lengthy recapitulation. She began the study of astronomy with her father, devoting her attention especially to nebulæ and comets. In 1847 the woman of twenty-five published an account of the discovery of a new telescope comet, for which she received from the King of Denmark a gold medal. During the next ten years she was employed by the coast survey, and assisted in compiling the nautical almanac. In 1857 she visited the principal astronomers and observatories in Europe. In 1865 she became professor of astronomy in Vassar College. She was a member of the Association for the Advancement of Science, and also of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to which she was the first woman to be admitted.

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Probably no woman since Maria Mitchell has made more remarkable progress in astronomical directions than Mrs. Elizabeth Preston Davis, of Washington, who married her classmate, Arthur Powell Davis, of the Geological Survey.

From a mere child, Miss Preston showed a remarkable fondness for mathematical calculations and a marvelous ability to work them out. She graduated from Park Seminary and the Normal School. In 1888 she took the degree of Bachelor of Science at the Corcoran School of Columbian University, and afterward secured the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University, making mathematics her specialty, being afterward admitted to the university as a graduate student.

It fell to Miss Preston to read the proof sheets of an important work by Professor Gore and of Professor Newcomb’s Calculus. Both men acknowledge their indebtedness to her in the prefaces of their books.

While on her bridal tour in New Mexico, Mrs. Davis accomplished intricate work on a volume for the Navy Department. While in California she visited the Lick Observatory for the purpose of establishing methods of computing the orbits of new comets. A few years ago she published a mathematical table entitled, “The Washington-Greenwich Reduction Table.” Her most important work has been the calculation of the sun’s ephemeris for the Nautical Almanac.

Mrs. Davis, with all her care and studies, is a devoted wife and tender mother, and her family “rise up and call her blessed.” She is a member of the Woman’s Literary Club, of Baltimore, and of the Anthropological Club, of Washington. She has made time, with all that crowds her days, to fit two cadets for Annapolis and two young men for Stanford University.

Miss Dorothea Klumpke is one of the youngest of American women who have won distinction as scientists. She wears the tiny purple ribbon with which the French government decorates the officers of its academy. Her honors were won in the Paris Observatory, where she was given an important position over the heads of fifty French male competitors.

Miss Klumpke is a Californian by birth. She was educated in the public schools of Valentia, and afterward went to Germany to study.

The New York Journal speaks thus of women scientists employed by the government:

“Uncle Sam employs a great many scientists, and among them are several women who are regarded as experts in their several departments.

“Miss Adelaide Hasse enjoys the distinction of ranking higher officially than any other woman in the government employ. She stands next to the chief in her department, and acts for him during his absence. While she was still a child she moved to Los Angeles, Cal. On being graduated from the high school there she obtained the position of assistant librarian of the Los Angeles Public Library, and 319 so distinguished herself there as an organizer and manager that in March, 1895, when it was first decided to establish a library of public documents in Washington, she was sent for to take the place of librarian. “Up to that time nobody knew how many public documents there were, excepting that there was a great accumulation of them piled up pell-mell somewhere in the depths of the Interior Department.

“‘There was nothing for me to do,’ said the pretty librarian, ‘but to put on a big brown gingham apron and get down on the floor and go to work.’ She had no help except simply a couple of laborers who moved about the heavy volumes under her directions. There are now 1500 volumes in the library, and there is room for 200,000. They are all arranged with wonderful method and exactness, and the catalogue is most complete. By its aid the smallest pamphlet can be found in a minute.

“In a large bright room in the annex of the Agricultural Building Miss Lillie Sullivan sits. She has two desks—one where she keeps her paints and pencils, and the other bearing a microscope of the latest pattern. Here are also such entomological treasures as the left hind leg of a flea, part of a wasp, a baby mite and a spider’s head.

“Miss Sullivan is a particularly sweet looking little woman, with shy brown eyes and a charming smile. Her business in life is painting bugs. In order to paint them well she has to dissect and study them. It is said that there is no one in this country who can depict insects so accurately and so beautifully.

“Miss Sullivan, who is a Washington girl, studied art and painted portraits until one day she saw a friend painting insects. She became at once infatuated with the study, and began devoting herself to it. She has been in the government service for nearly fourteen years.

“Miss Alice Fletcher’s life study has been ethnology. She took part in the opening of many Indian mounds from Florida to Maine. Then she took a daring resolve. She made up her mind that the real way to study Indians was to go and live among them. So she took up her abode among the Dakotas. This was nearly twenty years ago.

“After being among the Dakotas and Omahas for some time, Miss Fletcher went to Washington to beg certain favors for them from Congress. She was successful, but was asked to see the reforms she asked for carried out personally. This she did, living among them altogether for fourteen years. She administered for them at one time a million and a half of acres. She has helped to have educated a great many of the children. One of her former proteges is Mr. La Fleche, one of the cleverest employes in the Indian Bureau. He is now preparing a work about his people.

“Miss Thora Steininger makes mammals her study. She is authority on the names by which these animals are known.

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“Two of the best known of the government scientific women are Miss Rathburn, of the Fish Commission, who is considered the greatest living expert on crabs, and Miss Caroline Stevenson, of the Ethnological Bureau, who is a profound student of American ethnology.”

“Although,” says the author of “Women in the Business World,” “fashions, rather than fluxions, are popularly supposed to be the peculiar province of women, nevertheless women have furnished a very respectable list of mathematical celebrities, even within the last century. Two women astronomers—one of Hamburg and one of Boston—discovered the comet known as Olbers’, almost at the same moment, though studying the heavens independently. In our own days, for a long time a woman was director of the astronomical observatory of Rome, which was always famous for the brilliancy of its staff. She was one of the ablest mathematicians of the century, and a member of nearly every European learned society, but so modest and unobtrusive that only a few of her own countrymen knew that the work of the great observatory of the capitol was conducted under the supervision of a woman. A woman filled the mathematical chair in the University of Stockholm many years, much to the surprise of that part of the world, who imagined the feminine mind incapable of mastering so abstract and logical a branch of knowledge as the science of numbers in its higher development and application.

“No greater example of perseverance against difficulties can be cited than the life of Mary Somerville, ‘whose name stands at the top of the scanty roll of women eminent in science.’ At the age of fourteen a friend taught her some fancy work from a fashion magazine. On one of the pages she saw some strange x’s and y’s, and was told that they belonged to a kind of arithmetic called algebra, but nobody could explain it to her. It was even next to impossible to procure books to study from. At last her brother’s tutor brought her Euclid’s geometry and Bonnycastle’s algebra, and she set to work to master the contents without an instructor. It was necessary to first brush up her knowledge of arithmetic, which had never been very exact. Indeed, at this time, she frankly said she could not add up a column of figures correctly. She studied at night till there was complaint that she used up the candles too fast, and she was deprived of them altogether. Then she began reviewing her geometry from memory at night. The intellectual rank assigned women by public opinion at that time was very low; and any attempt on their part to rise higher was met by prompt and severe disapproval.

“Not until she was thirty-three years old, a widow with two children, did she possess a library of mathematical books. This treasure was the reward of a long course of years in which she had persevered almost without hope. She was considered eccentric and foolish even by her own family, and much of her studying had to be done in secret. One of her male admirers accompanied his offer of 321 marriage by a pamphlet on the ‘Duties of a Wife,’ with the pages turned down at the narrowest precepts. After her second marriage her life flowed smoothly, success followed success; the leading scientific men of England did her honor, and she lived to the age of ninety-one, working till the day of her death upon her difiicult calculations.

“The first woman doctor of note in this country was Harriet K. Hunt, of Boston. She was educated in her profession by private instruction, and began practice in 1835. Twelve years afterward she applied to Harvard University for admission but was not admitted. Three years later the faculty were willing to receive her, but as the students objected she declined to attend, and continued a successful practice in Boston for more than a quarter of a century.

“Now nearly three thousand women practice medicine in the United States, and most of them are more than ordinarily successful. One woman in England has been appointed house surgeon in a children’s hospital, the first of her sex to hold such a position in London. Nine male candidates for the place were vanquished by her superior qualifications. She is both Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery of the London University. Paris, for a time, had a medical examiner of girls in its municipal schools. The examiner’s duty is to see that the girls are not overworked, and that they get through their studies under sanitary conditions.

“The woman doctor goes through severe discipline to qualify herself for future usefulness; but if she is possessed of genius for her work, and applies herself to it zealously, she will achieve enviable financial independence.

“To begin with, she should have strong predilections for the profession—should be a born doctor, not a made one. This is the only kind that ever succeeds in the true sense of the word. A genius for healing and helping underlies all the training of the greatest lights of medicine. Next to that, good health and a stout, though sympathetic, heart are most essential, granting, as a matter of course, that the head is supplied with brains. In this calling more than any other, perhaps, the higher or subjective senses need to be developed, though of this the schools have nothing to say.

“Formerly the woman who chose to become a physician experienced great difficulty in getting a medical education, and had the sentiment of the public against her, besides. Now the doors of the schools are open to her and the public accepts her without an antagonistic word.”

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WOMEN IN UNUSUAL PATHS.

OMEN as archæologists?” says Rev. William C. Winslow, Ph. D., L. H. D., LL. D., vice-president of the Egypt Exploration Fund. “Yes, a good number of women have done splendid work in this field, but in many cases their work has not been accredited to them, but to the men whose best helpers they have been. There is Madame Edouard Naville, for instance; her husband, Henri Edouard Naville, is king of Egyptologists, you know. Madame Naville is a splendid draughtsman, and illustrates all her husband’s books, copying hieroglyphics from tombs, and everywhere where they occur, in a most masterly manner, besides assisting him in a thousand other ways. I am not sure but she is about as good an Egyptologist as he is.

“Then there are Mrs. H. M. Tirard, who edited Erman’s ‘Life in Egypt,’ Mrs. McClure, who edited Maspero’s ‘Dawn of Civilization,’ and Mary Broderick, Ph. D., who edited ‘Outlines of Ancient Egyptian History,’ ‘Egypt under the Pharaohs,’ and who edits all of ‘Murray’s Hand Books for Egypt.’ These are all good Egyptologists. But, of course, the stars, however brilliant, pale before the sun, and all women and most men Egyptologists look small beside Amelia B. Edwards. She was the queen of this realm, and it is not likely that we shall look upon her like again.

“Miss Edwards was, as you know, the honorary secretary for Great Britain of the Egypt Exploration Fund, and did her best work as an Egyptologist. And yet she was marvelously gifted in other directions. At nine years of age she won a prize for a temperance story, and had a tale accepted by the Omnibus at fourteen. Hers was a voice of such wonderful flexibility and compass that it was thought at twenty that the opera would be her profession. She was well known 323 at twenty-two as a contributor to periodical literature and as a full-fledged novelist. Later on she became a reviewer on the staff of the London Morning Post, Saturday Review, Graphic, Illustrated News and other journals. And so on and on in a splendidly brilliant career, till late in the afternoon of life she took up the study of Egypt, preparing, as a result, the best work, in its scope, on ancient Egypt that I know of, giving the world a most captivating, inspiring, instructive book that has become almost another ‘Bædeker’ to the Nile tourist.

“She was many-sided as an Egyptologist. When she vividly painted the many pre-requisites of the successful explorer in situ, in one of her lectures, I inwardly said, ‘What a queen among explorers you would make!’ As an incipient Egyptologist, in 1874, she ‘wriggled in’ through ‘an aperture about a foot and a half square’ in ‘Discoveries at Abou Simbel,’ so graphically told by her in Chapter XVIII of ‘A Thousand Miles up the Nile.’

“By nature and by grace, and otherwise, it came about that Miss Edwards was the best delineator that Old Egypt has ever had. The Saturday Review thinks ‘no other writer did so much to render Egypt popular.’ Her advent christening as an enthusiastic amateur in Egyptology may date from 1877, when ‘A Thousand Miles up the Nile’ appeared, and her confirmation in that science from 1881, when she had critically mastered all the details of the unprecedented discovery of the royal mummies at Thebes, and substantially assisted Sir E. Wilson in preparing his book, ‘The Egypt of the Past,’ which she was revising the last year of her life. Harper’s Magazine, of July, 1882, under the title, ‘Lying in State in Cairo,’ gives her clear, picturesque delightful story anent those regal mummies.

“Harper’s, October, 1886, contained ‘The Story of Tanis’ (Zoan), which, as an archæological paper in a popular magazine, is, as a whole, without its peer. Its background of study and research, its grouping of historical data and exploration details, its dignity and classic finish, its imaginative play (resting on ascertained conditions and established topography) in the portrayal of Zoan in all its glory, when Rameses oppressed Israel—particularly in the description of the scene, which a stranger approaching that great northern capital of the Pharaohs would have witnessed, when the king of all colossi in Egypt and in the world towered in majesty above the vast temple—these and more stamp this article as a masterpiece of archæological and historical verbal painting.

“One of Miss Edwards’ pamphlets is in substance her paper read at the Congress of Orientalists, held at Leyden, in 1884, entitled ‘On a Fragment of Mummy-Case,’ illustrated by herself. Here I may exemplify the clearness and grace with which she transcribed hieroglyphs. On page 212 of the New England Magazine, for April, 1890, I introduced a fac-simile of her manuscript that she had intended solely for my own eye. The characters are models of elegant drawing; yet I am sure that Miss Edwards executed them with a running hand. 324 Some of my readers will pleasantly recall her electric manual touches upon the blackboard in her lecture upon the evolution of Egyptian letters and text.

“Had Miss Edwards’ life been spared another decade the world would have been the richer by at least two or three more new books of a calibre and merit equal to her ‘Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers;’ and her revision of Wilson’s ‘Egypt’ is the work on the history of the dynasties and marked epochs of Egypt for the general reader, and singularly useful for reference. Her translation of Maspero’s ‘Egyptian Archæology’ gives to the English reader a most authoritative text-book on the architecture and art of the ancient Egyptians.

“The Egypt Exploration Fund owed an unpayable debt to Miss Edwards; that debt is now due, will be ever due, to her memory. ‘Miss Edwards,’ as the obituary in the Annual Report of the Fund says, ‘has followed Erasmus Wilson and James Russell Lowell. In honor of their memory, we, who survive, have a sacred duty to the great enterprise consecrated by their names.’ It may be truly added that the archæological bread she cast upon the waters returned to her not after many days.

“Intellectual culture, education, may everywhere regard Miss Edwards as a generous creditor in the great exchange of knowledge. For out of Egypt has chiefly come our knowledge of the evolution of man during a period of five thousand years B. C., and among the delightful surprises of our day is the enthusiasm, intelligence, skill, magnetism and poetry with which her pen and voice have invested the old, old subject, now regenerated to notice—public notice—by discovery, and by portrayal like hers. May other imaginative and scholarly souls take up the burden of her song in the promotion of exploration to reveal and to record monumental history by the sweet waters of the Nile.”

The most famous woman archæologist now in the world is Madame Dieulafoy.

“When people go to the opera or theatre or the salon in Paris,” says the Sketch, “they sometimes see a small, well-dressed man, with a clean-shaven face and small feet and hands, and they sometimes think what a nice-looking man, but never in the world do they suspect that this same fine-looking man is a woman, and one of the most famous in Paris. Mme. Dieulafoy is one of the most celebrated of the world’s archæologists, and has been of great service to the scientific world. She discovered the ruins of the Temple of Darius, which are now in the Louvre, in Paris. For this great achievement the French Government decorated her with the Order of the Legion of Honor and gave her the right to wear men’s attire at all times. She is married, and she and her husband both patronize the same tailor. Their home is one of great luxury, and they gather about them the savants of France, who are anxious to pay homage to so learned and remarkable a woman.”

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A most noted traveler in unusual paths was Florence van Sass, better known as Lady Baker. In 1861 she started, a mere girl, with her husband, Sir Samuel Baker, on his memorable journey to discover the source of the Nile. She shared all his hardships, and her courage and tact were equal to every draught upon them. On one occasion Sir Samuel was obliged to struggle through fire and water to get through the Ellyrian pass in advance of his deadly enemy, the Turk Ibrahim. When he believed that the task was accomplished, and imagined he heard his men talking behind him, his implacable foe, Ibrahim, confronted him. That this encounter meant the entire failure of his expedition he did not doubt, but, as he himself declares, “its fate was retrieved by Mrs. Baker. She implored me to call him, to insist upon a personal explanation, and to offer him some present in the event of establishing amicable relations. I could not condescend to address the sullen scoundrel. He was in the act of passing, and success depended on that instant. Mrs. Baker herself called him. For the moment he made no reply; but upon my repeating the call in a loud key he turned his donkey toward us and dismounted.”

Baker reasoned with the Turk, and by “clinching his argument with a promise of a double-barreled gun and a bag of gold, Ibrahim was won.”

At a time when a number of the men had mutinied, Mrs. Baker quelled the riot, and caused the little army to go quietly forward.

She accompanied her husband in all his African travels. In 1861 she went with him to Abyssinia; in 1863-65, while investigating the course of the Nile; and in 1869-73 she labored with him during the Ismailian expedition to suppress the slave trade. In the midst of actual engagements, while the air about her was thick with spears, she remained cool and collected. Her kindness to her husband’s men filled them with love for her, and by her skill and devotion as a nurse she saved many of their lives.

The story of Alexandrine Trine as a wanderer in strange paths reads like a romance. Miss Trine was a born traveler. In her early teens she had visited Norway and Sweden, and at eighteen had journeyed through Asia Minor, Palestine, and Egypt. The Pyramids captivated her; the Nile enchanted her; and there was kindled in her heart a vehement desire to explore a part of the unknown regions of Africa, and to investigate the source of the Nile.

In July, 1861, Miss Trine and her aunt and a friend were domesticated for a while in Cairo. After a time, and with a suitable retinue, they journeyed as far as Khartoum, and from thence to Gondokoro, the place where preparations had been made for Captain Speke and Captain Grant in the unlikely event of their returning from their expedition into Zanzibar in search of the source of the Nile. When they did return, after discovering Victoria Nyanza, Samuel Baker and his wife met them at Gondokoro, but never had a meeting with Miss Trine.

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Miss Trine’s expedition to search for the Nile’s source was fitted out on so grand a scale that the natives averred that she was the daughter of the Sultan. Terrible disasters overtook this expedition: sickness, famine, obstructions of all kinds. These things and the death of her aunt drove the adventuresome lady back to Cairo, where for a time she lived in Oriental magnificence. She finally started on another expedition, still with the purpose of tracing the Nile to its source. She was murdered between Mourzouk and Ghat by the savages, whose rapacity her apparent wealth had excited.

An entire volume could be interestingly written about the travels of Isabelle Bird, afterward Mrs. Bishop.

Miss Bird, a frail, delicate, refined woman, pushed her way along many tracks which had been trodden by no woman and by few men. In her youth she visited America, about which she wrote with justice and intelligence. She traveled in Japan, the Malay Peninsula, Persia, Kurdistan and adjoining countries. About 1893 she went to Corea and China. Her books are full of interesting information. Wherever she travels Mrs. Bishop takes a warm personal interest in the people, and does all she can to make their lives brighter, their outlook more hopeful.

Miss Gordon Cummings is too well known and too widely loved to need extended comment here. Like Mrs. Bishop she is a wanderer in many far fields, and, also like Mrs. Bishop, she everywhere “goes about doing good.”

Nellie Bly’s exploits as a traveler have been too widely and too recently exploited for our readers to have forgotten them.

Miss Annie S. Peck, a young American woman, is one of the comparatively’ few people who have ascended the Matterhorn. Miss Peck says:

“It was early in the eighties that my attention was first called to the Matterhorn by hearing Dr. David Jordan, now president of Leland Stanford University, describe his ascent of that mountain. He told a tale so terrible that while my spirit was fired with a determination to see this wonderful rock pyramid if I ever went to Europe, I concluded that I should be satisfied with beholding it from below. When, in 1885, I first saw this magnificent rock towering above me I was seized with an irresistible longing to attain its summit. But alas! fifty dollars is a large sum to spend on a single day’s pleasure . . . so I reluctantly turned my steps onward, cherishing the determination that some day I would come again and fulfill my heart’s desire.”

Miss Peck did “come again,” and this time she was prepared for the stupendous climb. She goes on:

“Though nearly all the snows of winter slide from the mountain’s steep slopes, it is nevertheless true that the irregular ragged rocks allow of the lodgment of a few inches of snow here and there, enough to make the footing insecure and the handholds uncomfortable, thus increasing the danger both of freezing and of 327 unexpectedly gliding down the mountain side. One is so situated during a large part of the time that if he should slip, and was not held by the rope, he would slide two or three or four thousand feet down to one of the glaciers three thousand feet below.”

The narrator speaks of parts of the route where “the incline was from forty to eighty degrees, mostly eighty, the rocks smooth,” and where “there were no secure handholds.” “The distance covered by ropes,” she goes on, “is probably one or two hundred yards. It was here that young Hardow fell, dragging three of his companions to death four thousand feet below.”

Miss Peck’s story, as told in McClure’s Magazine for July, 1896, relates a feat of splendid endurance and persistence.

One of the most remarkable trips ever taken by a woman, however, was that of Mrs. May French-Sheldon in east Africa, when she traversed 990 miles of interior, never before explored by white person. There have been white women in Africa before—Lady Burton, Mlle. Tinne and others even—who have gone at the head of expeditions. But Mrs. M. French-Sheldon—an American woman by birth, training and loyalty—was the first, and so far the only one, to enter the African wilds at the head of a large caravan of natives, and entirely unaided or unaccompanied by any white person.

Mrs. Sheldon is a native of Philadelphia, and has lived in several American cities, although for some years she has been a resident of London. In making this journey into savage wilds Mrs. Sheldon did not lay aside the social graces for which she is noted, nor discard the amenities of a refined civilization. On the contrary, she observed and maintained the same dainty habits which belong to a lady’s boudoir in London.

Instead of adopting a rough dress and lowering her personality to the level of wild and uncivilized surroundings, she provided herself with one magnificent court dress of white satin, and was carefully costumed in becoming, clean and suitable clothing at all times. Only a woman versed in the ways of the world would have acted on the truism that “clothes make the man,” and recognized in advance that the way to maintain her social prestige, even among savages, was to live up to it. Throughout her journey she had her private bathing tent, which was sacredly guarded by boys detailed for the purpose; and every day she performed in it the sacred mysteries of a refined woman’s toilet, securely screened from observation, and was regarded in consequence as a being of better than ordinary clay, a creature of finer mold—in short, as the “white queen”—(“Bebe Bwana”).

The Sultan of Zanzibar, although not an uncultivated savage, recognized the divine royalty of a pure and true woman, and threw around her the protecting influence of his despotic favor. He not only assisted her materially in the 328 selection of men for her caravan, but he sent before her a proclamation threatening instant death to any who should molest her.

And so this woman at the head of two hundred men was regarded as a superior being, and was paid involuntary tribute like a princess with greater powers than their own chiefs. The native potentates met her with gifts, invited her to visit them, and allowed her to talk with their women and to witness rites and ceremonies 329 which are usually carefully kept from white men. Their homage at times threatened to become tedious, as when they brought tribal differences to the “white queen” for adjustment. Domestic trials were also laid before her, in the hope that she possessed some occult authority to right all family wrongs. She was taken to their lurking places, too, giving her an insight into their character and customs far beyond what she had dared hope. They had no doubt of her motives, and she carefully kept up the appearance of royalty which had so impressed them.

Every night she slept in her palanquin with the curtains closely drawn, and a faithful native guarding it on each side.

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Mrs. Sheldon’s object was not simply to gratify her love of adventure. There was a humanitarian reason for her journey. She succeeded in penetrating the wilds of Central Africa, unattended by other assistance than her own woman’s wit and marvelous firmness and magnetism of character. She has proved to a thoughtful people that the natives of those countries are intelligent human beings. If she shall convince the world that the problem of educating and Christianizing them can be solved by industrial education she will have more than succeeded. Mrs. Sheldon was recently made a member of the Royal Geographical Society of London, an honor seldom accorded any woman. Her lectures before scientific societies in London have been heard with extraordinary interest. Her work supplements that of Mr. Stanley, which was purely geographical, by giving a side no male traveler could have ever reached—the customs, habits and home life of the women and children. Mrs. Sheldon brought back with her an immense variety of objects which she uses to illustrate her lectures, and which give graphic interest to her picturesque narrative.

Along the same line of effort is the work of Marie Robinson Wright, of Georgia and New York. She was reared in luxury with slaves at her command to gratify every wish, until she was almost a young lady. At the age of sixteen she married, and by the time she was twenty she was the mother of two children, and the ravages of war had devastated the fair Georgia country so that neither 331 husband nor father had any property left. She had to go to doing her own work and taking care of her own babies—a rather dismal prospect for a high-bred, high-spirited Southern girl of twenty, was it not? She did not dream then that some day she would be a distinguished traveler, nor that she would be received by foreign potentates with every mark of respect and distinction.

When she was left a widow a few years after, she found that she must do something for the support of herself and her young children. And so it happened that she struck out into a new path. Not all at once, however. She went to the office of the little magazine called the Sunny South—not with poor poems and worse stories in her pocket, but with a proposition that met the wants of the publishers. She asked for the privileges of traveling and soliciting subscriptions. Doubtless she would have liked to be a famous author as well as anybody else, but she had good common sense, and she knew that the business end of the magazine offered her a much quicker opportunity.

She was engaged at once, and for two or three years made a good living for herself and babies, and very materially increased the circulation of the periodical. So successful was she that a chance came from this work to go on to the New York World, not as a sensational reporter, nor even as editorial writer, but to travel through the Southern cities and write them up for the big city daily. This work was even more successful, and her great feat of writing an article descriptive of the resources and development of Mexico, for which the Mexican government paid the paper the sum of twenty thousand dollars, is one of the most remarkable in the annals of modern journalism. At the World’s Fair in Chicago, she was again given an opportunity to distinguish herself by getting the illustrated edition of the Fair, again making several thousand dollars.

“But why should I go on making enormous sums of money for other people?” she asked herself. “Have I not now sufficient ability and experience to stand alone?”

She decided to try, and in 1895 with her daughter, Miss Ida Dent Wright, for her sole companion, she went again to Mexico. Secretary of State Mariscal and President Diaz were already her warm admirers, for splendid courage and womanly independence were never more strongly combined with all feminine graces—and to them she went with her plans. Both these executives furnished her with letters to every governor in Mexico, and the President ordered, not only a military escort wherever needed, but that special trains and steamboat facilities should be given her throughout the country. Then she spent a year in thoroughly inspecting and studying the country. Besides thousands of miles of railway and steamboat traveling, Mrs. Wright and her daughter went nearly nine hundred miles in mountain regions, on mules, attended by military escort, and penetrating regions where none but native women have ever been seen. The result of her 332 experiences has been put in a large illustrated book on Mexico, which is the most comprehensive and altogether the most beautiful book on Mexico ever written in any language, and which was ordered in advance by Mexican officials to the number of 8000.

In addition to this, or as a result of her success, Mrs. Wright has been invited to Costa Rica to prepare a similar book for the government, and later she will make a thorough tour of South America for the same purpose.

And so tired, weary young woman, do not get discouraged no matter how dark the outlook. The clouds may hang low at times, but they are sure to clear away and perhaps your sun may be mounting toward a zenith of whose brightness you little dream. Only keep up courage and determine to do your best to develop the highest qualities of which you are capable, and you cannot fail.

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LII.
JUST WHAT WOMEN ARE DOING.

HERE is one cheery little woman in a large city who has started out to earn her living in a most original way—as an entertainer of invalids and convalescents. So far as is known, she is the only person who makes it a profession to bring even laughter into the house. The little woman is a brave soul who was left a widow with a son to educate, a boy in his early teens. At the death of her husband she found herself possessed of little else than a mortgaged home. Something had to be done, but what it was to be was a most perplexing query.

“I tried everything I could think of,” she said, “but I did not succeed in doing anything to speak of. At last I was companion for three months to a woman who was suffering from a severe case of nervous prostration. I kept her mind from her troubles. It came near killing me, but she lived and the physician said it was I who saved her. Then I happened to think it would not be a bad plan to go into the cheering up business for a living. I made the attempt, and have been quite successful. Most of my—what shall I call them—clients?—simply want to talk, and they are happy to get a good listener. I go regularly to see one woman who talks the entire hour on religion. Doubtless she has tired out every one in the family, and they have little patience in hearing the same thing over and over again. All that I find it necessary to do is to listen interestedly and just take the opposite side once in a while to give her a bit of excitement, and she enjoys it immensely. Sometimes I succeed in interesting her in other things, and I consider that quite an achievement, something to be proud of.

“There is an elderly man whom I visit who is perfectly happy if I will only listen while he talks politics. Now I cannot argue on politics, although I am not 334 absolutely ignorant on the subject, but I can listen, and I understand enough to object occasionally to some of his views, and so keep him interested. There is nothing like a little well-timed objection to keep a political enthusiast entertained.

“It is surprising how grateful an invalid is for any attention; they are the easiest people in the world to entertain, anything which diverts them, and takes their mind off themselves and their own condition makes them happy and it is a delight to do this. I am happy myself in the accomplishment of my endeavors. I think one reason why I have been so successful is that I have never bothered any of my clients by asking them what they wanted. If there has been no one to tell me, I have found out for myself. Some want music, and for them I play the piano and sing; others like to be read to, and to others I just talk, telling them what is going on in the world. Of course, I have to read the papers and keep up in current events, and that is good for me, as well as for those for whose sake I do it. Some want me to play games, others want to learn some new stitch in embroidery, knitting or crochet, and these I have to learn in order to teach them. So you see, it is no small task to get ready to play. But the best part is the eagerness with which my arrival is awaited. There is no familiar friend who receives a more cordial welcome than I do. It is worth every bit of bother and thought which you have given to getting prepared for a visit to see the glad smile break over a listless, wearied face as the door opens to admit you to the invalid’s room. I wonder more women do not take up this plan of earning money, there is such genuine satisfaction in it.”

The unexpected ways are oftenest the successful ways, and many a woman—yes, and man, too—owes her good fortune to an accident. Not, my dear girls, that I would have you sit around in Micawber fashion waiting for the accident to happen, for it is only when one is active that accidents of this kind occur, but when you are looking for one thing you may chance to stumble over another. If you do, please regard the circumstance as of value, and do not pass it over without taking advantage of it, for this very thing may be your opportunity which presents itself in this unceremonious manner. Just, indeed, as it did to Mrs. Sarah D. Kelly, of Chicago, who is making a living as a scientific packer.

“I have made a good living at this work for more than six years,” said Mrs. Kelly when asked about it. “I have managed to support and send to school three children, besides laying up a few hundred dollars in the bank against a rainy day. My story does not differ much, in the main, from that of many another woman left a widow with children to support and no money to do it with. I looked about for work, and approached a man, whom I had known, in the hope of getting into his office. There was no opening, and he frankly told me there was no chance for me in the office, but he said that his wife had been suddenly taken ill and they were to move the next week. If I would not be 335 insulted by the proposition, he would be glad to have me go to his house, take charge of the things and see to the packing and moving. I can assure you that I was not insulted, but glad enough of any opportunity to earn money for my children, and I undertook the work readily. When I had finished I was pretty sure that I had found my vocation.

“I had cards printed and distributed them among firms who made a specialty of moving furniture. Then I went to some of the best real estate offices and furniture houses, explained my business and asked them to speak a good word for me when an opportunity offered. But I did not then sit down and wait for my customers; I looked out for myself, and when I heard of a family who expected to move I called and offered my services. Naturally, I met with rebuffs at first, for people had never heard of such a thing, and told me so. But, fortunately for me, there are delicate and busy women, who find it impossible to superintend the packing and moving of their furniture and valuables. These women recognized the convenience of my proposition and gave me work.

“You ask me to tell you how I go about the packing for the average well-to-do family. Pretty much as I do for their richer neighbors. They are expected to find all the boxes and barrels necessary, but when I go through the house if I find there are not enough I order what are needed. I have an index book, and after numbering each end and all four sides of every box and barrel, I enter the numbers in my index book, and under their respective numbers I give a complete list of their contents. Suppose I read you the contents of a box or barrel from this book made out for a family for whom I have just finished storing and packing furniture. They have gone abroad for several years. Box No. 5 is on page 13, and contains four etchings, one pair of rowlocks, a pair of skates, three games, a box with wedgewood candlesticks, six copies of Harper’s Magazine for 1896, two bundles of letters (H. P.), the Pathfinder, Oliver Optic series, and so on, dozens more of miscellaneous articles. This seems a motley collection, but they fitted in, and in that way saved space. When possible, I pack the contents of a room together, but where they do not fit in they must go elsewhere.

“Frail objects should be packed in cotton, excelsior or wrapped in several thicknesses of paper or cloth, then, when possible, put into pasteboard boxes and securely tied up before packing with other articles. Pictures and engravings should be carefully wrapped, first in soft paper, then in several folds of newspapers, tied securely with twine and placed around the four sides of the box. The box should then be packed as firmly as possible with miscellaneous articles, so keeping the pictures in position, and thus insuring their safety. I omitted to say that in placing the pictures in the boxes the glass must face the sides of the box. Books, magazines, pamphlets, and all those things which every housekeeper has stored away, seldom used, yet valued for various reasons and kept from year to year, 336 may be used as filling. By this plan everything can be securely packed, and nothing need be left behind.”

Mrs. Kelly not only gave her own story, but she kindly gave so much of her methods that any woman who is moved by her example to undertake the work will see the way to do it successfully. There should certainly be an opening in every city and large town for at least one scientific packer.

Another young woman makes a good income as a teacher of athletics. During the winters she has large classes in the various cities, confining herself chiefly to physical culture, pure and simple. She teaches the proper use of the muscles, the correct way of breathing, walking, running, standing, sitting, sleeping, and, in fact, she treats every point of that important study which is so essential to the health and development of every girl. She makes a special point of posturing, as it applies to holding one’s self well and walking correctly. There are too many women nowadays who walk badly and sit ungracefully, and the most sensible of them realize the importance of improving in this respect, and they are willing to pay well to be taught.

In the summer she teaches other branches of athletics. Swimming, diving, floating, all the fancy strokes, and turns out graceful swimmers. She takes parties for horseback exercise, teaches cross country riding, and directs the dressing for this exercise. She teaches tennis and golf, in short she is up on all points of athletics which interest women, and is an expert in them. She is well bred, dresses in perfect taste, talks interestingly, and has no end of tact. All these are necessary for the successful teacher in these special branches. This special girl says that there is plenty of room for more teachers along the line which she has chosen, and she says, still farther, that the prices obtained are precisely the same as those paid to a man for the same kind of instruction.

There is a young woman in Buffalo N. Y., who has made a reputation as a window dresser. It would seem as though the decorative taste of women might stand many of them in stead in a vocation like this. Why have not more tried it? It must be a pleasant and attractive mode of gaining a livelihood, and surely the average woman has as much taste as the average man. Why not employ it in this fashion? Here is a suggestion for some girl to act upon.

An English woman has taken up the business of cleaning bicycles. She goes from house to house, so that no one need to take the cycle to a shop for repairs. She carries an assortment of cheese-cloth cleaners of various sizes, well permeated with oil, and bits of flannel to use in polishing. She adjusts handle bars, saddles, tightens nuts, pumps up and fills tires, trims and fills the lamp and puts it securely in place, and tests everything to see that it is firm. She is familiar, not only with all the tools used about a wheel, but with every piece which goes into it, and its proper relation and position with regard to every other piece, 337 and understands the mysteries of gearing. She finds herself a very welcome visitor at the houses which she visits at stated intervals, for the new duty of attending to the wheel of her mistress does not belong to the housemaid, nor, in fact, to any member of the household staff as yet.

Trimming and cleaning lamps and keeping them in order, and cleaning silver are two branches of labor that some girls might find remunerative. Very few servants know how to take care of the beautiful, decorative lamps which are such an important part of furnishing now, even in houses which have gas or electric lighting. The lamp is an ornament, and, for many purposes, its light is preferable, but it is such hard work to keep it in order, complain the mistresses. Get a dozen or more of these mistresses to let you come daily, for a small consideration, and take care of these lamps. If you have time, you might undertake the silver also, receiving an additional sum, of course, for the service. You need only work during the morning hours, and you would not only solve a vexed question for the house-mistresses, whom you assist out of a difficulty, but you gain a nice little income for yourself.

You may call this a chapter of hints, if you like, only some of you must find one that is worth the taking, or all the work of dropping them will have been in vain, and one does not like to work with no return, it is disheartening.

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LIII.
COOKING SCHOOL TEACHERS.

INCE the establishment of school kitchens in connection with the public schools, a new field has been opened up to young women, and it is a field that is constantly broadening and that will continue to develop for some time to come.

And not only are public schools requiring teachers of cooking but communities everywhere are asking for teachers and lecturers on this subject, and every helpful, philanthropic institution into which girls are received, are establishing classes in cooking, and naturally they must have trained teachers.

This movement is a comparatively new one and that is the reason why there are more openings in it than there are in many of the occupations. It is but a few years since the first cooking schools were regularly established and it is only about ten years since they were tried as an experiment in the public schools of Boston, which was the first city to introduce cooking as a regular branch of public school instruction.

And its establishment and its carrying on to success was due to one woman. And to this woman all the women in the United States owe a debt of gratitude. For, although Mrs. Mary Hemenway began her work in Boston, it did not end there. Mrs. Hemenway was a New Yorker by birth, her father being one of the staunch business men of a half century ago. In her young womanhood Miss Tibston was wooed and won by Mr. Augustus Hemenway, of Boston, and after her marriage she was closely identified with the city of her adoption. Mr. Hemenway was one of the famous New England merchants and his fortune was splendid, ranking him among the many time millionaires, and when he died, leaving the use of the larger part of the fortune which he accumulated to his widow, he 339 cautioned her against so using her means as to make two persons miserable in the endeavor to give happiness to one. He knew the generous heart she possessed, and he knew also the evils which attended misapplied benevolence, and knowing both these things he gave the word of caution which proved the wise word of direction.

During the Civil War she was an active member of the Sanitary Commission, and her large means made it possible for her to advance the State work most materially. Then she turned her energies to the Freedmen.

It was about this time that she became impressed with the need and value of industrial training in connection with the public schools. She realized, with many others who were engaged in relief work among the poor, that what was most needed among them was a practical knowledge of the best and most economical manner of managing with what they had to do with, and the first step to meet this need was the attempt to establish classes of sewing in the schools.

This attempt was met with the most determined opposition on the part of teachers and committee. One of the principals said, when he heard of the new movement: “Sewing in school! Well, the next we know they will be wanting to set up cook stoves and teach the children to broil a beefsteak.”

This remark has been recalled many times since it turned out to be a prophecy. And the fulfillment was brought about by the very woman who was, 340 more than any other, instrumental in introducing the sewing. To prove to the school committee that the cooking classes were quite feasible and would prove beneficial, she equipped and carried on the first one for two years at her own expense, and, when finally the school kitchens became a part of the school system, she continued for a while to support the first one, so that the committee might have the more means for establishing others, and she also opened and sustained a Normal Cooking School to prepare the teachers for the work which by this time was adopted by other cities.

In precisely the same way she introduced the “Ling” system of gymnastics into the public schools, giving the pupils a thorough physical training under competent teachers prepared for the purpose at the Normal School of Gymnastics, which she instituted and maintained, and which is still supported by a fund which she left for the purpose, and where hundreds of young women have been trained for teachers.

She was one of the foremost in the work of saving the Old South Church from its threatened destruction, using both her means and her influence for the successful attainment of this end. It was her thought that made this historic building the centre of practical education in our national history, and the inculcation of public spirit in the young people who were to be the future citizens of the commonwealth. This she did by the impressive celebration of national festival days, by lectures on American history, by offering prizes for essays on historical subjects to graduates of high schools, and by the various methods, which as “the Old South work” has not only been plainly felt in the community already, but has been followed in other cities of the country.

And yet it must not be supposed that all of Mrs. Hemenway’s work has been local: this is by no means the case. Her sympathies were as broad as the land, and her field of endeavor was bounded by the oceans on either side, with a limit the other way of the lakes and the Gulf. She was American to her fingers’ ends, and had in her nature no room for mere partisanship. Whatever was for the nation’s credit and interest appealed to her. She believed that the future well being of the nation lay in the proper education of the young of all classes and conditions. Education was the key which was to unlock many of the present national difficulties, education in the right direction, which to her meant love of country, loyalty to principle, the divorcing of all personal, private interest from all public questions, and the inculcation of a spirit and habit of industry. She did not believe in a leisure class, but maintained that all should labor for the good of the whole. She set the example herself, not by labor in its lower sense, the toil merely for pay, but in the broadest meaning, the constant thought and work for the uplifting of all humanity, and the amelioration of much useless bitterness and suffering.

She was the firm supporter of General Armstrong in his work at Hampton for the education of the Negro and Indian. Indeed, but for her help the school 341 could not have attained the position which it holds. She was an ardent member of the Indian Association, and it was through her interest in the cause of Indian rights that she was first attracted to the work of Mr. Frank Cushing, who was a student of the Zuni Indians, and so enthusiastic a one that he took up his abode among them, and won their confidence and respect while studying their history. In consequence of her friendship for him, she established the Hemenway Southwestern Archæological Expedition, and Mr. Cushing’s important contributions to science, founded upon his explorations among ancient ruins in New Mexico and Arizona, were the result. Through Mr. Cushing Mrs. Hemenway secured the preservation of the pre-historic ruin of Casa Grande, in Arizona, and its protection in charge of the United States Bureau of Ethnology.

Nor, in her interest for the oppressed of the Indian and Negro nations, was her own forgotten. Recognizing the disadvantage under which the white children of the South suffered for educational privileges after the war, she established, at Wilmington, N. C., a school for white children, placing it under the charge of Miss Amy Bradley, who had been a nurse of the Sanitary Commission during the war, and previous to that a most successful teacher in the North. A beautiful building was erected at a cost of $75,000, and was named by Mrs. Hemenway, the Tibston School, in honor of her father. Competent teachers were supplied, and the school was opened in the midst of the most bitter opposition and 342 prejudice. But as people grew to understand the motive of Mrs. Hemenway in placing the school in their midst, the opposition died away, the success of the school was assured, and has continued from that time. Southern girls were educated there, and took the places of the retiring Northern teachers, Miss Bradley still remaining at the head. It is one of the most highly prized of the institutions of Wilmington now, and in that city Mrs. Hemenway’s memory is held sacred.

One of the most marked features of Mrs. Hemenway’s character was her aversion to anything like publicity. She was personally unknown to the thousands of persons whom she benefited. She had always about her a corps of sympathetic, competent men and women, who carried out her plans and did the work she laid down for them. Of course a woman of her social standing and her means, could not avoid a certain degree of prominence, but as far as she possibly could, she kept her own personality in the background, content to know that she was doing a work which was helping and ennobling all mankind.

She has left behind her a memory whose fragrance shall never be lost, and the country still mourns a citizen who, in the quietest and simplest way, laid the foundation for future loyalty and good citizenship in the hearts and minds of thousands of young men and women. Could any work of achievement be nobler than this?

She also sought by her influence to elevate the idea of domestic labor and bring it up to the plane where it belongs, and her most successful work in this line was the establishment of the school kitchens in the public school work.

The Boston Normal Training School for cooking teachers provides that the teaching shall be uniform, and the course studied is to be adopted in every school. This school has graduated a large number of pupils, and, so far, every one has found a place waiting for her when she graduated. You can see by this that the work is being carried forward as rapidly as teachers can be got ready. The great danger is in beginning the work before you are altogether prepared. There is as much danger in undue haste, as there is in delay. I am not altogether certain that there isn’t more. In any important matter like this, it is safe to make haste slowly. No matter how anxious you are to begin this work in your own town, wait until you are trained, and do not fall into the mistaken notion that anybody can teach cooking who can cook. A mistake at the beginning would be fatal, and you could never again awaken interest in the subject if you once fail.

In regard to the training school, its demands, and its accomplishments: In the first place every applicant for admission must be acquainted with the theory of teaching, and it is considered a great point in her favor if she is the graduate of some normal school. She should possess that particular qualification for the work—a genuine liking for it; and she should determine to devote herself to it to the exclusion of all other branches and be a power in her line of teaching.

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There is no use in taking up any work in a half-hearted way; and if a pupil does not show herself disposed to do her best in the school, her continuance in the class is not encouraged. The teachers very soon discover if a student is lacking in the ability to do the work, and if there is any doubt of her ultimate success as a teacher of cooking she is kindly advised to turn her efforts in some other direction.

That is fair treatment certainly, and kindly too. For the whole future of a girl may be spoiled by allowing her to make a failure when good advice, honestly given, might have turned her in the direction of success. And that is why we should be so glad of the interest and care that the managers of this particular school give to the pupils.

When a student has taken the course, passed the examination, and received her certificate, then she may feel that she is well equipped for the work, for no certificate would be given her had she not won it, you may be sure. The course of study includes, beside cooking, lessons in chemistry by the most competent teachers, and with the practice lessons in both branches, there are frequent lectures by well-known specialists.

The salary of the teacher is the same as that of any grammar school teacher, and the hours of work are the regular school hours. Sometimes, when a town is not large enough to take a teacher’s entire time, it will combine with an adjoining town, and the two will employ the same teacher.

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Besides the teaching in the public schools, there is the teaching of independent classes, and of private schools. The Lasell Seminary, in Auburndale, Mass., which is one of the most progressive schools for girls in the country, has a regular course in cooking, ranging from the simplest to the most intricate. It has a prize for bread-making, and there is a spirited contest for this prize every year.

Miss Maria Parloa, who is, without doubt, the best known and most capable of all the lecturers and instructors of cooking in this country, is one of the pioneers as well. She has amassed a snug little property by her work, and she is still in greater demand than any other lecturer. Mrs. Sarah Rorer, of Philadelphia, and Miss Maria Daniell, of Boston, are also successful and well-known teachers.

These teachers form classes, and also give demonstration lectures, for which they get well paid. If a girl is fond of cooking, can impart her knowledge and has patience for detail, she may make a successful teacher, and earn a good income; but she must work for it.

345

LIV.
THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER.

S OUR ideas in education are advanced and become incorporated in the school system, new opportunities for those desiring to teach arise, and so a fresh avenue for endeavor is opened.

The development and growth of the kindergarten is a case in point. Where, twenty years ago, there were not a score of kindergarten teachers in the whole country there are now hundreds, and the demand for them still continues as the different communities make the kindergarten a part of the public school work.

When the kindergarten was first introduced into this country it was as a private school, and the experiment was tried only in the large cities and among people of wealth. The mass of people regarded it as absurd to send such tiny children to school as those this new school took under its special care, and even physicians inveighed against it, and talked about crowding the brains of the little ones, and predicted dire results—which predictions, by the way, have never been fulfilled.

The idea of bringing the kindergarten to this country belonged to a Boston woman—Miss Elizabeth Peabody. Miss Peabody was the sister-in-law of Horace Mann, who was so prominent in educational matters during the early portion and the middle of this century, and who was specially identified with the education of the deaf and dumb. So Miss Peabody was always living in the atmosphere of progress, in educational affairs. She was also the sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the American novelist, the writer of the most remarkable stories that any American author has given to the world; and she was the chosen friend of 346 Emerson. You can easily see that she must have been a remarkable woman to win and hold a friendship like that.

During a visit to Germany, Miss Peabody became deeply imbued with the spirit of Frederic Froebel, and she saw in his methods of teaching, or rather of directing and leading the minds of the little children, the best basis for all education. On her return she talked and wrote on the subject, until the time became ripe for the introduction of a teacher. First one came from Germany to establish a training school to prepare teachers for this new work, then another came, when there were training schools both in Boston and New York.

The wealthy people, and the more cultivated classes took the idea very readily, and for a number of years these were the only patrons, because to send a child to a private kindergarten was a somewhat expensive matter.

But Miss Peabody was not satisfied with this state of affairs. She wanted the children of all the people to have the same opportunity that a portion of them already had. She labored earnestly to have the school committees take favorable action on the kindergarten, and make places where the smaller children could be kept from the pitiful surroundings, which so many of them knew as home, and given some brightness and cheer to lighten their little lives.

But school boards are slow to become convinced, they are the reflection of the public whom they represent, and Miss Peabody had times of almost discouragement, but she would rally and work with new determination.

When it became apparent that nothing could be done, for the present at least, through the public schools, Miss Peabody then turned her attention to the establishment, through private means, of free kindergartens in the poorer parts of the city of Boston. In this effort she was met generously and heartily by Mrs. Quincy Shaw, of Boston, who did at once what Miss Peabody desired, and established several free kindergartens in Boston, Brookline, Jamaica Plain and Roxbury, paying all expenses out of her own private income. Mrs. Shaw was the daughter of Professor Louis Agassiz, of Harvard, and her mother was from the Carey family, of Cambridge, who have always been identified with every progressive movement in education and sociology.

Mrs. Shaw supported these schools for many years, until the city, recognizing their worth, and the strong influence for good which they exerted, decided to incorporate them into the public school system, and now the city supports them as it does all the other public schools. The movement has gone outside of Boston, and many of the towns and cities of New England support the kindergartens.

New York has taken the same step, and in many of her cities the kindergarten flourishes as a part of the school system.

The women of San Francisco, headed by Mrs. Leland Stanford and Mrs. Phœbe Hearst, have established the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association, and 347 are supporting free kindergartens all over the city. From the inception of the order, until her sad death, Mrs. Sarah B. Cooper was the head of the Association, and she gave her most devoted care to it. She, a newspaper woman, beloved of every one, was the chosen almoner of the charities of the richest women of San Francisco, and she made the very best use of the means that were placed at her command. One of the early San Francisco kindergartners was Kate Douglas Wiggin, whose fascinating books, especially “The Bird’s Christmas Carol,” and “Timothy’s Quest,” have made her name a household word wherever sweet, choice literature is appreciated. The work done by the kindergartens of San Francisco is a marvelous work, and full of interest, and the teachers are among the most charming and refined young women of that city.

St. Louis stands well to the front in the kindergarten work, and the other Western cities are following closely.

So you see, here is a work that is growing, and will grow with the future growth of the communities of the country. Teachers will always be needed, and the remuneration is fairly good.

But not every one can be a successful kindergartner. Simply because some girl may think it an easy and a pleasant way of gaining a livelihood, it is no reason why she may expect success in it.

In the first place, much depends upon the personality of the girl. She must be attractive. By that I do not mean merely pretty, for I have known—and, no doubt, you have known also—pretty girls who have not been attractive when you came to know them. I mean girls with refined natures, good manners, high moral sense; cultivated girls, who win admiration and compel respect. There must be character to the girl who wishes to be successful in this line of work, and this strength must be allied to gentleness. She must really love children, attract them and hold them, after she has won them. She must be patient, tactful, cheerful and firm.

She needs to have a pleasant voice, both for speaking and singing for so much of the kindergarten work is done in song, that this is an absolute necessity. And she must also have a good education.

It is not so easy to gain entrance to a kindergarten training school as it was in the earlier days. The supply of teachers has been so much increased that now it is possible to choose who shall become teachers. A girl must be able to pass a certain examination, which is rather rigid, or she must bring a certificate from a high or normal school. In some training schools the latter is demanded, and no pupil will be received unless she has graduated from a regular normal school.

The course of study is by no means easy, and in the best and most thorough training schools it covers a period of two years. Until quite recently one year 348 only was given, but with the additional requirements has come the need of additional time.

Not only are the methods thoroughly taught, but the science of pedagogy is considered, and the pupils have to write abstracts, essays and stories, as well as do practical work in some of the schools. The girl who studies kindergartening may make up her mind that she will not have time for anything else during her two years, but that it will mean constant application. But when she gets through she has a profession that is one of the most beautiful in the world, and that will be, not only an assured income to her, but a constant source of pleasure: that is assuming, of course, that she has a natural aptitude and love for it. In any other case she would better not attempt it, for she will, if she does not fail altogether, become only a common-place teacher, and so find herself frequently out of position as well as always out of place.

349

LV.
WOMEN AS INVENTORS.

The Greenes moved from Rhode Island to Mulberry Grove, on the Savannah River. The General died soon after the removal, leaving five children and a much embarrassed estate.

It was during the winter of 1792-93 that there was gathered in Mrs. Greene’s parlor a little group, whose conversation turned upon the subject which was then largely engrossing the attention of nearly every planter in the South: the toilsome and profit-destroying process of separating cotton and its seeds, and the fortune which would come to him who should invent a machine for the accomplishment of this work. To clear the seeds from a pound of cotton kept one person busy for an entire day. Every evening found the entire family of most planters busy with the uncongenial task of separating 350 seeds from cotton. It was only thus that the staple production of many a plantation could be made to yield maintenance for those who were dependent upon it for support.

Mrs. Greene had taken into her home as boarder, Eli Whitney, a young man who had gone South to teach in a private family, but who, on reaching his destination, had found his place supplied, and had thereupon decided to study law. She proposed to Mr. Whitney that they should construct the much-needed machine. He agreed, and the work was begun, Mr. Whitney proceeding according to Mrs. Greene’s idea, and under her immediate and constant supervision.

The first model, which was supplied with wooden teeth, did not perform the work satisfactorily, and Mr. Whitney was about to give up the experiment in despair, when Mrs. Greene suggested the substitution of wire teeth. With this change the machine wrought wonderful results. So perfect was it that all subsequent cotton gins have been, in all essentials, modeled after it. Instead of one pound, three hundred pounds of cotton could now be cleaned in a day, and the South, which had been languishing in poverty and discouragement, or emigrating to more hopeful fields in search of work, took heart of grace, and found employment at home, while all over the world manufactories sprang up, the price of cotton cloth went down, and a complete commercial revolution was inaugurated. Cotton became king because of a woman’s thought.

When Mrs. Greene became Mrs. Miller, she took, through her husband, a partnership with Mr. Whitney in the manufactory of gins.

One who realizes how a woman known to be an inventor would have been looked upon in the year of our Lord 1792, and for years afterward, will not marvel that Mrs. Greene did not proclaim herself maker of one of the most wonderful machines of her own or any other age. Had she done so, the ridicule and scorn of every man and woman who knew her name would have been heaped upon her. She would have been looked upon as a monstrosity of unwomanliness and presumption. A Lucy Stone, or a Mary Somerville, or a Mary A. Livermore might have braved all this. That Catherine Greene did not, has deprived her sex of an honor and an example which were lost to it by her age’s manner of thought, or lack of thought.

China, a country which supports such an overwhelming number of people, must long ago have been blotted out of existence but for two things—rice and silk.

Silk fabrics were first invented by the Empress Si-lung-chi, between three and four thousand years ago. Cotton was unknown to China till about eight hundred years ago, and the inhabitants of that country were almost universally clothed in silk. Even now more than half the garments of the empire are made from this material.

351

Silk was introduced to the notice of Europeans during the reign of Alexander the Great, and has since formed a most important article of trade between China and the European nations. Soon after its introduction into Europe a woman of the island of Cos, called Pamphila, invented the art of unweaving it and remanufacturing it into a fabric so fine that it was spoken of as “woven wind,” and yet sufficiently firm to allow of its adornment with embroidery and threads of gold, and to retain beautiful colors. Thus we came to have silk gauze.

More than forty years ago it was estimated that France received from silk an annual profit of over seven million dollars, and the value of the raw material each year is over twenty-five million dollars.

The education, the arts, the entire prosperity of the nation hinges on its revenues. This being true, the importance of that which a woman inventor did primarily for China, and through China for all the world, can scarcely be overestimated.

Whenever we see one of the mammoth straw shops which give employment to thousands, and place befitting head-gear within the reach of all, we should, if we knew the history of the straw bonnet’s evolution, think that here, and in the myriads of other manufactories scattered throughout the country, we have the concrete results of a woman’s invention.

In 1798 Miss Betsey Metcalf, of Providence, R. I., sat herself down to form from straw a bonnet which should resemble the costly imported Dunstable concoction which she had seen displayed in a shop window, the latter species of hat being much too expensive for the usual New England purse. The maiden succeeded well in her task, and at once straw hats begun to be manufactured.

Twelve years after the making of that trial bonnet it was estimated that the value of straw bonnets manufactured annually in Massachusetts alone was over half a million dollars. Massachusetts now produces over six hundred thousand straw hats and bonnets annually, and the city of Philadelphia manufactures over five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of straw headgear each year.

The Rhode Island Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Industry still preserves a fac-simile of this initial straw bonnet originated by Miss Metcalf.

The invention of engraving is claimed by several different nations, but the weight of testimony is in favor of the twins, sixteen years old, Alexander and Isabella Cunio, who lived in Ravenna, Italy, in the thirteenth century. This brother and sister made a series of pictures representing scenes in the life of Alexander the Great, which were executed in relief on blocks of wood, and polished by the sister. It is supposed that the engraving was printed by placing the paper on the block and pressing the hands upon it.

One has only to fancy the riches which the want of engraving would have withheld; the copies of great paintings, the illustrations of books and periodicals, 352 the reproductions of geological and ethnological discoveries, the temples and shrines and obelisks and monuments too far afield for poverty to compass a sight of them, but with which the man of humblest means may become acquainted through their many likenesses—one has only to fancy this to realize something of the world’s debt of gratitude to Isabella Cunio.

Many countries derive an immense revenue from the manufactory of lace. Lace making is the bread-winning trade of over two hundred thousand women. Valenciennes, Chantilly, Lisle, Alencon blond and Alencon point are all pillow laces—and the art of pillow lace making was invented by Barbara Uttman, of Annaberry, Saxony.

About the time this art was invented the mines were less productive than usual, and the embroidered veils which were made by the peasant women were in less demand. Multitudes were out of employment, and great want prevailed. Lace making provided work for thousands, and brought back comfort and happiness to a whole community. The industry spread rapidly, country after country taking it up. Many cities are famous for the variety of lace which they make. Caen and Bayeux are noted for their silk mantles, veils, scarfs and laces. Who does not know Alencon by its point lace? or Mirecourt for its elegant designs in thread lace? In Devonshire, England, seven or eight thousand girls are employed in making Honiton lace.

Lace is the universal ornament. It beautifies the infant’s frock and droops over the bosom of the mother. Priests and popes, kings and courtiers, generals and statesmen have found it fitting to embellish their attire. It adds richness to the apparel of the bride, and is handed down from mother to daughter, from friend to friend as dower most precious.

In our own day and country women have been busy inventing many small articles without which life would be harder and labor more wearisome. From October 1, 1892, to March 1, 1895, over seven hundred patents were granted to women. To Lucretia Lester, Cuba, N. Y., a patent for fire escape; to Margaret Knight for a sole cutting machine; to Mary E. Cook for a railway car stove; to Mary F. Blaisdell for a combined trunk and couch.

Miss Cora L. Turner has invented and patented a boiler especially adapted for securing great economy in storage of fuel, and for this reason likely to be of immense service in vessels, rendering it possible to make longer voyages without renewal of fuel.

Miss Turner’s father had during his life endeavored in vain to render this idea practical. It was after his death that the daughter took it up and carried it through to a successful issue.

“How to Obtain Letters Patent” is the title of a book which gives many valuable hints to would-be inventors. This book declares that although great 353 inventions bring more fame, little ones are more profitable. It states that the invention of a certain kind of ink brought its inventor sixty thousand dollars, and a chimney spring was worth fifty thousand dollars annually to its originator. We hear of millions being made by the invention of a shoe clasp, an envelope fastener, and many another equally small and seemingly insignificant things; and these are the kind of articles that women are constantly evolving.

In a paper entitled “How to Invent,” in the book referred to, the author says:

“The readiest way to invent is to keep thinking. Inventors should cultivate habits of observation. Examine things about and see how they are made, and how improved.”

If “genius is eternal patience” as has been declared, then women should be successful as inventors, for nothing requires more patience than invention. The dreaming tendencies of woman, also, should be a factor in her success as an inventor. Nothing is ever mentally discovered in the noise; everything photographs itself on the imagination “in the silence.” Edison says that “women have more fine sense about machinery in one minute than most men have in their whole existence.” If one has “fine sense” about one delicate thing why not about others?

The day is probably not far distant when we shall see as many important inventions by women as by men. While it is true of all important callings that “there is always room at the top,” it is particularly true of invention, for even our male Morses and Edisons and Wattses do not by any means jostle each other.

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355

LVI.
WOMEN AS BUSINESS MANAGERS.

HE number of women who are successfully managing large business houses or manufacturing concerns in the United States is not large, but it is annually growing. Those women who have taken such positions have usually been forced into them, in a way, but they have almost invariably proved successful.

Miss Helen A. Whittier, for instance, who is president of two of the largest cotton manufactories in America, did not go into the work from any desire to work, nor did she climb the ladder of success, step by step, as so many women have to do. Her father was the principal owner and manager of the Whittier cotton mills of Lowell, Mass. Just as age came stealing upon him, his only son was taken from him by death, and Miss Whittier, realizing how much he needed such assistance as only one could give who shared his interest, then went daily from a luxurious home into his office, taking many burdens from his shoulders, and gradually learning the details of his immense business. At his death she was left the principal heir, and with no near male relative who could take her father’s place in the business office. Consequently she kept her hold on the position, and was soon elected by the stockholders as president. For several years now she has attended to the details of this cotton mill, and in 1895, built and set in operation the second one in Atlanta, Ga. She is said to be the only woman president of a big cotton factory in this country. She is a finely educated and highly refined woman, mistress of all the so-called “accomplishments,” and 356 president of one of the largest woman’s clubs in the country. Miss Whittier, with her gentle, quiet ways and wonderful business ability, is a fine example of what the true American business woman may become.

In a similar way Miss Amanda M. Lougee became the head of a large rubber “gossamer” manufactory at Hyde Park, Mass. She was “silent” partner with her brother for some years. At his death she decided to look after the business herself, rather than to entrust it to strangers, or sacrifice what she had put into the business. She began in 1879 with the rubber-gossamer works, and has since developed the manufacture of double texture clothing, mould work, electrical tape, etc. She employs two hundred and seventy-five men and women, and occupies besides a factory at Clarendon Hills, three floors of a large block in Boston, with offices in New York and Chicago. Probably most men who deal with “A. M. Lougee, Treasurer,” do so in utter ignorance that they are dealing with a quiet little elderly woman.

Mrs. Harriet G. Minot is another woman who successfully runs a factory, hers being a large woolen factory in Vermont, which came to her from her father as a losing venture. She left her pleasant home in Somerville, Mass., and went to the little country village among the Green Mountains, remaining for several years, studying the best ways of improving her machinery. The result is, that she makes the finest blankets in the world to-day, although they are sold under the 357 private label of a large New York concern—who pay handsomely for the privilege! Almost nobody in the world knows that Mrs. Minot’s blankets are her own manufacture.

But she does more than that. She owns four of the principal bakeries in Boston, and she personally sees that they are properly managed. She is up at four every morning, and sometimes gets in town before her employes open the shops at six o’clock. She hires all her own help and attends personally to the pay-roll and its duties. She is one of the busiest women in the world; but if you were to see her at her club, at home, or in society, with her sweet face and ladylike charm of manner, you would never dream you were beholding an up-to-date business woman of the period!

Miss Charlotte Bates, of whom mention has been made before in these pages, has built up a very large business in the manufacture of reform underwear. In fact she has made a comfortable fortune; and, best of all, she has used it to establish and maintain a home for little destitute children. Her “Ella Reed Home,” at Sharon, Mass., was opened by no less important a personage than the late Phillips Brooks, bishop of Massachusetts; and he called this one of the most beautiful of all charities. Just think what a pleasure it must be to make a pleasant home for motherless little children, and to feel that you are doing it with your “very own” money.

Mrs. Nellie Russell Kimball, of Dunkirk, N. Y., has demonstrated the good results of industry and business calculation. Six years ago, in the beginning of her widowhood, she decided to continue the business left by her husband, this being a coal and wood yard situated near the shore of Lake Erie, entirely away from the active portion of the town. She was a young woman, had just recovered from a long illness, and did not feel equal, in any way, to the work before her, but she went bravely on. Under her excellent management the business has grown and is now large and thriving. In addition to a good local trade, she has the contract for supplying all the coal used by five dredges employed by the government for cleaning the harbor. This contract calls for about three thousand tons. She has to “coal up” two of these dredges every evening. She is her own and only bookkeeper, weighs every ton of coal sent out from her yard, hires and discharges the men and gives personal attention to the care of her horses. She is kind and pleasant to all who work for her, whether man or beast.

Her days are filled with work, which begins at 7.30 a. m. and ends at irregular hours in the evening. She is bright and cheerful and seems to be as happy as she is busy. Quite recently she has added a farm of eighty acres to her business cares.

Mrs. Emma Colman Hamilton is the owner of a large coal and wood yard in the same city. She also sells drain pipe, fire brick, tiles, cement, etc., has a 358 trusty man in her office, but oversees her books and the business generally herself. Besides this she was president of the Woman’s Educational and Industrial Union for three years, when she resigned on account of business and family cares. She was one of the principal workers in organizing the Dunkirk Library, which has been a decided success. She is interested in everything that benefits humanity, a broadminded, progressive woman, loved and respected by all who know her.

Mrs. Ella H. Eddy is founder, owner and manager of one of the most successful manufacturing plants in Worcester, Mass. She manufactures fine overgaiters and leggings, lamb-wool soles and machine buttonholes in shoes and clothing, and has a trade in these several productions as far west as Minnesota, and south to Alabama and Florida. She employs her own salesmen, who cover every important trade centre in the country. Bicycle, riding and hunting leggings and overgaiters for men and women are made in especially large quantities. She has a large machinery equipment and some twenty employes.

Another capable woman has made great success as manager of a New York wood-carpet establishment, and is in receipt of a five-thousand-dollar-a-year salary.

Many instances in New York could be cited where women have succeeded as business managers. A notable one is that of a young gentlewoman who is not only the working manager, but the real owner, of a large and successful photograph establishment, although her name does not appear. This is on Fifth avenue. The young woman commenced at the bottom round of the ladder, and step by step rose to the top. She first was paid ten dollars per week, then twenty, and so on until she received fifty dollars per week. Subsequently she was offered a share of the business, in order to retain her valuable services. When the proprietor had “made his pile” and wished to retire, the young woman had saved enough money from her salary to purchase the business, which she still runs successfully. As an outside investment, this woman photographer has recently built a splendid apartment house. It is original in design, and one of the novelties on the facade, introduced by the architect, is a portrait bust of this same clever and charming young woman.

Some people attribute such a career as this to luck—“blind luck, I tell you.” I think there is another name for such a career. The result is gained, I know, by simple, but sure, winning methods—industry, frugality, fidelity to employer, tact, good judgment, and downright cleverness. Let us “give credit where credit is due,” and “render unto Cæsar.”—you know the rest.

359

LVII.
IN GOVERNMENT SERVICE.

ANY young women, particularly those who have been brought up in a political atmosphere, turn naturally to government service when the question of bread-winning is put before them. This, perhaps, is natural, for certainly the government does offer many desirable positions which women can fill and fill well, and which are paid at a fair price for the labor performed and the hours observed. Within a few years, owing to the development of the civil service, it has not been so easy a matter to obtain these positions, and only women of education who were able to pass the severe examinations have been considered as candidates. Although a political pull is not without value, and, indeed, may be said to be almost necessary, yet it by no means possesses the power which it did in the days preceding the civil service examinations. After one has passed the examinations successfully, she who brings to her support some Congressman or other officials, is likely to be the first chosen, but a creditable passing of the examination is the first point to be gained.

It is surprising to note the number of positions, civil and governmental, which women are filling. Not only are they clerks in the departments at Washington, and in like capacity in the capitols of the States, but they are also postmistresses, notaries public, deputy constables, legislative engrossing clerks, supervisors and superintendents of schools, overseers of the poor, county clerks, examiners in chancery, and members of boards of education and charity. The latest position of public trust to which a woman has been appointed is that of inspector of streets. Mrs. A. E. Paul, of Chicago, has just been appointed to 360 attend to the work of cleaning the down-town business streets of Chicago. It was through her efforts that women were first employed by the authorities of that city to look after its house-cleaning. Mrs. Paul has given up all social attachments and other pursuits, and devotes all her energy to the work of cleaning and keeping the down-town streets. There is sentiment in Mrs. Paul’s devotion to this most trying work. She is a widow, and when her only child died of diphtheria several years ago, she resolved that the deadly and disease-laden atmosphere of the city must be purified. So earnest and determined has she been in this work that the city authorities, seeing her fitness for the task and her devotion to it, put the work into her hands. It is to her the work of salvation for other mothers’ little children, and it will be done in no perfunctory manner, but in such a way as to prove to every one who sees it that a woman can do for the public thoroughfare what she accomplishes for her own home, if the opportunity is but given her. To one who stops to think of the matter there is nothing surprising about this. Women have been the most devoted members of the village improvement societies which have wrought such changes in the rural districts, giving of their time, their substance and their thought to bring about the desired results. They care for the physical cleanliness of their town almost 361 as much as they do for its moral purity; indeed, to the average woman, the old saying that cleanliness is next to godliness is an important article in her civic as well as her personal creed.

Rumors have gone abroad of late to the effect that women are being crowded out of government service. If one may judge by figures, that rumor is entirely erroneous. It probably sprung up from the fact that during the last Cleveland administration Secretaries Carlisle and Smith openly announced that no woman’s work could possibly be worth more than $1200 a year, and then proceeded to follow their announcement by the wholesale cutting-off of the heads of the higher salaried women. Fortunately, this sadly prejudiced opinion did not obtain in other departments and the women were left in their positions, although there were much quaking and terror lest the example of the Secretaries of the Treasury and the Interior should be followed by some of the others.

Recent appointments seem to show that the confidence in the ability of women has been more firmly than ever established, some of the most arduous and important positions having been filled by them. A gentleman resident in Washington, Mr. Rene Bache, has gathered some valuable statistics and facts which will show just what positions are possible to women in the government at Washington. The Indian Bureau is offering just at present the best chances. The available places reserved for women under the Department of the Interior are numerous and well paid. Cooks at the schools and agencies, for example, get $500 a year, and are obliged to do no menial work. Their business is simply to teach the young Indian women how to cook in civilized fashion. It is the same way with the laundresses and seamstresses in that service, who receive from $400 to $500 a year, with the prospect of promotion to the office of matron. Such appointments are well worth having, notwithstanding the fact that the Indian schools and agencies are mostly scattered over the far West. For these institutions matrons were appointed during one year, one each from North Carolina, Ohio and Oregon, and the positions in question are worth from $500 to $600 a year. They are the only offices under government which are accessible to the married. For it is a fact, that the wife of any superintendent of an Indian school or agency is always a preferred candidate for the place of matron there. The Indian service calls also for a great many teachers; of these forty-three were appointed during the year which ended on the first of October, 1897. They get from $550 to $660 a year; two of them stationed at Fort Belknap, Montana, and Fort Louis, Colorado, are obliged to give instruction in vocal and instrumental music, besides the regular school branches.

The war which opened so many branches to women, as well as made bread-winning a necessity for hundreds, opened also the government offices. General Spinner, of the Treasury Department, was the first to employ them. A few were 362 taken as an experiment. To-day the personnel of the Treasury Department is half made up of women who do practically all of the money counting and ever so much more of the responsible work. There are, in all, about 15,000 women in the employ of the government in national offices, and of this number 6100 are in Washington. Of the rest 7500 are postmistresses and post-office clerks scattered over the country. The number of women in state and city positions equals, if not exceeds, the number in the national government, and this makes a large army employed in public positions and paid out of the public funds.

Only a few years ago all the women in government employ were on a level of mediocrity so far as status is concerned; they were all in subordinate positions. At present it is otherwise. There are women in places of authority in government service. One of them is chief librarian in the Bureau of Public Documents. Two mere girls were appointed only the other day to very responsible offices, as translators of French and Portuguese in the Bureau of American Republics at $1600 a year each. The women experts engaged in reading illegible addresses at the Post Office Department could not be replaced by equally competent men, and the same is true of the women who dissect and identify the paper money damaged by all sorts of accidents, which comes to the treasury for redemption.

Women are even invading the domain of science. One of the appointments during 1897 was of a female “agrostologist” from Tennessee at $900 a year. This term, being translated, signifies an expert in grasses, the study of which has been taken up by the Department of Agriculture. Already in government service there are women botanists, women ethnologists, while the most accurate living artist in the representation of insect life is a woman attached to the Bureau of Entomology.

Women, no more than men, shrink from hardships in their search for employment. The government Bureau of Education recently applied to the Civil Service Commission for four women teachers to go to Alaska. The Commission, doubting whether candidates would be easily forthcoming, sent a circular query to the ten highest names on its list. To its great surprise, nine out of the ten replied, they would be glad to go, and of these the ranking four were selected.

The number of women typewriters and stenographers is slowly increasing, ten having been admitted during the year 1897. These get from $600 to $900 a year. The Patent Office has a woman linguist at a salary of $720, whose business it is to translate French and German patents, in order that the patent examiners may know about foreign inventions. Another translator is employed in the Department of State, where she draws $1200 a year. In her examination she stood at the head, with a much larger percentage than any of her rivals. The requirements included half a dozen languages as well as a knowledge of other things which might have troubled a Cambridge senior wrangler. She answered 363 every thing correctly, and although failing to get the position in the Department of War for which she was trying, she stepped at once into a superior position in the Department of State.

Vanceburg, Ky., and Allegheny, Pa., have each of them a woman deputy sheriff. Miss Florence Klotz, of Allegheny, is a young girl only eighteen years of age, but she serves warrants, summonses and subpœnas with all the authority of a male constable. Miss Klotz’s father is an alderman whose regular constable was an old man who had an inconvenient way of being sick or invisible when he was wanted for duty. On one of these occasions the despairing alderman pressed his daughter into service. That settled the matter. The girl constable proved to be the pluckiest, quickest and most reliable one in town. Her first mission was to serve a subpœna on a farmer living four miles out of town. Miss Florence put on her bicycle dress, mounted her wheel, and went after her man. When she came back tired, muddy, but triumphant, she found a crowd in front of her father’s office to welcome her. “I served them, papa,” she exclaimed, and then, girl-like, she cried, even though she was constable. Before she went into the constabulary, she wheeled through Allegheny County, taking orders for her father’s candy manufactory. In one case Miss Klotz acted as counsel as well as constable. A butcher had kicked in the door when he found his hallway locked up by the baker, who, with his family, occupied the rest of the house. The locking was by the order of the landlord who demanded that it be done at 10 p. m. Miss Klotz brought her man to court, also served a score of subpœnas for witnesses, arranged the details of the hearing, cross-examined the witnesses, and finally had the case dismissed on her own recommendation that each of the parties be furnished with keys. The costs were divided, and the young lawyer-constable smiled with delight as she counted over her share. She says she doesn’t know what she would do if she ran against an ugly customer, but she declares, with a snap of her black eyes, that she would get him. She is the pet of the municipal court, and if she ever sent word for help the entire retinue of clerks, heads of departments, and underlings, would turn out to the rescue of Constable Florence.

Miss Lillie Fountain, the deputy sheriff of Lewis County, Ky., is a young woman whose first experience as bread-winner was as school teacher. She then became an attendant and teacher in the State School for Feeble-minded, and left that to undertake the duties of her present office. She is especially successful in dealing with the insane, and her first work in her new position was to take a trip of ninety miles, carrying a woman to the Insane Hospital of the State. She has the respect and confidence of all with whom she is associated, and is already much relied upon by the superior officers.

The women lighthouse-keepers are the modern heroines of real life romance. Grace Darling and Ida Lewis were the pioneers of their calling; and the latter, 364 who is now known as Mrs. Wilson, is still in charge of Lime Rock light in Narragansett Bay. But there are others of efficiency and courage, whose lights shine for them while their names rest in the obscurity of government records. There are no less than thirty women lighthouse-keepers in the employ of the United States. Some of them have been in the service forty years, or almost since the present organization, which dates back from 1852. Mrs. A. C. Murdock, the keeper of the light at Rondout on the Hudson River, and Mrs. Nancy Rose, keeper of the light at Stony Point, were appointed in 1861; Julia F. Williams, at Santa Barbara, Cal., in 1865; Mrs. Maria Younghaus, at Biloxi, Miss., in 1867; and Mary J. Succow, at Pass Manchac, La., in 1873. These female slaves of the lamp are notably careful and conscientious in the discharge of their duties, and it is remarked that they endure the lonesome, monotonous life of the light-keeper better than men. The salaries range from $400 to $1400, and the keepers have comfortable houses, with fuel, lights and provisions furnished by the government.

In state and municipal offices many of the clerical positions are held by women, and in one case at least, a woman has been appointed State Librarian. For some years Miss Harriet P. Dickerman was at the head of the Corporation Bureau in the Department of State in Massachusetts, taking the position on the death of its previous incumbent whose chief clerk she had been. By the civil 365 service rules she was next in the order of promotion, and the fact of her being a woman did not influence her appointment. She continued in that position, filling it most creditably, for a number of years, when she was transferred to the Archives Department.

In Michigan a woman has been appointed Game Warden for Grand Traverse County. During May of 1897 the State, Game and Fish Warden’s Department prosecuted 109 alleged violators of the law, and convicted 96, growing out of 149 complaints. All but three of the convictions were obtained for violation of the fish laws, and the majority of these cases were established by Mrs. Neal. The duties of Game Warden are to keep a sharp lookout for violators of the game and fish laws. As Grand Traverse County is densely wooded and has many lakes, Mrs. Neal will be kept busy in seeking out and bringing to justice violators of the law. She handles a gun like an expert, rows a boat, and is a skillful woodsman and knows every inch of the country she has to patrol. She usually makes a trip over the entire county once a week. When out after the violators of the game law, she rides over the country on horseback, and when she comes to a lake, secures a boat and with a steady, swift oar, she rapidly covers her territory made up of water.

366

LVIII.
ARCHITECTS, CIVIL ENGINEERS AND DESIGNERS.

HE professions of architect and civil engineer are two in which, until recently, it would probably have been impossible to find successful women workers. Even now the number is not great, but the success of those who are now at work in those lines shows that this work for women is perfectly feasible.

When one speaks of women as architects, the name of Miss Sophia B. Hayden, of Boston, comes into mind as the designer of the superb Woman’s Building at the World’s Fair at Chicago, in 1893. Even if the beautiful building, looking out on the lagoon where Venetian gondolas floated, is only a dream now, its memory will always remain as a proof of what women architects can do. The artistic designs of the interiors of several of the separate rooms in the same building also showed what women designers could do.

Two young women who have won success as architects are Miss Mary N. Gannon and Miss Alice J. Hand, of New York. Both came to that city as students at the School of Applied Design, and graduated in the Class of 1894. In the same year they entered the competition for the plans of a hospital in San Francisco, and received the award. This hospital is now completed and in running order, and is pronounced by physicians a model of sanitation, convenience and architectural beauty.

Miss Gannon, when asked about her work, and how other young women could learn it, said: “One can never master the intricacies of architectural drawing except under the instruction of practical architects. Theoretical training amounts to but little; but practical knowledge, the most important thing, we acquired at the school. Of course, one must have a thoroughly good mathematical knowledge, and a love for art is necessary.

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“We make our own measurements, and having made an exhaustive study of the different building materials in the market, we know just how much everything should cost, and can give a correct estimate of expense with every plan. We not only draw our designs but superintend the building in person, except in New York, where an engineer is always chosen for that purpose. Among other buildings which we have put up was one of those at the Atlanta Exposition, and a pretty little Dutch cottage at Asbury Park, called Gretchen Cottage, in honor of Margaret Bottome, of the King’s Daughters. We have also built a number of suburban cottages and several in the Catskills and at the seashore.

“A point upon which we are determined is that we will not cut rates. The cheapening in all the departments of work undertaken by women is deplorable, and causes men in the same professions to discourage women, whom they correctly hold responsible for the lowering of wages. This is why men as a rule are opposed to women usurping the professions usually considered as the prerogative of men. From the beginning we decided that if our work was equally meritorious with that of men in the same line, we should demand equal recognition, although we were women. The best architects encourage and praise our efforts. It is from the insignificant and unsuccessful ones that the opposition comes; those who are not sure of themselves criticise us and are afraid of us as competitors.”

Miss Gannon and Miss Hand have made a special study of the tenement house problem. Having finally decided that they could not properly understand 368 the conditions which confront people who live in tenement houses unless they lived in one themselves, they hired two small rooms in a moderate class tenement house, had their laundry done there, bought their provisions at the same shops their neighbors did, and in fact lived just like them. Of what they learned, Miss Gannon, writing not long afterward in Godey’s magazine said:

“We discovered that the rental paid for these miserable rooms was greater in proportion than that for rooms in the better quarters of the city; that enormous prices were charged for gas and fuel. The conditions were unsanitary, the ventilation poor, and there were no bathing privileges. The poor overworked women were obliged to bring buckets of coal up four and five pairs of stairs, do their laundry work and cooking in a kitchen without light and ventilation, and inhabit with their families an apartment where privacy was impossible.

“After gaining a thorough insight into the habits of these unfortunates, Miss Hand and myself set to work to improve the sanitary conditions of the tenement houses. Our plans have been approved not only by philanthropists, but by practical business men. We believe it is possible to erect buildings for the poor, which shall be healthful, beautiful, and homelike, and where light, ventilation, and every convenience shall be provided at no greater cost than in the miserable tumbledown tenements that families are now obliged to occupy, and that, moreover, they will be profitable to those who invest their money in them. This is in no wise a purely philanthropic scheme, but is intended to provide healthful homes for working men’s families who must live in the crowded districts of New York. The tenement house as it stands to-day is a reproach to the humanitarianism of this enlightened century. It is a crying evil, and one which should be redressed without delay.”

Miss Marian S. Parker enjoys the distinction of being a practical woman civil engineer. Miss Parker, when asked to tell how she came to take up this branch of work, said, “At first I thought I would study architecture, because plans and designs had always had a great attraction for me. Then as I became more and more interested in mathematics I came to believe that some work involving that branch of science would be more to my liking. Civil engineering seemed to be just the thing, and so when I was fifteen years old I began in earnest to study for that.

“I had no trouble in getting the education. My father is a graduate of Ann Arbor, so I naturally decided to go there, especially as that school is coeducational. I prepared myself, was examined, and was admitted to the regular course in civil engineering, just the same as if I had been a man. I have no doubt some of the faculty, and perhaps some of the students, thought it strange, but no one expressed any unfavorable opinions or discouraged me. I could not have been better treated than by the professors and the men in my class. I took the regular 369 course, except that in the senior year I took architectural work instead of surveying, because I thought that would do me the most good.

“I was fortunate in getting a position easily. I had expected to have to encounter a great deal of prejudice, but this was not the case. I was offered a position with the same salary that is given to men doing the same work, and the same chances of advancement. Two weeks after I had graduated I was at work.”

As in the case of Miss Gannon and Miss Hand, Miss Parker has had her attention attracted to the subject of model tenement houses, and she has done a great deal of work in designing and building these. The sufferings which the women in the poor houses in the slums of the cities have to encounter seem to appeal especially to other women, and it is only natural that women who have learned how to do things should desire to plan some way to help these unfortunate people.

Asked what she thought would be the necessary qualifications for a woman wishing to take up the same work, Miss Parker replied, “First of all to make a success of such a career, a woman must be thoroughly and naturally fond of mathematics. Not merely algebra, and the like, but applied mathematics. Civil engineering is really the application of pure mathematics to construction. Then, too, a woman must be willing to work with all the little intricate and complex details that are part of mathematical service. She must be careful, accurate and patient.

“The whole system is made up of trifles, to be sure, but if every trifling detail is not exact and perfect, serious accidents may occur.”

In the office where Miss Parker is engaged she has her desk, table, and high stool, just the same as the other assistants do. For a year and a half she was employed upon the construction of a large hotel, then in process of building. She worked on all parts of the structure, detailing and designing, and making the shop drawings. The shop drawings are the plans for the workmen to follow, and must be absolutely correct, even to the smallest fraction of an inch. The work is of a difficult nature and involves great responsibility. Estimating the amount of materials necessary is another detail which she is often called on to calculate.

The women who are finding congenial and profitable employment as designers is greater than in either of the two classes just referred to. As designers of fabrics, carpets and wall papers it is only natural that they should excel. The usual way in which a woman fits herself for such work is by attendance upon some art school. Whether manufacturers would accept young women or girls, as some of them accept boys, and pay them a trifle while they are learning to design is a question. At any rate, without the advantages of being in the midst of such 370 work the processes have been mastered by women, and acceptable designs produced.

And so scientific education is helping women to “find their places,” as Huxley expresses it. To these pioneers in new fields other women look to see proved their abilities, and disproved the old-time theories against the limitations of the sex.

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LIX.
WOMEN AT THE BAR.

Mrs. Alice Parker Lesser was admitted to the bar in California the same year in which Miss Green was admitted to the bar of Massachusetts. She practiced for a year in that State, then came to her Eastern home and sought admittance to the Suffolk bar. Although Mrs. Lesser, who was then Miss Alice Parker, received her legal education in California, she was an Eastern girl, born and educated in Lowell, Mass., the only child of Dr. Hiram Parker, a leading homœopathic physician of that city. Being left an orphan, not needy, but with a desire for more and more practical knowledge, she at first, through the influences with which she was surrounded, was inclined to become a physician: but her health failed, she was obliged to give up her studies, and she went to California to recover; but there she was given up to die and plans and preparations were made for the final return and disposition of her body—not a very cheerful prospect. Destiny had a different road for her. She suddenly took a turn for the better, and in that wonderful climate her improvement was very rapid, and in a very short time she was seen riding horseback and became a keen huntswoman. With returning health and having her own property to care for, she began the study of law for her own convenience, but its infatuation seized her and she determined to make it a life profession. While Mrs. Lesser is fearless and firm, she has the modesty of true womanhood and is unobtrusive in all her ways. So accustomed had she been to a sexless deference to her abilities, and to being the acknowledged comrade in law, she was unprepared for the different sentiment which prevailed in Boston toward the woman with a defined purpose of a life of usefulness on the basis of value for value received—in other words, toward a woman in a professional and commercial sense. Mrs. Lesser has a good practice, and as a counselor-at-law, is not only grave and judge-like, but her keen wit, dry humor and eminently social nature make her one of the most entertaining of women. While in California, Mrs. Lesser, then Miss Parker, was made referee—that is, a lawyer in prominent 373 standing appointed to hear cases in place of the judge and submitting testimony to him—a legal office that does not exist in the New England States, but equivalent there to the Master in Chancery.

The pioneer lawyers of the United States were Mrs. Belva Lockwood and Mrs. Myra Bradwell. Mrs. Lockwood fairly fought her way through opposition. State after State refused to admit her to the bar even after she was fully qualified and passed the most rigid examination. Mrs. Bradwell was the wife of Judge Bradwell of Illinois, and studied with her husband from genuine love of the profession. She was appointed editor of the “Court Register” of the State, a position which she held until her death. Mrs. Bradwell went abroad as representative to several congresses, and was an expert in international law. Her only daughter is also a lawyer, and after her admittance to the bar was married to a young Chicago lawyer, with whom she is in legal, as well as domestic, partnership.

Mrs. Carrie Burnham Kilgore was the first woman lawyer in Philadelphia. She was a school teacher and began to study law in 1875, when such narrow prejudice existed against woman receiving the benefit of a university course, that accompanying the refusal of her application for admission to the Law School of the University of Pennsylvania, was the courteous observation of the dean, that the time for him to resign would be when negroes and women were admitted. Mrs. 374 Kilgore persevered sixteen years before she became a recognized member of the bar.

A woman of Bucharest, Roumania, has been given the degree of LL. D. She is held in high esteem in her own country. Her marvelous talents developed early, and at the age of seventeen years she gained her B. A. degree and went to Paris where she studied law for five years, passing brilliant examinations through this period, until in 1889 she received the degree of LL. D., taking the first prize in the final examination. Her treatise entitled “The Legal Position of the Mother in Roumania” was considered the most comprehensive work of the kind that had ever been written, and its five hundred pages showed an extraordinary acquaintance with both ancient and modern law. Soon after the bestowal of her degree Mlle. Bilcesco petitioned the legal authorities of Bucharest to permit her name to be placed on the roll of advocates, a demand which was agreed to unanimously.

Mrs. Anna C. Fall is another successful Massachusetts lawyer, being a partner of her husband in his Boston office, and having an office in Malden of her own.

Miss Amy Acton and Miss Alline Marcy are the two women who have entered the profession purely and simply to make a living out of it. They are working as a man works, just for money, while most of the others are doing it for pure love of the profession. Miss Marcy occupied an important position with the Massachusetts Title Insurance Company for some time, and is now in the State House at Boston in the Realty Department, her special work being that of looking up titles. She is one of the best authorities on the subject in the State. Miss Acton is at Dayton, Ohio, in the legal department of one of the large manufacturing concerns. She is practically the head of the department, and attends personally to all details of contract and other legal work. She draws a handsome salary.

One of the early lawyers was Mrs. Clara H. Nash, who was admitted to the bar in Maine in 1872, and Mrs. Marilla M. Ricker, who does not attend strictly to law, but devotes much of her time to political writing.

In New York, Miss Nellie Robinson has recently won two cases in the Court of Special Sessions, and is being talked about as a rising young lawyer. On being asked whether she would advise girls to become lawyers, she said she would not, unless they were seriously in earnest and felt a special calling for it. “It is,” said Miss Robinson, “a hard life. The nervous strain of court practice is wearing even to men, and women are much less able to endure it. I would certainly advise girls to study law as part of a valuable practical education, but I would discourage them from attempting court practice unless it is necessary. It is useless to deny that there is a prejudice against woman lawyers. I mean among the men in the profession. When I first began to practice I had the 375 feminine idea of the social courtesy extended by men to women, and I thought everything was going to be perfectly lovely; but I found out my mistake. If I wanted to win, I had to fight tooth and nail. I did it, but it isn’t every woman who would be physically able to endure the strain.”

A young woman recently graduated at the Union College of Law in Chicago. She is entirely blind, and during the lecture course her mother was her constant companion and read from the text-books to her. Miss Lilian Blanche Fearing was one of four students whose records were so nearly equal that the committee appointed to award the scholarship prize decided to divide it equally among the four. The blind girl has already been admitted to the Illinois bar by the Supreme Court, at Springfield, and is said to give great promise in her profession.

Mrs. Ella Knowles Haskell, the assistant attorney-general of Montana, differs from Miss Robinson regarding the profession of law as a suitable one for woman. She says: “I think the vocation of law is a good one for women who are willing to work early and late in the interests of their clients, and who will give attention to details, no matter how unimportant they may seem to be. A woman taking up the profession of law should have a logical and a reasoning mind, a good education, and should have already learned the indispensable lesson of how to concentrate the entire mind force on the work at hand. She should also possess a good share of sound common sense. With these qualifications, a woman should succeed in law as well as a man, but when we think of the great number of men who never attain success, we must not be surprised if women, bright and clever though they may be, should also fail.”

Mrs. Haskell graduated at Bates College, Lewiston, Me., in 1880. She then began to read law with the view, first, of being able to attend to her own business affairs; gradually she became more absorbed in the study, and after three years went to Helena, Montana, where she continued her studies in a law office. She was soon able to pass an examination for the bar, and then arose an obstacle which taxed her best efforts to surmount. Women were not allowed to practice, and she introduced and worked for a bill which, after great opposition, passed the legislature, and she was permitted to appear in court as a full-fledged attorney. She is the only woman lawyer in Montana and she has earned large fees. One was for $10,000. In 1893 she was nominated on the Populist ticket for attorney-general of the State, and the election was so close that for three weeks it was not known who was the successful candidate. It proved, however, to be General Haskell. Immediately after his election he appointed Miss Knowles as his assistant, and in less than two years they were married.

Other women have graduated from the law schools who have studied simply to be able to manage their own business affairs; in fact, it has become quite the custom for rich women who have large estates to take a course in law that they 376 may better understand the value of their property and its wise administration. Among the women who have studied for this purpose are Mrs. Theodore Sutro and Miss Helen Gould, of New York. So far as she possibly can, every woman should know the points of law which will be of service to her should she be left either to settle an estate or to manage a business.

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LX.
CHANCES FOR COLORED GIRLS.

URING the past few years colored girls have been coming rapidly to the front and making their way in the professional and business world. Opportunities are opening for them that once were firmly closed, and they are making the most of these opportunities, like the sensible women that they are. Race prejudice, although still existing to a certain degree, is much softened, and the girl of ability belonging to the colored race finds entrance, if not welcome, in almost any vocation which she attempts. This is true more largely of the professions than of the trades, because with broader education comes a broader view, and the men and the women who are met in professional life are more courteous than are those in the lower strata to these new invaders of the field of endeavor.

A great deal of comment has been made on the fact that a colored girl was given a degree at Vassar College with the Class of ’97, her classmates and the faculty not knowing that she was of African descent until her college career was near its close. She was called the most beautiful girl in the college, and her mental attainments ranked with her beauty. It is no matter of comment because a colored girl entered the Freshman Class of ’97 of Boston University, although she was the first colored woman who ever entered the college of liberal arts as a regular candidate for the degree of A. B. The color line has never been drawn at this coeducational institution either in theory or practice, so when Miss Ida Hill, of Millerton, N. Y., applied for admission as a regular student, she was cordially received. She prepared for college at the Gilbert Academy, Winstead, Conn., from which school she was graduated with honor the June previous to her entering Boston University. Dr. Clark, the principal of Gilbert, is a Boston University graduate, and it was through his recommendation that she applied to the college on Beacon Hill. Miss Hill is exceedingly attractive. She has a 378 pleasant manner and a face that bears the traces of refinement. She dresses in excellent taste, is pretty and graceful, and altogether a decided acquisition to the college. It is said that the several secret societies, to be a member of which is a badge of social prestige, are all anxious to claim Miss Hill as a member.

Just after the war Miss Charlotte Fortin attracted much attention in Boston by her brilliant translations of the Erckmann-Chartrain novels. Miss Fortin was a young quadroon who had been educated abroad, and was a girl with rare qualities of mind. She was quite a protege of Colonel T. W. Higginson, Dr. Samuel G. Howe, and other members of the Boston literary guild. She was the first colored woman to attain distinction.

Cambridge has among its most valued teachers a colored woman, Miss Maria Baldwin, who is principal of the Agassiz Grammar School, situated in the most aristocratic and exclusive part of the University city. Miss Baldwin was educated in the Cambridge public schools, finishing her education at one of the State Normal Schools. On her graduation she applied for the position of teacher in the Cambridge public schools. Her claims to consideration were upheld by many of the leading Cambridge people, and the committee determined to give her a trial. They knew it would not do to attach her to a school in the poorer parts of the city, because the ignorant foreign element, of which these schools were largely composed, would resent the idea of being taught by a colored woman, so she was given a position in the Agassiz school, which is largely attended by the children of the University professors and that choice coterie which makes up Cambridge’s most delightful social element. Not only was no opposition offered to Miss Baldwin, but she has been liked and revered as a teacher by the children who were under her training, and her work has been respected and honestly valued by the school committee. She not only kept the position upon which she entered, but by degrees was advanced, until now she is the principal of the school, and Cambridge people would resent the idea of supplementing her by any other teacher.

Miss Baldwin has also been successful as a lecturer, and during the summer of ’97 gave one of the lectures in the famous Old South course, her subject being “Harriet Beecher Stowe and Her Work for Anti-slavery through the Medium of the Story.” No lecture in the course, which had among its other speakers such men as Secretary Long, Mr. John Fiske, and others of the same stamp, was so warmly commended or so enthusiastically reported as the one given by Miss Baldwin. She closed her lecture with some comments on the question of how far the efforts to educate the negro had been successful. She said, the answer could not yet be given, but there were indications to mark what it would be. The hardest thing of all to bear was the contempt of the white race. The white man kept telling the black that he had not the capacity for the highest development. Something, however, had kept the negro from believing that himself. In the little attempt 380 here, the little struggle there, there was evident at least an aspiration. Perhaps no more striking addition to this comment of Miss Baldwin on the question of the capacity of the negro for development could be made than to quote one of her own final sentences. What shall be said of a race one of whose women can say this: “It is not easy to tell what genius is, but there are certain things by which we recognize it—intense personal impressions of life; fresh, strong and direct speech; swift, irresistible rushes of power; newness, unexpectedness, exuberance, and nearly every page of, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, bears this royal mark.”

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Topeka, Kansas, has a colored woman lawyer, Miss Lutie Lytle. She says of herself:

“I am not the first colored woman in America who has studied law, but I am the first to practice it. Miss Platt, of Chicago, was the pioneer of my race in the study of law, but she intended to acquire legal knowledge only as an assistance to her in stenographic work. I will practice and make it my life work. I may open an office in Topeka, but my ambition prompts me to begin practice either in New York or in Washington. Those who have taken an interest in me recommend New York.

“I graduated from the Law Department of the Central Tennessee College on September 8, and was admitted to the bar by Judge Cooper, of Nashville, who, although a typical Southern gentleman, was kind enough to me to bid me Godspeed in my profession, and professed a hope and prophecy of my success.

“My favorite is constitutional law, but I shall have no specialty. I like constitutional law because the anchor of my race is grounded on the Constitution, and whenever our privileges are taken away from us or curtailed, we must point to the Constitution as the Christian does to his Bible. It is the great source and Magna Charta of our rights, and we must know it in order to defend the boon that has been given to us by its amendments. It is the certificate of our liberty and our equality before the law. Our citizenship is based on it, and hence I love it.

“In the North the letter of the Constitution is better observed than in the South, but in the South the spirit of the Constitution is not dead. In the North the colored people are given all the privileges of spending money, but not of earning it. In the South the negroes are given the privilege of earning money, but not of spending it.

“What I mean is this: In the South the white people give our people employment side by side with themselves in a most generous spirit, but they are not allowed to spend money side by side with them in the opera house, in the restaurant, in the street car, nor even in the saloon. In the North the people are niggardly in giving the colored people a chance to earn a dollar, and they are generous in allowing them to spend it elbow to elbow with them at the theatre or anywhere else.

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“The South discriminates in punishment for violations of the law as between the Caucasian and the negro. If a poor negro is suspected of a capital crime he is immediately lynched; if a white man is convicted of a capital offence he is given a slight jail sentence. That is not right; both should be justly dealt with and punished with equal severity.

“In connection with my law practice, I intend to give occasional lectures, but not in any sense for personal profit. I shall talk to my own people and make a sincere and earnest effort to improve their condition as citizens. I shall also talk to the white people and appeal to them for fair play to my race. I am not a radical in anything, nor do I intend to be. I believe in efficacy of reason to bring about the best results.

“I conceived the idea of studying law in a printing office where I worked for years as a compositor. I read the newspaper exchanges a great deal and became impressed with the knowledge of the fact that my own people especially were the victims of legal ignorance. I resolved to fathom its depths and penetrate its mysteries and intricacies in hopes of being a benefit to my people. I very soon ascertained that it was more deep and intricate than I first supposed it to be. It requires hard work to master it, if such a thing is possible at all. It is a great study and I am infatuated with it. I have devoted some time to the study and cultivation of elocution and oratory, and I intend to improve myself in them.”

The Boston Herald has on its editorial staff a young colored woman, Miss Lilian Lewis. Miss Lewis is a graduate of the Girls’ High and Normal School 382 of Boston and began her newspaper career very early after her graduation. Her first position was that of private secretary and assistant to the then society editor, Mrs. Anna M. B. Ellis, now of London. Upon Mrs. Ellis’ retirement from the position, it was taken by Miss Lewis, and she filled it very creditably for a period of years. Then feeling that she was capable of stronger and more original work, she gave up the position, still continuing with the Herald, however, and became one of its corps of special writers. When it is understood that the Herald writers are considered among the most brilliant of the newspaper men and women of the city, it will be easily seen that Miss Lewis must have been possessed of genuine ability to attain a position among them. Besides her newspaper work Miss Lewis has written several exceedingly clever stories, and has been so successful in that line that she sometimes threatens to abandon newspaper work for the field of fiction.

Mrs. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, widow of the late colored Judge Ruffin, of the Massachusetts bench, has edited for some time a weekly paper devoted to the interests of her race, particularly to the women. Mrs. Ruffin is a handsome, stately woman, with the airs of a grande dame, highly intelligent and refined. She makes her paper exceedingly bright and full of interest. She is interested in charitable and philanthropic movements and is a member of the Woman’s Press Club of New England, as is Miss Lewis also.

Miss Dora Gould, of Dedham, Mass., is a graduate of the State Normal Art School, and has been a successful teacher in one of the race schools in the South. Miss Gould, who also possesses fine literary ability, is a frequent contributor to Mrs. Ruffin’s paper, writing many of the book criticisms and articles treating on purely literary topics.

Many girls who have been educated in the schools of the North have gone South and found a fine field of labor among their own people as teachers. The list of colored women of attainment would not be complete without the name of Mrs. Booker T. Washington, the wife of the principal of Tuskegee University, in Alabama. Mrs. Washington is an inspiration, not only to the girls who come under her immediate influence, but to all colored girls with ambition and ability. It is to women like her and Miss Baldwin that the women of the negro race may look for the gradual beating down of the race prejudice which still exists to a marked degree, although it has lessened materially during the last quarter of a century.

With examples like these and that of the other women who have been quoted, the young colored woman of the present and of the future may feel that no path in the professions is barred to her, but that there is work for her hand to do if she has courage and perseverance to attempt it.

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LXI.
TRAINED NURSES.

HE task of caring for those who are ill is one for which, by very common consent, women have always been allowed to be particularly fitted.

Many years ago Sir Walter Scott wrote of woman:

Mothers, sisters, wives, cared for their relatives who were ill, until through many generations of exercise, what may have been at first only the natural maternal instinct came to be developed in some women until they had what was called “a gift for taking care of the sick.”

Because they could do the work of nursing better than other women, and because people must be ill who had no mother, sister or wife to care for them, the work of these self-taught nurses came to have a distinct market value. Partly because there grew to be a demand for a greater number of nurses than then existed, and partly because, in these later years, people have come to see that very often, in the absence of the physician, the life of the patient depended on the nurse knowing, in some sudden emergency, just what should be done and how to do it, there began to be a demand for women who should have this knowledge. The trained nurse has been the result.

Compared numerically the number of women at work as trained nurses will always be very much greater than the number of men in the same profession. The writer has asked a successful woman physician, who has been practicing for the last fifteen years in a large city, to write out the results of her observations during this time on trained nursing as an occupation for women.

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“So nearly as I remember now,” she says, “the first training-school for nurses in this country was established early in the ’70’s, by an English woman, at Bellevue Hospital, in New York. Since then similar institutions have sprung up all over the country, and the demand for the work of the graduates has been so great that women have flocked to this new field of labor until it is safe to say that the number at work to-day is at least a hundred times what it was five years ago. As a result, if I was asked what I think about the desirability of women entering upon this line of work now, I should say that I think the field is probably about full. In saying that, however, I should wish to add another statement which I believe to be equally true.

“The women who first became trained nurses took up the work as many men and women study medicine; because they had a special fitness for it which led them to look conscientiously upon this as their ordained life work. Since then the commercial advantages of the field have led many other women to enter it, regardless of the question whether or not they have any liking or fitness for it. The result has been that there are now many trained nurses who will always be of only indifferent ability in the work, and so, while the field may seem to be full, I am convinced that any woman who has tact and a liking for the work, who will thoroughly fit herself, and then is willing to work hard, will find profitable employment.

“Many young women seek this field because they have an idea that the work is easy. A greater mistake was never made. There are rare cases which a fortunate nurse may sometimes obtain, where the nurse’s work is little more than that of a companion, but they are indeed rare. In general it is hard, confining work, with long hours, day or night, sometimes both. It is true that very often a young woman who has no organic disease, but who may not have been well, finds herself grow stronger and better after she has been for some time a pupil in a nurse’s training-school. When this is the case her friends are very apt to think, and say, that this is because the work of a nurse is easy. The real reason is very much more likely to be that the change from the irregular hours of home life to the regular routine of a hospital, and the increased knowledge of the laws of hygiene and physiology, are what has caused the improvement.

“The first thing a young woman should do, if she thinks of becoming a trained nurse, is to go to her physician and be thoroughly examined to see if she is physically well enough to take up the work. If she has any organic disease whatever, she should at once dismiss the idea of becoming a trained nurse.

“Thorough training can be had only at a training-school connected with some hospital. As a general thing the larger the hospital the better the school, for the reason that the experience is so much wider. The pupil must expect to 385 stay at least two years, while the best schools are now extending that time to three years, and recommending four.

“The work will not be easy. The hours in most schools are from 7 a. m. to 8 p. m. for day duty, and from 8 p. m. to 7 a. m. for night duty. Of course there are stated periods for rest and recreation. The young woman who knows nothing of what the drill may be, and goes to her duties expecting to assist at a delicate operation the first day, may be surprised to know that her first task will probably be the scrubbing of floors, and the second, the scrubbing of newly arrived patients, quite likely to be a good deal more dirty than the floors. In time, the other duties come, though, a steady development from one thing to another.

“Apropos of the need of training, even in these first duties, there came not so very long ago to one of the great New York training schools, seeking to become a nurse, the daughter of one of the most famous poets America has produced. The second day she was there she was set to work to bathe an old woman patient just brought in. In this case ‘scrub’ would have been the better word, for there seemed to be good reason to believe the patient’s assertion that she had not taken 386 a bath for fifteen years. The new pupil had energy and determination, though, and she did the task set her so thoroughly that the patient died the next day, from the direct effects, so the doctors said, of her bath.

“One advantage about this work has been that the expense of learning has been small, and from the very first there has been some income. The only expense is that of the uniform which the nurses are required to wear, and since these must be of cotton, and must be worn all the time, the cost is apt to be less than ordinary clothing for the same length of time. From the very first, too, the pupil receives not only board and lodging, but a certain sum, even if small, for wages. I think there are some of the Canadian hospitals where the pay is only seven dollars a month, for the first year, but I do not know of any in the States where the wages are less than ten dollars for the first year, and from that up to sixteen dollars for the last year.

“Girls wishing to enter a training school must make application, and then wait until there is an opening for them. The number which can be taken at almost any school is limited, and of late there have been so many would-be pupils that it is often necessary to wait some time.

“So far as wages after leaving the school are concerned, the best nurses in large cities, except in some very special cases, can command twenty-one dollars a week for ordinary diseases, and twenty-five dollars for contagious diseases. From that the price comes down to ten dollars a week in smaller places. The woman who is willing to go out into the country towns and smaller cities will not be able to command quite so high prices as her city sister, but on account of the lack of competition her employment will be so much more constant that I am inclined to think her income will equal that of the city woman. It should be remembered that even if she is to be employed a good portion of the time, the nurse must have a home to which she can come when not at work. The expense of keeping a room, or a suite of rooms, in the town is very much less than in the city.

“If I was to add a word of advice to young women who are trained nurses, or hope to become such, it is to emphasize the need of tact. The difference between hospital nursing and private nursing is very great. Very many trained nurses fail, or at least fall far short of success because they have not the tact to adjust themselves to the changed conditions into which they come to work. It is no less necessary that they be exact, and insist on being allowed to strictly carry out the doctor’s orders, but it is possible to do this and still ‘get along’ with the patient and the family. The nurse who does not do this runs the risk of serious injury to her patient from the uncomfortable atmosphere with which she surrounds herself.

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“Try and put some heart into your work. Don’t look upon it simply as a means of earning money. Don’t feel that the giving of powders at the appointed 388 time, and the shaking up of pillows, are all the duties which you owe your patient.”

It was in this special tact and thoughtfulness that “Mother” Bickerdyke, perhaps the most famous nurse this country has ever seen, excelled. It was on the battlefield and in the hospitals of the Civil War that Mrs. Bickerdyke gained her reputation, but she had been an experienced nurse for a long time previous, and had supported her two little sons by her work.

Mother Bickerdyke’s eightieth birthday was celebrated in 1897. Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, who knew her and her work very intimately, and loved the woman as much as she admired the work, in speaking of Mother Bickerdyke on that occasion, said: “She was the best nurse I ever knew. She had the instinct which led her to know what was the best thing to do for every case. With it she had a heart so big and kind that she would go to no end of trouble to do things to make her patients happy, believing this did quite as much as medicine to recover them.

“I remember once a poor young fellow in a hospital had set his heart on having a baked potato to eat. She had told him that just as soon as it was prudent for him to eat a potato he should have it, but his mind still dwelt upon the coveted delicacy so persistently that finally she went and got four nice new potatoes, washed them clean, dried them, and then warmed them. Then she brought them to the sick boy, for he wasn’t very much more, and said, ‘There, my boy, here are four nice potatoes. You shall have them in bed with you, where you can touch them, and look at them, and just as soon as it is safe for you to have a baked potato to eat, you shall have one just like the best of these cooked for you.’ The man was as happy as a child. He hoarded up his treasures, and crooned over them, and was quiet and contented.

“The next day along came the ward surgeon on his rounds. He discovered the potatoes, asked how they came there, and when he knew, tossed them out onto the floor. He was a young man, and did not know Mother Bickerdyke. She happened to be out of the room, but came in before the round was completed. The potatoes were on the floor, and the man, weak with pain and long illness was crying. It took only a glance for her to comprehend what was the matter.

“‘Who threw those potatoes down there?’ she asked.

“‘I did,’ said the surgeon.

“‘What did you do it for?’

“‘Because it was foolish and unnecessary to have them where they were. I’m not going to have the beds in this hospital made into potato hills.’

“Mother Bickerdyke swooped down on the potatoes, and gathering them up in her apron brought them back to the bed.

“‘Do you think anything is foolish which makes a sick man comfortable?’ she exclaimed. ‘It can’t possibly hurt him to have those potatoes there. I even 389 warmed them, myself, so they should not be cold to touch.’ Then to the patient, putting the vegetables back into the bed, ‘There, there, my poor boy,’ said she, ‘don’t you feel bad. You shall have them back, and you shall keep them in bed until they sprout if you want to.’ And he did keep them until he was able to eat his potato baked.”

The young woman who has Mother Bickerdyke’s tact and kindness of heart, and who has fitted herself to be a nurse, need not fear but what she will be successful, and have all the work she wishes to do.