All in the Day's Work: An AutobiographyTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
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All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
Journalists -- United States -- Biography; Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva), 1857-1944
No, the security men flattered themselves they had achieved was never
certain. Moreover, my security was costing more in certain precious
things than I was willing to pay. Take the matter of making something
professionally sound, useful, justifiable, out of myself, which is the
only one of these “precious things” that I am talking about! I could do
no more towards it where I was. To begin with, I at last knew what I
wanted to do. It was no longer to seek truth with a microscope. My early
absorption in rocks and plants had veered to as intense an interest in
human beings. I was feeling the same passion to understand men and
women, the same eagerness to collect and to classify information about
them. I find the proofs of this slow and unconscious change of
allegiance in an accumulation of tattered notebooks tucked away for
years, forgotten and only brought out after I had set myself this
curious task of tracing the road I have traveled through my eighty
years, trying to find out why I did this thing and not that, getting
acquainted with my own working life.
I seem to have begun to enter observations on human beings soon after I
had settled down to learn how to put a magazine together in an orderly
fashion. I applied the same method that I had used for so many years in
collecting and classifying natural objects which excited my curiosity.
Take leaves, on which I was always keen. I started out in high school to
collect them from all the flora in my territory, classifying them by
shapes, veins, stalks, color. Rarely do I take up a family book of those
early years that there do not fall out from between the pages leaves of
one thing or another that I had pressed to help me carry on my scheme of
classification. I suspect that I did not get much beyond a glib naming
of parts.
Something analogous happened when I recognized that men and women were
as well worth notes as leaves, that there was a science of society as
well as of botany.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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