The College, the Market, and the Court: or, Woman's relation to education, labor and lawDall, Caroline Wells Healey
History
The College, the Market, and the Court: or, Woman's relation to education, labor and law
Dall, Caroline Wells Healey
Women -- Education; Women -- Employment; Women -- Legal status, laws, etc.
teacher braved the storm; and the school, when I called the roll,
responded to the number of eighty. I told them that I knew how dearly
they loved my husband, that he was very ill, and that the only way in
which they could help him was to behave so well that he need feel no
anxiety about his work. They responded at once to this appeal, and I
carried home the best possible account. As Sunday drew near,--this
night-school having been held on Monday,--my husband grew more ill and
more anxious. He thought of the large, mixed congregation, which met him
every week, and for which no provision had been made. We were on an
outpost of our faith; we could not have summoned assistance in season,
nor without an expense we could not well bear. I thought the matter
over; said to myself that it was only like a large Sunday school; that
the fashionable ladies, who often dropped in to hear the preaching,
would certainly stay away, knowing my husband to be ill: so I told him
quietly that I had made arrangements for the Sunday service. He was too
weak to make inquiries, but was comforted at once. He was sick several
weeks,--long enough for me to relinquish reading, and take to
exhortation in pure despair; but he did not find a small congregation
when he resumed his place, and that was my reward. Perhaps no such step
was ever taken more simply, or with less idea of its natural
consequences. When I came back to Boston, radical country ministers took
pains to ask me to their pulpits. I shall not soon forget the first time
I preached to a large Unitarian audience, with a good mixture of city
people. It was at South Hingham; the church was crowded; the country
covered with a crystalline mantle of snow, over which a clear moon
glimmered. The beauty of that night is a permanent possession. So it
went on, till I became, I believe in the winter of 1859 and 1860, the
superintendent of the Sunday school at Indiana-place Chapel, in Boston,
where I remained for five years. This broke up my preaching, for I could
not leave town on Sundays; but it led to my addressing various
Sunday-school gatherings, and my being asked to address Sunday schools
when away from home in the summer. My addressing a Sunday school in
Greenfield in the summer of 1865, while the pastor of the church was
absent with his regiment, led, by his kind sympathy, to my preaching in
the summer of 1866 in the regular Unitarian churches at Rowe and
Warwick, as well as doing irregular service in many other places. The
church at Florence had always shown me a generous appreciation; and I
was often asked to preach for Theodore Parker's people at the Music Hall
and the Melodeon. I always declined to speak for this last society, not
because I do not sympathize with their purposes in the main, but because
I would not consent to be advertised for a religious and especially a
devotional service in the city which I make my home. There may be women
who, in the present state of things, can do this innocently and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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