The Education of American GirlsBrackett, Anna C. (Anna Callender)
General
The Education of American Girls
Brackett, Anna C. (Anna Callender)
Women -- Education -- United States
The class of '75 had, on entering, eleven women. Of these, one has died,
an apparently healthy girl, who passed from us in the second year of
her college life, shortly after her return in the autumn. We do not know
the cause of her sickness, but we do know that it was not the result of
overtaxed mental powers, since it occurred but a little while after the
long vacation of the summer, and the disease was one which had carried
off a number of members of the same family in former years, viz.,
typhoid fever, alike unsparing of age, sex, or condition. With this
exception, this class has been remarkably healthy, and with but a slight
exception is, at the present time, perfectly so. Their attendance on
recitations has been uniformly good, above the average of the classes,
and they have done excellent work. Of these, two were sixteen years of
age on entering, one was twenty, and the others varied in ages between
sixteen and twenty. Concerning one of the former, President Angell had
some misgivings when she entered, as she did not seem to be very strong;
but she is now in her third year in the University, and her mother
informed the president not long since that the health of her daughter
had improved since she came to Ann Arbor, and that the nervous headaches
by which she had been formerly troubled had entirely disappeared.
Among those who matriculated with the class of '76, were seventeen young
women, two of whom were in poor health at the time, and physically unfit
for work. One was ill for some time last winter with rheumatism, and
compelled to suspend her labors, and the other was obliged to leave
college. The former is now teaching, and will probably return, and the
other has resumed her studies, but is far from being well. One of the
number, who is from the Sandwich Islands, was sick four weeks with
inflammation of the lungs; but her brother, who is one year in advance
of her, was also sick in his freshman year with the same disease, the
only difference being that she was ill four weeks, and he, seven.
As a class, the 'sophomore girls' are in even a better physical
condition in the middle of this their second year, the hardest year of
the course, than they were at the beginning of last year. One of them,
with charming _naivete_ asserts that she was 'miserable' when she
entered, and her father sent her to the University to 'see if she
wouldn't get well;' and she 'has been getting well ever since.'
The average attendance of the young women of this class upon
recitations, is also fully equal to that of the young men, judging from
the stand-point of the professors; and in the classical sections it has
been better.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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