The Survey, Volume 30, Number 6, May 10, 1913 — John Shaqi
The Survey, Volume 30, Number 6, May 10, 1913Various
General
The Survey, Volume 30, Number 6, May 10, 1913
Various
Charities -- Periodicals; Social problems -- Periodicals; United States -- Social conditions -- Periodicals
Her impulse for service was re-enforced by a remarkable talent for
administration. It was this which made possible the extraordinary
generosity of her life. It was scientifically managed from the start. At
the height of her career, as Miss Hunt remarks, Mrs. Richards was doing
the work of ten people. Even as a little girl, Ellen Swallow had shown
her capacity to carry on a triple career by helping her mother at home
and her father in the “general store,” besides doing the lessons proper
for a little girl. Later she combined teaching with housekeeping and
storekeeping and helped to earn the money with which she went to
college. During the greater part of her two years at Vassar, she
supported herself by tutoring. From this time on, as student in the
Boston Institute of Technology and subsequently as instructor, Mrs.
Richards was steadily increasing the range of her energies and
activities. The history of her life is the history of the inauguration
of many social and scientific movements.
As a leader, she united to a marked degree the qualities of pioneer and
conservator. To have been the first woman to enter the Institute of
Technology and to have opened the way for other women was for her a
life-long satisfaction. She was never weary in fighting the battle for
the higher education of women. But she had also a strong instinct for
sustaining the victory so hardly won. This is illustrated by a
reproachful letter which she wrote to a woman friend, a college
professor, who had fainted. “Take beef three times a day for a fortnight
to tone yourself up,” she wrote, “and don’t do it again. It is fully as
important to keep in physical condition as to have a mental grasp.
Nowadays the last card they can trump up against us is that we are not
physically equal to what we try to do. The more prominent we are the
more closely they watch us. Just now, too, when so much is in the air
against woman’s education.”
The volume is issued as a memorial and was prepared with the
co-operation of Professor Richards and a committee of Mrs. Richards’
friends representing her various interests.
* * * * *
At the age of twenty-five, Ellen Swallow was just pulling herself free
from the narrow life of a New England village and starting off to Vassar
College. At the same age, Carola Woerishoffer, thanks to a more
favorable environment and a more enlightened generation, had finished
her college course and entered upon a well-established career of social
service. When her gallant and useful life came to a tragical end in an
automobile accident at this same age, she had already accomplished much
that was worth recording.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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