The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on EducationPalmer, Alice Freeman
Philosophy
The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on Education
Palmer, Alice Freeman
Education; Education, Higher; Women -- Education
If such are the permanent gains for character which women in common with
men, yet even more than they, have derived from the Fair, there remain
to be considered certain helps which have been brought to women in some
of their most distinctive occupations. Of course they have had here an
opportunity to compare the different kinds of sewing-machines, pianos,
type-writers, telegraphs, clothes-wringers, stoves, and baby-carriages,
and no doubt they will do their future work with these complicated
engines more effectively because of such comparative study. But there
are three departments which ancestral usage has especially consecrated
to women, and to intelligent methods in each of these the Fair has given
a mighty impulse. These three departments are the care of the home, the
care of the young, and the care of the sick, the poor, and the
depraved.
At Philadelphia in 1876 Vienna bread was made known, and the native
article, sodden with saleratus, which up to that time had desolated the
country, began to disappear. The results in cookery from the Chicago
Exhibition will be wider. They touch the kitchen with intelligence at
more points. Where tradition has reigned unquestioned, science is
beginning to penetrate, and we are no longer allowed to eat without
asking why and what. This new "domestic science"--threatening word--was
set forth admirably in the Rumford Kitchen, where a capital thirty-cent
luncheon was served every day, compounded of just those ingredients
which the human frame could be demonstrated to require. The health-food
companies, too, arrayed their appetizing wares. Workingmen's homes
showed on how small a sum a family could live, and live well.
Arrangements for sterilizing water and milk were there, Atkinson
cookers, gas and kerosene stoves. The proper sanitation of the home
was taught, and boards of health turned out to the plain gaze of the
world their inquisitorial processes. Numberless means of increasing
the health, ease, and happiness of the household with the least
expenditure of time and money were here studied by crowds of despairing
housekeepers. Many, no doubt, were bewildered; but many, too, went away
convinced that the most ancient employment of women was rising to the
dignity and attractiveness of a learned profession.
When it is remembered that nine tenths of the teachers of elementary
schools are women, it can be seen how important for them was the
magnificent educational exhibit. Here could be studied all that the age
counts best in kindergarten, primary, grammar, high and normal schools,
and in all the varieties of training in cookery, sewing, dressmaking,
manual training, drawing, painting, carving. Many of the exhibitors
showed great skill in making their methods apprehensible to the
stranger.
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