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
And then there were the modes of bodily training, and the lamentable
image of the misformed average girl; and in the children's building
classes could actually be seen engaged in happy exercise, and close at
hand appliances for the nursery and the playground. Nor in the enlarged
appliances for woman's domestic life must those be omitted which tell
how cheaply and richly the girl may now obtain a college training like
her brother, and become as intelligent as he. No woman went away from
the educational exhibits of the Fair in the belief that woman's sphere
was necessarily narrow.
There is no need to dilate on the light shed by the Fair upon problems
of sickness, poverty, and crime. Everybody knows that nothing so
complete had been seen before. The Anthropological Building was a museum
of these subjects, and scattered in other parts of the Fair was much to
interest the puzzled and sympathetic soul. One could find out what an
ideal hospital was like, and how its service and appliances should be
ordered. One studied under competent teachers the care of the dependent
and delinquent classes. One learned to distinguish surface charity from
sound. As men grow busier and women more competent, the guidance of
philanthropy passes continually more and more into the gentler hands.
Women serve largely on boards of hospitals, prisons, charities, and
reforms, and urgently feel the need of ampler knowledge. The Fair did
much to show them ways of obtaining it.
Such are the permanent results of the Fair most likely to affect
women. They fall into three classes: the proofs women have given of
their independent power, their ability to organize and to work toward
a distant, difficult, and complex end; the enlargement of their
outlook, manifesting itself in a new sense of membership in a
nation, a more willing obedience to law, and a higher appreciation of
beauty; and, lastly, the direct assistance given to women in their
more characteristic employments of housekeeping, teaching, and
ministering to the afflicted. That these are all, or even the most
important, results which each woman will judge she has obtained, is not
pretended. Everybody saw at the Fair something which brought to
individual him or her a gain incomparable.
And, after all, the greatest thing was the total, glittering, murmurous,
restful, magical, evanescent Fair itself, seated by the blue waters,
wearing the five crowns, served by novel boatmen, and with the lap so
full of treasure that as piece by piece it was held up, it shone, was
wondered at, and was lost again in the pile. This amazing spectacle will
flash for years upon the inward eye of our people, and be a joy of their
solitude.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] Published in _The Forum_ for December, 1891.
XVI
WHY GO TO COLLEGE?
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