USA > Massachusetts > Commonwealth history of Massachusetts, colony, province and state, volume 5 > Part 20
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Photograph by Bachrach, Boston
Courtesy of Mrs. Harold Russell
MRS. JULIA WARD HOWE
AMY LOWELL
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RADCLIFFE COLLEGE
tures ; namely, that the "young ladies were to take part in the domestic work of the 'family' "-as the body of teachers and students was designated. Emphasis should be placed upon the fact that the housework required was not merely to in- crease efficiency in homemaking, but to make college expenses lighter and "to promote a spirit of democracy and considera- tion for others." To this end, every student helps either in housework or in the academic departments.
BOSTON UNIVERSITY (1869-1930)
Boston University was granted its charter by the legisla- ture of Massachusetts in 1869, opening its doors from the beginning to men and women alike, to bond and free, to rich and poor ; no one excepted-color, race or creed. Among the early friends of Boston University were many notable wo- men. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was listed in the first catalogue as a lecturer on modern fiction, the first woman ever associated with a college faculty in New England. Other famous women who by various forms of service helped the university to get a favorable start were Mrs. William Claflin, wife of the governor of the Commonwealth, Mrs. Sleeper Davis, Mrs. Emily Talbot, Louisa M. Alcott, Abbie Gould Woolson, Lucy Stone, and Julia Ward Howe.
SMITH COLLEGE (1876-1930)
Smith College was founded at Northampton by Sophia Smith with the fortune inherited from her brother. The de- velopment of the individual, both socially and academically, was perhaps the distinctive feature of the educational methods of the new little college at Northampton. With this in view, a personnel bureau was established in 1920. At this time was also created an institute for the co-ordination of women's interests, to study and experiment in methods of enabling women to maintain their intellectual interests, both cultural and professional, after graduation.
RADCLIFFE COLLEGE (1876-1930)
Radcliffe was the first of what may be called agglutinative colleges, connected with a great men's university, yet separate
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in organization. The beginnings came in 1876, at the instiga- tion of Mrs. Gilman, the wife of an historian, Arthur Gilman, of Cambridge. The plan suggested by Mr. and Mrs. Gilman® secured for women study with the most eminent professors in the country-those at Harvard-without making the college coeducational or impairing the quality of its instruction to men.
The success of the final undertaking was due in a large measure to the choice of sponsors. They were seven well- known women, respected and admired, and of the type that the Cambridge citizen would like his own daughter to become ; Mrs. Louis Agassiz, Mrs. E. W. Gurney, Miss Lillian Hors- ford, Miss Alice Longfellow, Mrs. James B. Greenough, Mrs. Gilman, and Mrs. Josiah P. Cooke. Mrs. Agassiz, who as- sumed leadership of the experiment, was said by President Eliot to be the most influential woman in the community. She became the first president of Radcliffe College, and proved a valiant and gracious leader. Through her, Radcliffe was granted a charter by the Massachusetts Legislature; and it has been formally recognized by Harvard University, which countersigns its degrees as equivalent to its own.
SIMMONS COLLEGE (1893-1930)
Simmons College was established by the will of John Simmons, of Boston, as an institution in which instruction would be given in such branches of art, science and industry as would best enable women to earn a living. Instruction opened in 1902. In connection with Harvard University, the college maintains a school for social service workers.
A distinctive feature of the college is the Prince School of Store Service. Mrs. Lucinda Prince conceived the idea that saleswomen might be trained for their work and become professional, as are nurses, teachers and doctors. Beginning as an independent venture, the school became connected with Simmons College. Since 1922 that college has granted M.S. degrees to students in the Prince School. It limits its classes to sixty girls, selected after many rejections, who must hold a bachelor's degree from an approved college. The methods of the Prince School not only are used in all the great cities
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THE CAREER OF HELEN KELLER
of the United States, but have also been extended to London, Paris and other European centers.
WHEATON COLLEGE (1834-1930)
Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, began its history as Norton Female Seminary, established by Judge Laban Wheaton in 1834, as a memorial to his only daughter. This was one of the pioneer schools for the education of women, and Mary Lyon superintended its organization and directed its work for the first two years. In 1912, it became Wheaton College. Its aim is to educate for a woman's life, keeping in view her efficiency in the home as a center, while also furnish- ing the opportunities which a college of high standards gives to women who intend to engage in professional life.
NEW TYPES OF CHILD EDUCATION (1868-1930)
In the kindergarten, Massachusetts again establishes her claim for leadership. The great leaders of the kindergarten system in America were undoubtedly Bostonians. The adaptation of the kindergarten as an integral part of the public-school system was due mainly to two Boston women, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Mrs. Pauline Agassiz Shaw.
Mrs. Shaw, the daughter of Louis Agassiz and the wife of Quincy A. Shaw, was also responsible for the introduction of the kindergarten system into Massachusetts. Out of her own pocket, she established more than thirty free kinder- gartens. She also started day nurseries, settlement houses, the vocational bureau, Sloyd schools, and before she died at Jamaica Plain, in 1917, she became an ardent supporter of the peace movement.
THE CAREER OF HELEN KELLER
An unparalleled story in the history of education is that of Helen Keller and her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, who shared public interest almost equally with her celebrated pupil. When she was nineteen months old, Helen Keller be- came deaf, dumb and blind; but at the age of seven, she had the good fortune to be taken in charge by Miss Sullivan, who herself had been almost blind as a child, and at the age of
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fourteen had been sent to the Perkins Institution for the Blind.
The results achieved by Miss Sullivan are epoch-making in the education of the deaf, dumb and blind. A woman of strong mentality and splendid character, she was indeed happily chosen to release from captivity the mind and soul of Helen Keller. So completely were her physical handicaps removed by the genius of Miss Sullivan, that Helen Keller received an education which ultimately fitted her to enter and graduate from Radcliffe College and to become a lecturer of nation-wide reputation. Two of her books, The Story of My Life and The World I Live In, are popular and well known.
MODERN WOMAN
It is a far cry from the colonial woman, bending under the hardships of the wilderness and struggling against the injus- tice and cruelty of sex prejudice, to the American woman of today, radiant in her new freedom, the world at her feet. Household labor has yielded to the magic of modern science; clothing for the family-no longer carded, spun and woven by the fireside of the individual home-is now made in fac- tories and sold in department stores. In child-bearing, neighbor women no longer figure as accoucheuses; the mediæval midwife has almost vanished, giving place to the highly specialized physician and the modern hospital.
The edicts of the General Court once regulated women's dress: for example, prescribing the width of her sleeves, placing a ban on those so fashioned that "the nakedness of the arm may be discovered in the wearing thereof." Today, she goes her way in utter freedom with bared arms and short skirts. In spite of the outcries of false modesty, women have not been so beautifully nor so comfortably dressed since Grecian days. History . shows that fashions and customs change, but human nature remains the same and there is no cause for alarm.
Earning a living is no longer restricted to the selling of bread and cake, lace making, or the keeping of inns; all trades and professions are now open to women, and no field for self-expression is closed to them. As to education, it was
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AMERICANIZATION
enough if the colonial woman could read and write, and many could not do that. Today, compulsory laws keep girls as well as boys in the public schools-744,246 children, all told, in Massachusetts, of whom 366,425 are girls.
WOMEN'S CLUBS (1870-1930)
The women's club movement is another influence which calls women into the larger fields of thought and action, giving them necessary training for taking their part in public life. Here again we find Massachusetts in the lead. After the Civil War, Mrs. Caroline M. Severance, Dr. Harriet K. Hunt, Mrs. James Freeman Clarke and others formed an association under the name of the New England Women's Club. Some literary unions of women may have existed before, but this was the first to call itself openly a women's club. Its speakers numbered such men and women as Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, James T. Fields, John Fiske, Ednah Dow Cheney, Edward Everett Hale, Pro- fessor William' T. Harris; in short, the intellectuals of that period. The club records show the guidance of Lucretia Mott Hallowell, Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Mrs. Horace Mann, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and many other honored names. Today, in Massachusetts, there are more than one hundred and forty-one thousand women enrolled in clubs connected with the general federation.
AMERICANIZATION IN MASSACHUSETTS (1914-1930)
The population of Massachusetts was approximately one- third native-born; the other two-thirds being either foreign or of foreign-born parentage. The Chairman of American- ization therefore used her own State as an experimental sta- tion to develop methods and curricula. The State govern- ment lent its cooperation, and the first normal course for teaching of citizenship was opened-the Massachusetts Wo- man Suffrage Association providing the class room, paying the expenses, and recruiting a class of fifty, many of them public-school teachers, who graduated and received their cer- tificates from the State. The most brilliant pupil in the first year's class was Mary L. Guyton, State Supervisor of Adult
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Alien Education, who later gave teacher-training courses at Boston University. She assisted in the course in Immigrant Education at Harvard University for three summers, lectured at Radcliffe, and continued directing, recruiting, organizing and supervising twenty-five thousand foreign men and wo- men. Miss Guyton completed a bulletin for the Department of the Interior, to be distributed throughout the United States to assist communities in organizing their problems in adult education.
RELIGIOUS LEADERS
The founder of Christian Science was Mary G. Baker Eddy, who, although born in New Hampshire, spent her most productive years in Massachusetts. Mrs. Eddy regards her discovery of Christian Science as resulting from her "immedi- ate recovery from the effects of an injury caused by an acci- dent, an injury that neither medicine nor surgery could reach." "On the third day thereafter," as Mrs. Eddy has related, "I called for my Bible, and opened it at Matthew ix. 2. As I read, the healing Truth dawned upon my senses and the re- sult was that I rose, dressed myself, and ever after was in better health than I had before enjoyed. That short experi- ence included a glimpse of the great fact that I have since tried to make plain to others, namely, Life in and of Spirit; this Life being the sole reality for existence."
Mrs. Eddy then devoted several years to meditation and study, especially to searching the Scriptures. Soon she began to practice and to teach her interpretation of the Christian religion. Then ensued what may have been the most im- portant part of her career; that is, writing and publishing the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, issued in Boston in 1875. She revised it from time to time until 1907, and it is so published by the trustees under her will.
Mrs. Eddy gave particular attention to originating and de- veloping the Christian Science Monitor, an international news- paper, which is found in all cities and most towns of the United States, also greeting the American traveler in the centers of Europe and the Orient.
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MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE
SOCIAL REFORM
Among pioneers in social reform were Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton, both Massachusetts women. They were known internationally for their records in the Red Cross, but were active also in prison reform, and were the forerunners of Jessie D. Hodder, head of the Reformatory for Women and foremost among specialists in prison reform. Twice, once in Washington and again in London, Mrs. Hodder was the repre- sentative of the United States as a delegate to the Interna- tional Prison Congress. With a successful record of eighteen years as a penologist, Mrs. Hodder's institution and her methods are widely studied and copied. The peculiarity of the discipline at Sherborn is that it is much more moral than physical. The regime of fear has been replaced by that of maternalism. Disciplinary punishment there must be, but no bodily chastisement is ever administered, other than confine- ment in the disciplinary room until the prisoner is willing to obey the rules of the institution. Music, united with religion, is the means by which Mrs. Hodder accomplishes her perma- nent reforms ; and the musical director, Mrs. Pearl Wilkinson, is also the chaplain. Gardening, domestic service, and home making are other factors of Mrs. Hodder's regime.
After close contact with all types of criminals, from the young prostitute, often more sinned against than sinning, to the thief and the murderess, Mrs. Hodder rejects the theories of Lombroso and his school, that the presence of stigmata dooms a human being to permanent criminality.
MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE
In 1928, in Massachusetts 3,646 divorces were granted as compared to 2,336 in 1916, and the number has been steadily growing at a faster rate than the population. The number of marriages has dropped every year since 1916, and twice as many wives as husbands obtain divorces. In 1927, over seven tenths of all the divorces granted were for the combined causes of cruelty and desertion. Misery and incompatibility are not new in the world; but in colonial times, the subservience of the wife to the husband was assumed and theoretically, at least, there was but one will to be consulted-that of the hus-
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THE WOMAN MOVEMENT
band. Today, with the changed status of woman, her wishes and viewpoint are not to be disregarded. Domestic clashes result, and relief is sought in divorce. In spite of statistics, there never before was so much wedded happiness, if women's share be thrown into the balance. The pendulum for freedom has swung too far and the world waits for a return to equilibrium. Marriage is an institution built upon the solid foundation of racial experience, a slow evolution through savagery and barbarism. Mankind is going forward, not backward. Home will always be home. Mother love and father love are elemental instincts, and children were never so well born nor so intelligently reared as today.
THE PROFESSIONS
The achievements of women in the arts and professions probably do not parallel their inherent ability in these lines, and should not be judged without consideration of the handi- caps imposed upon them by traditional prejudice and by the jealousy of the opposite sex.
In the law, Harvard, which stands at the head in Massa- chusetts, if not in the United States, does not admit them as students. They may, however, be educated in law in Boston University, Portia Law School, Northeastern University, and some other schools. On graduation, the woman lawyer finds difficulty in securing openings with law firms, through which she must gain the experience necessary to successful practice. Mrs. Anna Christy Fall was the first woman ever to try a case before a jury in this State. Mrs. Sadie Lipner Shulman is assistant corporation counsel for the city of Boston, the first of her sex to receive the appointment. Among the prom- inent Massachusetts women lawyers are Miss Ellen Buckley ; Miss Edith M. Haynes; Miss Sybil Holmes ; Mrs. Jennie Loit- man Barron; Miss Clara Powers; Mrs. Frances Brady ; Mrs. Emma Tousant and Miss Greta Coleman.
SCIENCE
A study of the activities of Massachusetts women reveals the rather remarkable fact that one field in which they have most achieved international fame is astronomy. Two most notable women astronomers of the United States are Massa-
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SCIENCE
chusetts women, Maria Mitchell and Annie Jump Cannon.
Maria Mitchell, a Nantucket woman, first won distinction in 1847 by the discovery of the first telescopic comet ever to have been discovered. She long occupied the chair of pro- fessor of astronomy at Vassar, and during that period the Vassar Observatory acquired for itself a recognized place in the annals of scientific study.
Miss Annie Jump Cannon, of the Harvard Observatory, is considered the world's most famous astronomer of her sex. She has discovered five new stars; and the great achievement, for which her name is known all over the world, was the publication of Classification of Eleven Hundred and Twenty- Two Bright Southern Stars. The stimulus of this work brought about the world-famous Henry Draper Catalogue, in which is contained the class spectrum of more than 225,000 stars. With a staff of six other women, Miss Cannon then undertook the classification of Milky Way stars at the rate of about two hundred a day. Her title since 1911 has been Curator of Astronomical Photographs at the Harvard Ob- servatory, which contains on its three hundred thousand plates a history of the sky for more than thirty-five years.
Among Miss Cannon's distinguished assistants are Miss Cecelia Helena Payne, Ph.D., Miss Margaret Walton, Miss Helen Howard, Miss Emma Williams, and Miss Margaret Harwood. Miss Adelaide Ames, daughter of Col. T. L. Ames of the United States Army, has discovered nearly three thou- sand new galaxies in the constellations Coma and Virgo, bringing her world-wide recognition, including election to the International Committee on Nebulae and Clusters.
Miss Henrietta H. Swope, who during the past two years has discovered 385 new variable stars, heads the list of dis- coverers of variable stars, only seventy-two of which had been discovered in the particular section of the sky which was the field of her study. By determining the periods of luminosity of more than a hundred of these stars, she made possible the Shapley announcement of the corrected hub of the universe, thus realizing the hope of astronomers for centuries.
The opportunities for research and the foregoing record of achievement mark the progress made since the close of the
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last century, when Mary Somerville stealthily procured mathe- matical books, and studied them by night to escape the censure and disgrace which might be expected if her occupation were known.
MEDICINE
The prejudice against women as doctors still exists, al- though it is gradually giving way. At the time when women had become admitted as members of the Massachusetts Medi- cal Society (1882), the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, commenting editorially, said: "Enshrouded in her mantle. of science, woman is supposed to be endowed with power to descend from that high pedestal upon which we men have always placed her and to mingle with us unscathed in scenes from which her own modesty and the esteem of the other sex has hitherto protected her." The editor seems to have for- gotten that women had long mingled in those "scenes" as patients and as nurses. It was only as physicians that they were protected from them.
One of the necessary steps in the education of a physician is that of an interne in a hospital. Without this daily prac- tice and experience, it is difficult for a doctor to acquire the preparation actually necessary. The first step, therefore, in women's medical progress was the establishment of a hospital where women should have equal opportunity with men as physicians and surgeons.
Dr. Marie Zakrzewska, a Polish woman, opened the doors of the medical profession to the women of Massa- chusetts by the founding of the New England Hospital for Women and Children. In this pioneer work, she was aided by a group of women of broad vision, among whom were Lucy Goddard, Abby May, Ednah Dow Cheney, Sarah Shaw Russell, Caroline Severance, and Anna Lowell.
MEDICAL INSTRUCTION
Although the doors of the Harvard Medical School are closed to women students, in 1919 Dr. Alice Hamilton was appointed Assistant Professor of Industrial Medicine for that institution. In the field of industrial poisons, Dr. Hamilton stands at the head of the profession.
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TUBERCULOSIS EDUCATION
Many qualified women surgeons have practised in Massa- chusetts. One of the most distinguished is Dr. Agnes Vietor. In 1926, the American College of Surgeons, which numbers about fifty women among its seven thousand fellows, deter- mined that women deserve a recognition heretofore reserved for men, and it elected four women to the Board of Gov- ernors, sweeping across the continent to name one each from Boston, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Dr. Vietor was the woman surgeon chosen to receive this honor for the New England district.
The head of the Division of Hygiene in the Massachusetts Public Health Department was Dr. M. Luise Diez, who now occupies the post heretofore held only by men. For sixteen years, Dr. Diez practiced obstetrics, serving at the same time as staff surgeon of a Philadelphia hospital. For six years before assuming her present position, she did pioneer work in developing the new Division of Maternity, Infancy and Child Hygiene in New York State. The task launched in New York and continued in Massachusetts was to cut down the death rate of women in childbirth, and of their babies.
TUBERCULOSIS EDUCATION (1907-1930)
Tuberculosis education, now carried on from coast to coast through the channels of the General Federation of Women's Clubs, was set on foot by Mrs. Rufus P. Williams of Cam- bridge. Demonstrating the value of such education, she founded the Anti-Tuberculosis Association of Cambridge, carrying on the work for twenty-five years with the result that the death rate from tuberculosis in that city dropped sixty per cent. In the effort to raise funds for the work, Mrs. Williams planned a Christmas seal to be sold through State chairmen of the Federation of Women's Clubs in the various States. Mrs. Williams herself superintended the designing and the printing of the seals, and the slogan "Victory through Unity" was woven into the design of the seal. The National Tuberculosis Association gratefully did honor to Mrs. Wil- liams, not only as a pioneer in the tuberculosis education, but also for inaugurating the sale of the Christmas seal-the penny sticker sold by billions, the sale of which has realized more than one hundred and seventy-five million dollars:
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AVIATION
In the newest profession, that of aviation, a Massachusetts woman, Amelia Earhart, has won the distinction of being the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, in the plane Friendship. Miss Earhart holds the first international pilot's license issued by the N.A.A. won by a woman, and has some five hundred hours of solo flying to her credit. On June 15, 1930, what was declared to be an international speed record for women was set in Detroit, Illinois, when Miss Earhart, flying over a measured sixty-four-mile course at the Grosse airport, averaged 174.9 miles an hour.
LITERATURE
In literature, no Massachusetts woman is accorded a sure place among writers of world renown, although a host of women are among the well-known and much-read writers of good literature. In the field of juvenile publications, Louisa May Alcott was the most popular and widely read author of her day. Abbie Farwell Brown, in addition to her stories for boys and girls was also well known for her songs, poems and fiction for the grown-ups. Among other names well known are those of Mrs. James T. Fields; Kate Field, the lecturer ; Lilian Whiting; Elizabeth Stewart Phelps; and Vida Dutton Scudder.
Emily Dickinson's reputation seems to be growing, and was much augmented by a volume, Further Poems, published since her death. All her life, with the exception of her board- ing-school days, was spent in her father's red brick house, still standing on Main Street in Amherst. Her meditations and introspections concerning life and immortality find illus- tration in nature, especially in flowers, of which she was pas- sionately fond, and which she loved to tend in the nun-like solitude in which she lived in "the house behind the hedge."
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