My great-grandmother was an amazing woman. I remember my Gran E. telling me stories about her mother and I was always in such awe of her. Imagine how much my feelings for her grew after I found her high school graduation essay while sifting through my grandmother’s things after she died in 1995. Hettie Eliza Jones graduated from high school in 1899. She was one of nine graduates of Richwood High School that year. I have to believe she created quite a stir. Remember, this was written more than 120 years ago. It still gives me goosebumps every time I read it. I hope you enjoy it.
The New Woman
Probably at no period of the world’s history has the subject of woman’s influence and position been so prominently brought forward as at this present time. A quarter of a century ago all the women found in the liberal professions in this country could be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Few women before that time had occupied the platform as lecturers. The novelty drew audiences. A small number won distinction for vigorous thought and literary culture. The proportion who won was as great as that won by the other sex.
The question of sex should not enter at all into employment. No man not a coward or a bigot will bring it in. What if women do keep men out of positions? Don’t men keep women out of positions? Why give men a monopoly of the means of earning a livelihood? There is a wide field open to women in every quarter, from paring potatoes up, if you please, to the trades, professions, arts and sciences.
Look where you will, you will find specialized labor among women as you will among men.
It is not so very long ago that the possible advent of women into the liberal professions was regarded as a visionary proposition, scarcely worth the serious consideration of the people, who, as a matter of ethics, were sturdily opposed to such an innovation.
Within the memory of people whose hair is not very gray, a regularly qualified female physician, a woman lawyer, or a newspaper woman, was literally unheard of. A few female preachers had ascended the pulpit, borrowing courage, it may be, from the good old Quaker practice permitting women to speak in meeting when the spirit moved.
To rise higher in the social life, let us note the families that enjoy all the comforts of a luxurious home, without troubling themselves with the consideration as to how these comforts and luxuries are maintained. Daughters in such households, until quite recently, were brought up with a sort of tacit understanding that marriage was the goal for which their education tended only to impart a superficial brilliancy, with a view to rendering them attractive in the eyes of the eligible suitors it was their authorized mission to try to gain.
The state of things at the present time demands that girls shall be brought up with the idea that their success in life will depend not on whether they are attractive, but upon the manner in which they turn to advantage whatever abilities they possess.
Today there is scarcely a calling or profession of dignity in our country that women are not free to enter, and in which one or more members of the sex have not already scored signal successes.
There is no more reason why woman should not be educated than why politicians should not be educated, and that quite aside from the question whether women are to become politicians.
No one can doubt for a moment that the present uprising of woman in the learned professions is both a sign and a means of advancement in civilization. The impulse is felt by the sex generally. With some it takes the form of a desire to know more, with others of a desire to do more. The woman who goes quietly and bravely about her work, who meets distrust or unkind remarks with faithful and diligent service, who is dignified and self respecting without being aggressive, tactful without familiarity, wise without pretensions, feminine without frivolity, and who, above all, manifests a kind disposition toward members of her own sex, will rise on solid foundations and do much to level prejudice against those who will come after her.
We discover in the homes surrounded by neatness and comfort, pervaded by an aid of good common sense, the most essential characteristics of a true woman – a heart. She thinks and acts as one whose heart is a glow with love and sympathy. And her whole life is but the outflow of this full fresh, fountain heart within. A woman thus endowed bestows her influence upon all around her, for the true heart is the regulator of life.
Manifestly woman no longer stands a mere spectator of the passing interests and achievement of life. She has attacked the problem of how to live. Not how to live for show, … but how to get the most good out of life. She is trying to live each day by itself. She is not living so much in the tomorrows which never come. Having begun to earn her own money, she is learning the value of her fathers – a thing the American father has been trying to teach her for fifty on a hundred years.
But she could not learn because she saw it come so easily, and she let it go so freely. The purification of society is a work that lies peculiarly within the sphere of woman.
Temperance, education, the maintenance of the family, reforms in dress, the preservation of good morals, the carrying of reforms into the usages of what is called good society, the manifold works of charity, lie peculiarly within the reach of intelligent women.
It is as if the new woman were striving, by making the best of her environments, and by developing her nature, to enunciate a philosophy of life which shall so dignify homely duties and beautify the commonplace that her creed might well be:
“We shall pass through this world but once. If there be any kindness we can show, or any good deed we can do to any fellow being, let us do it now. Let us not defer nor neglect it, for we shall not pass this way again.”
Develop a Skill, Hattie said
One of the stories my Gran. E told me was that, in 1917, Hettie bought her then 15-year-old daughter a piano and insisted she learn to play it so my grandmother would have a skill that would allow her to live her life without depending on a man for support. It cost $600, which Hettie paid off in installments. For several years, that piano sat in my great room. The instrument now graces the home of my nephew and his family.
In 1917, Hettie and her daughter, Mabel, were the only members of her family left. Hettie lost a daughter in infancy. Her son, Vincent, died at 13, while Hettie’s husband, Fenton C. Romine, died at 30 in 1909. Hettie, herself, lived the last few years of her life suffering with tuberculosis.
She was a great role model for my grandmother, who was a teacher until she married my grandfather. But she didn’t take the easy way out. One year, during the Christmas break, she and my grandfather eloped. When they returned, they lived apart and didn’t tell anyone they were married because teachers at that time had to be single. The school board found out and insisted she leave in the middle of the school year. But Gran E.’s Uncle Bert was a member of the school board, and he talked the other board members into letting her stay on until the end of the school year.
My Gran E. was a strong, self-made woman. She gave my sisters and me a perfect example of what it meant to be a woman. She was my roommate for the first few years I was in college. She ran a men’s rooming house near The Ohio State University campus in Columbus, and I shared her quarters on the first floor of the house, which she ran on her own as my grandfather died in 1968.
She continued to drive until a few years before her death. The last car she bought (in her 80s) was a Ford Thunderbird.
How lucky are we to live in a country and during a time when the education of girls and women is a given. (More on this topic in a future post.)
How about you? Do you have a relative you admire? Someone who taught you some amazing life-lessons? Tell me about them in the Comments section below or email me at susie@stix-n-stonez.com
You may find out you have a few change-makers in your family tree. People who lived long before there was such a thing as an “influencer.”
Until next week,
Susie from Stix-N-Stonez.com