| << Chapter < Page | Chapter >> Page > |
In the 1890s changing social conditions and an economic depression introduced a wider range of careers for women and the notion that all of them should learn to be self-supporting. The occupations suggested to the 1894 graduates of Baylor Female College were those identified as
"particularly adapted to women": florist, confectioner, bookkeeper, cashier, engraver, author, bee-keeper, poultry-keeper, and laundress. A woman was discouraged from undertaking law, medicine, or any business or profession
"that causes her to principally deal with men."
BS , August 2, 1894, p. 3.
The politician who made the speech claimed he was primarily concerned with giving women wider fields of usefulness and more opportunities for happiness. May Asbury, writing for the Standard in 1895, was motivated by economic necessity:"The time may come,"she warned other women,
"when you will be called upon to take up the battle of life alone, and with no idea how to do it."She suggested that parents determine their daughter's interests,
"then give her every chance possible as you would your son and teach her that no honest work is degrading."She saw no fault in depending on male relatives for support, but had learned from experience that that source could fail. Her message was derivative of the one being proclaimed by feminists, but it was one Baptists were just beginning to hear:
Young women[,] take this affair in your own hand and let there be an insurrection in all prosperous families in this land and country on the part of the daughters of this day demanding knowledge in occupations and styles of business by which you may be your own defense and earn your own support if all fatherly, husbandly and brotherly hands forever fail.
BS , July 4, 1895, p. 2.
The nineteenth-century suggestion that, first, girls were educable and, second, they would put that education to good use in their domestic pursuits, developed in the early twentieth century into the belief that females were perhaps even males' peers in the intellectual realm.
"Less than fifty years ago it was really a question whether women could. . .learn like men,"recalled J. B. Gambrell in 1915;
BS , September 30, 1915, p. 12.
"within memory of all of you men have conceded that a woman could take [an]. . .education just as well as men,"adjoined E. C. Routh in a graduation address that same year.
BS , July 8, 1915, p. 25.
One Baptist man agreed with an unnamed German observer who said that American women had actually outdistanced men in"general culture and the higher intellectual powers"because males' absorption in business life diminished their intellect and caused them to view education in a superficial manner.
BS , July 2, 1914, p. 2.
Another attributed the fact that"women are smarter than men"to their docility and respect for authority; men's independence and resistance to authority stood in the way of their learning.
BS , October 31, 1912, p. 24.
The latter is indicative of the fact that the writer (an unidentified college professor) equated intelligence with unoriginal diligence.
Notification Switch
Would you like to follow the 'Patricia martin's phd thesis' conversation and receive update notifications?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|