Education of women

I like what Peel writes about the education of women in New Hampshire in Mrs. Eddy’s youth.  The note at the back of the book (refers to page 54) is instructive:

            Many...were supporting themselves at schools like Bradford Academy or Ipswich Seminary half the year, by working in the mills the other half…they were improving themselves and preparing for their future in every possible way, by purchasing and reading standard books, by attending lectures and classes of their own getting up, and by meeting each other for reading and conversation.

 See page 318 - note 75 which quotes Lucy Larcom's "A New England Girlhood"

The part that grabbed my particular attention was their going to college for half a year and working for the other to gain the finances necessary.  Surely this could be a plan for to-day's University students rather than accruing huge debts during their study years.

And as I read her brother Albert’s writings I hear echoes in Mrs. Eddy’s.  Indeed, it is noticeable that every event in her life seems to have been a lesson which has found a way into her writings to instruct the reader.  I thought of this on reading of her brief experience of life in the South with her husband George Glover and felt it is illustrative of this.  She saw “sermons in stones, and good in everything”, a quote from Shakespeare's As You Like It on page 176 of Science and Health. Eddy quotes from the same Shakespeare play on page 66 of S&H: Thou art right, immortal Shakespeare, great poet of humanity: Sweet are the uses of adversity Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
 

“And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it.”― William Shakespeare, As You Like It.

I find myself wondering just who Peel thought would be his audience for this book.  It is very literary and one sees a continuation of the theme of his first book about Christian Science, Christian Science: Its Encounter with American Culture - first published 1958.  Our present book was published in 1966.  My copy of Christian Science: Its Encounter with American Culture has a picture of Robert Peel on its dust cover.  It went to 7 printings. 

Joyce Voysey