Dejeuner sur l’Herbe 2 or better Dejeuner sur Muskeg. A detail of that earlier photo, my husband’s US relations, 1905 camping trip. Now you can see she has a French Bulldog on her lap.
Well, another fantastic find for my novel Flo in the City, about a girl coming of age in the 1908-1913 era based on http://www.tigsolas.ca/, my social studies website.
My next scene will have Flo visiting Mrs. Coy in Framingham with Henry and Mae. (This really happened, and for some reason they dropped in unannounced.) They visited on the Tuesday in the Stanley Steamer. So I Google Mapped the journey they must have taken and realized it was through Wellesley College. Flo mentions visiting Wellesley.
So, I discovered a reason to drop in without warning: they were at Wellesley and, having a great time, they decided spontaneously, to drive a little further in Framingham and visit the family friend.
When I woke up this morning the first line of the scene came into my head: “Hold onto your hats, this car can go fast!” I wonder if the expression came from those early days of the automobile.
Now, I went online and found a brilliant document, the Wellesley Magazine for 1908, and I will have Henry buy Flo and Mae a copy. It will be an eye-opener to Flora, on many levels. The Nicholsons had very much the same values as these young women, but they didn’t have the incomes. (The ads in the magazine for furs and other fine things will bring the point home for Flora. She will recall how sister Marion, a few years before, was always ‘dead broke’ at McGill Normal School.
It has an article on Newspaper Work for women, very interesting.
And here’s the most important find, with respect to my book…an article that Flo will read and be influenced by.
“THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH”
There are roughly speaking, two classes of people in the world —those who are opposed to any change, however beneficient, who are satisfied with whatever is, no matter what it is; and those who are never satisfied with any thing that is provided that some thing better can be substituted for it. If every one had belonged to the first of these two classes, we should still be in the stone age, or, perhaps I might better say we should still all be in the amoeba state. Precedent is their god, “thus far and no farther,” their shibboleth. Success alone has power to convert them to belief in a new idea. To those of the second class we owe all the progress of the past and to them we must look for all progress in the future.
Every forward step in the world’s history has been taken only after a prolonged struggle between the reason of the Progressive and the prejudice of the conservatives. The opening of colleges to women was no exception. So rapid has been the progress made in the position of women, that we of to-day, who have taken our college education as a natural event, scarcely realize the price that was paid for our opportunity by the great women of the past generation who waged the battle for woman’s education against all the forces of conservatism. We can hardly believe that there was heaped upon them ridicule, abuse, contumely, for daring to demand educational opportunity for women. Yet such was the case. There used to be, and I suppose there still is, a book in the College library which was written some forty or fifty years ago and which predicted all sorts of dire disasters if there were interference with nature’s plans for keeping women ignorant. One choice bit, I remember, was, ”If women go to college, the world will be filled with broken down rakes.”
At the Boston meeting of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, in 1907, President M. Carey Thomas, of Bryn Mawr, said, in a public address, that when she went to college, neighbors and friends regarded it as such a disgrace that they refrained from mentioning her to her family. President Eliot of Harvard, at the same meeting, acknowledged, what those familiar with the old controversy already knew to be a fact, that he, thirty-five years ago, had strenuously opposed college education for women on three grounds : first, physically, they could not stand the strain; secondly, that, mentally, they were incapable of doing the work; and, thirdly, (Oh, dearest and ever present objection of the “whatever is, is best” group!) that it was contrary to nature’s plan.
But “the old order changeth” — inevitably changes when the proposed change is based on eternal principles of right and justice. The demand for the higher education of women was based on the fundamental truth that women, even as men, are individuals, equally with men entitled to individual development, to free opportunity for development. To-day, the world acquiesces in the right of women to a college education, it recognizes their ability both physical and mental to do the work of the college curriculum, it acknowledges that the higher education of women has wrought good not evil. In short the higher education of women has taken its place among the things that are, it is accepted by the majority and hence is approved by those who, forty years ago, opposed it as an overturning of nature’s plan. Having written success on the demand for the higher education of women the moving finger moves on to the next step in progress. The Conservatives have girded up their loins to oppose the next step, the Progressives have gathered all their energies afresh to go forth to the battle of initiative against inertia.
Yesterday, the struggle was for the higher education of women; to-day,the struggle is for the opportunity to have a voice in moulding educational,social and industrial conditions through the one medium which makes this possible, viz: the right to vote for measures and for men. The new struggle rests upon the same fundamental principle upon which the demand for educational opportunity rested, the right of women as individuals to individuality of action, their right to full equality of opportunity with the other half of the human race. Resting upon the same principles of right and justice as did the demand for higher education, it is bound to meet with the same triumphant success. By all the signs, that success is not far distant. Never before have the position, the rights, the demands of women so occupied the center of the world’s stage. Where, even three years ago, there was one article or editorial dealing with the subject, to-day, there are a hundred such articles in the various periodicals ; and, one after another, these periodicals are joining in the demand that women be given their full and free share in moulding conditions in city, state and nation. The old order is changing so rapidly that one scarcely dares to make
a statement setting forth the precise status of women civilly and politically lest
to-morrow’s dispatches bring word of change. The situation is such that, as
Professor Charles Zueblin said in a recent address, “A knowledge of the great
movement for woman suffrage now going forward is a necessity for those
who would be well informed on current events; whether one approves of it
or not, an understanding of it is an essential of general culture.”
Woman suffrjtge is no longer merely a theory, it is a condition. In Great (Britain and Ireland, women have all suffrage rights except the right to vote for members of Parliament. In all the provinces of Canada, women (in one or two provinces single women and widows only) have municipal suffrage.
In the Isle of Man. in New Zealand and in federated Australia, the latter a country equal to the United States in area, women have full political liberty and are possessed of a voice and vote on all questions, municipal, provincial and national. In four states of the United States, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Idaho, women have equal political rights with men and vote for all governamental officers from President down to constable. In one other state, Kansas, women vote on municipal questions. The other forty-one states of the United States, Newfoundland, and the British Colonies of South Africa are the only English speaking communities in which women have not a vote, at least in municipal affairs. The United States, once in the van of political liberty, is now lagging in the rear. Even in Russia women have more political rights than they have in nearly half the states in this country, women owning property having a proxy vote in the election of members of the Douma.
In Norway and Finland, women have the right to vote on all questions, and twenty-five women are to-day members of the Finnish National Parliament. In Sweden and Denmark, women have municipal suffrage. The progress of the movement has been amazing; it has been more rapid than has been the progress of any other great reform in the history of the world. And still the work goes on. The question of giving women in Great Britain and Ireland parliamentary suffrage is the burning political question of the hour, and its settlement threatens the overthrow of the present Liberal Government. In the United States, the question grows, every day, more prominent and more vital. * As Professor Zueblin says, no intelligent person can afford to be out of touch with this question. Least of all can the college woman afford to remain in ignorance, least plausibly of all can she shirk responsibility and remain an inactive onlooker. For her greater opportunity she owes greater responsibility and greater service.
She should bring to the decision of her position on this question a mind free from prejudice and from the back-drawing influence of ancient tradition, a mind open to the truth. Unless college has taught us to do this, then indeed has our college training been in vain. Unless we can say with Lucretia Mott, “Truth for authority not authority for truth,” we have missed the one great gift which a college education should bestow. In deciding her position in regard to the right of women to an equal share with men in moulding the conditions in the midst of which both men and women must live, the college woman will, in an indirect way, be deciding the question of the right of women to a college education. She will meet again exactly the same prejudice, the same objections, word for word, as those which did duty in the old opposition to the higher education of women. She will see that both questions are but ramifications of the same great principle — ^the right of every individual to the fullest individual development — ^the right of women as individuals to the full and free working out of their individual destinies. If she shall decide that the women of forty years ago were right in their demand for wider opportunities for women, right in their claim that no human being should limit the opportunities of any other human being or attempt to define another’s sphere, then
something more is due from her than mere belief in political liberty for women.
We college women owe a great debt to the women of the past. Because other women, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, with bleeding hands tore a path through the briars of conservatism, prejudice, injustice, have we college women been able to walk freely, even carelessly, to the privileges which we have enjoyed. We owe a debt. There is but one way to pay our debt — by doing eversrthing within our power to win wider opportunities for other women even as wider opportunities were won for us. Gail, Laughun, ’94.
Denver, Colorado.
