Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/104

100 necticut for her wheel-pin? or must she be only the manufacturing servant of man, never her own master?

Much of the business of education already falls to the hands of woman. In the last twenty years there has been a great progress in the education of women in Massachusetts, in all New England. The High Schools for girls—and, still better, those for girls and boys—have been of great service. Almost all the large towns of this Commonwealth have honoured themselves with these blessed institutions. In Boston only the daughters of the rich can possess such an education as hundreds of noble girls long to acquire. With this enhancement of culture, women have been continually rising higher and higher as teachers. The State Normal Schools have helped in this movement. It used to be thought that only an able-bodied man could manage the large boys of a country or a city school. Even he was sometimes thrust out at the door or the window of “his noisy mansion” by his rough pupils. An able-headed woman has commonly succeeded better than men merely able-bodied. She has tried conciliation rather than violence, and appealed to something a little deeper than aught which force could ever touch. The women-teachers are now doing an important work for the elevation of their race and all human kind. But it is commonly thought woman must not engage in the higher departments thereof. I once knew a woman, wife, and mother, and housekeeper, who taught the severest disciplines of our highest college, and instructed young men while she rocked the cradle with her foot, and mended garments with her hands—one of the most accomplished scholars of New England. Not long ago the daughter of a poor widowed seamstress was seen reading the Koran in Arabic. There was but one man in the town who could do the same, and he was a “learned blacksmith.” Another young woman, also a mechanic's daughter, in a town adjoining this, the New England Ariadne, has threaded all the intricate windings of that mathematical labyrinth, Laplace's “Mécanique Céleste,” for which few men have ever had the lengthy clue! The most accomplished philologist of Boston has also a feminine name. The God of Poetry likewise has bequeathed his most golden lyre to a woman's hand. Women not able to teach in these