Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/754

Rh her series of lectures to mothers was commenced. The sixty hygienic and fifty-six educational rules which she wrote in connection with those lectures were afterwards published in the New England Journal of Education. Other works from her pen are: "The National Kindergarten Manual," "The National Kindergarten Songs and Plays" and her song book, "Cheerful Echoes." In 1880 through President Garfield, she presented a memorial to Congress, asking an appropriation to found a free national kindergarten normal school in Washington. But, although it was signed by all the chief educators of the country, it was unsuccessful. Then she turned from Congress to Providence and with better success, for after giving a very profitable entertainment in 1883, the "Pensoara Free Kindergarten," with the motto, "Inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these, ye have done it unto me," was opened. In order to raise the necessary funds for its continuance a subscription list was started at the suggestion of Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes, who during her life was a regular subscriber. In connection with that kindergarten, Mrs. Pollock had a training class for nursery maids in the care of young children, and in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and other places, nursery maids' training classes were soon opened upon the same plan. Mrs. Pollock with her daughter was for years at the head of the National Kindergarten, a kindergarten normal institute for the training of teachers, hundreds of whom went out to fill positions throughout the country.

Mary Lowe Dickinson was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, in 1839. "We read of all-round women. They are of two kinds. There is the little all-round woman, smooth and small, like a bird's egg, holding infinite unfolded possibilities that never had the proper warmth and brooding for adequate development. And there is the other all-round woman, big as the world, with all sorts of excrescences and deficiencies, mountains and valleys of character, with rivers of thought and seas of sympathy, and forests of varied feeling crowned with abundant leaves for the healing of the nations, and with plains of experience and deserts of sorrow, and inside a burning heart of love that penetrates all, and now and then shows itself in some volcanic outburst that reveals the real passion and fervor of its inward life. And yet, with all this infinite variety, the all-round nature holds all in such true balance and poise, develops in such fine proportion, as never to seem to be all sympathy or all sense, or anything but a rounded and symmetrical whole."

Perhaps if the writer of the above paragraph had dreamed that the day would come when her own words would be chosen as perhaps the most fitting description of her own development she would have hidden them, as she has hidden most of her best thoughts, from the world.

From a primary school in a Massachusetts country town, the step to the head assistant principal's place in the Hartford Female Seminary brought her to the opening of Vassar, which occurred in her twenty-fourth year. The lady principal chosen to be the mother of Vassar was sixty years old. From among the younger educators of that day, it was proposed that this teacher should take, in the new college, the vice-principal's or elder sister's place. But an opportunity opening for