Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/524

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506
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tical end rather than a direct educational purpose. But they are defensible, I think, on the same broad grounds that the occupations of the farmer are defensible, that they contribute directly and essentially to the maintenance of life, and, like his, they may be made artistically excellent. Well-dressed men, women, and children, well fed men, women, and children are ethical realities still far in the future. When you remember that we are dressed during the whole period of our social life and that we eat three times every day, eleven hundred times a year (allowing an occasional late supper), it is astonishing that these very human arts have not been brought to greater perfection. So I would not disparage the practical turn that is being given to the girls' education any more than I would disparage the practical arts which minister to distinctly human ends in the culture of the boys. But I do insist, quite as uncompromisingly for the girls as for the boys, that the arts of life are secondary, that the major end is life itself. And I hope to see manual training for girls given such a human and æsthetic turn that it will mean not only more accomplished home makers, but in even a deeper sense more perfect and more charming women.

I have tried to present an adequate picture of the manual training school. One will get a better picture if one will supplement this criticism by a day spent in the school itself.

WOMEN IN SCIENCE.

By HENRIETTA IRVING BOLTON.

A GREAT deal has been written of late years in regard to the "new woman"; a somewhat vague term expressing the contrast between the clinging, fainting, willowy heroine, dear to the hearts of our grandmothers, and the alert, athletic, breezy woman who rules the world to-day. According as the phrase is used, it becomes a title of honor, or a term of reproach; but in either case we are apt to look upon the "new woman" as a fin-de-siècle production. The "sweet girl graduate with her golden hair," who

"Knows the great-uncle of Moses
And the dates of the war of the roses,
And the reasons for things—
Why the Indians wore rings
In their red aboriginal noses,"

we regard as an outcome of this century, and we have only just become accustomed to the idea of women physicians.

That women should hold professors' chairs in the great female