Читать книгу All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography онлайн

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This determination of mine to get an education, go to college, was chiefly due, no doubt, to the active crusade going on in those days for what we called woman’s rights. Ours was a yeasty time, the ferment reaching into every relation of life, attacking and remodeling every tradition, every philosophy. As my father was hard hit by the attack on his conception of individualism in a democracy—freedom with strictest consideration for the rights and needs of others—as I was struggling with all the handicaps of my ignorance, with the nature of life, a search for God, so my mother was facing a little reluctantly a readjustment of her status in the home and in society. She had grown up with the Woman’s Rights movement. Had she never married, I feel sure she would have sought to “vindicate her sex” by seeking a higher education, possibly a profession. The fight would have delighted her. If she had gone to Iowa she surely would have soon joined the agitation led there in the late fifties by Amelia Bloomer, the inventor of the practical and ugly costume which still carries her name, the real founder of dress reform. We owe it to Amelia Bloomer that we can without public ridicule wear short skirts and stout boots, be as sensible as our feminine natures permit—which is not saying much for us when it comes to fashions. But my mother found herself a pioneer in the Oil Region, confronted by the sternest of problems which were to be settled only by immediate individual effort and good will.