For a little more than five years of my life, I supported myself, something I could not have achieved without the education I was able to receive. The past sometimes seems so distant that it is hard to remember that, had I been born just a century earlier in the same place, my sex might have prevented me from receiving any more than a rudimentary education. It is exceedingly unlikely that I would have been able to obtain a college education, let alone a master’s degree.
I stand on the shoulders of educators like Helen Peabody, Emily Jessup, and Caroline D. White, women who not only fought for their own right to be educated, but then taught the next generation after them. They lived in a time when women’s very capacity for learning was questioned. They inhabited a society that accused educated women of neglecting their natural destiny and damaging the reproductive systems merely by learning.
these women made what were probably in some case hard choices, choices that aligned them to their academic institution more closely that most women are today. They paved the way for myself and countless other women. This post is but a small token of my gratitude.
A Grave Concern 