Woman and the Higher Education.
Salmon, Lucy Maynard. “The Teaching of History in Academies and Colleges.” Woman and the Higher Education. Edited by Anna C. Brackett. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1893.
32mo.; brown cloth elaborately stamped in gilt on the cover and spine.
First edition, with publisher’s undated ads in the rear. An anthology including works by the hit parade of activists for female education: Lucy Maynard Salmon, Mrs. Blanche Wilder Bellamy, Mrs. Emma Willard, Mrs. Emma C. Embury, Mrs. Maria Mitchell, Mrs. Lucia Gilbert Runkle, Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer, and Anna Brackett, who edited the volume. A beautiful copy of his scarce title from the “Distaff Series.” Krichmar 3680. NAW I, 217-18. Published in connection with the Women’s Building at the World’s Columbia Exposition at Chicago in 1893, this collection of essays effectively traces the evolution of thinking on higher education for women through the 19th century. In it, Brackett emphasizes that young women should not be protected or buffered from real life: “The American girl to be a teacher must be in contact with the life of the real world…She need not be shut in conventional ignorance to preserve her purity of thought.” Brackett’s distinguished forty-year career made her an obvious choice to edit this volume.
Lucy Maynard Salmon (1853-1927) overcame a youth of shy reticence in up-state New York to become a leader in educational reform through her work at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She later recalled that her years at the University of Michigan—she returned in 1882 for an A.M. in modern European history and English and American constitutional history—taught her three crucial lessons: “the necessity of production, the pleasure to be found in ‘enjoying one’s mind,’ and the inspiration that came from democratic simplicity of thought and action” (quoted in NAW, p. 224).
After several unfulfilling administrative and teaching positions, and the publication of Education in Michigan during the Territorial Period (1885), Salmon completed a year of graduate study in American history at Bryn Mawr College from 1886-87, and wrote a master’s thesis on the History of the Appointing Power of the President. The following year she became the first history teacher at Vassar College, and in 1889, the first full professor of history. With only a short hiatus from 1898-1900, which she spent abroad, Salmon devoted considerable time and effort until her death to the expansion and development of the history department, library, and broader curriculum, and to Vassar’s students and administration. In 1913 she was “instrumental in effecting a liberalization of the college administration which gave greater influence to the faculty and lessened what Miss Salmon considered the monarchical power of the president and trustees” (NAW, p. 225). She also found time to promote educational reform beyond the walls of the Vassar community, as a member of the executive committee of the American Historical Association (from 1915-1919) and cofounder of the Association of History Teachers of the Middle States and Maryland.
Her scholarship included an historical study of Domestic Service (1897), on which she collaborated with then-Labor commissioner Carroll D. Wright, and which “made a pioneering application of statistical method to this field. The book derived from her basic faith in democracy and from her strong disapproval of the class distinctions that were accepted as a part of the service system at Vassar, a conviction she again voiced in Progress in the Household (1906)” (NAW, p. 224). Among her later publications are The Newspaper and the Historian, The Newspaper and Authority (1923), Why Is History Rewritten? (posthumous 1929), and Historical Material (posthumous 1933). Salmon was a devoted suffragette, “although it was an unpopular cause in Pousghkeepsie and agitation in its favor on the Vassar campus was prohibited” (NAW, p. 225).
Boston-born educator Anna C. Bracket
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