Both in Great Britain and in the United States the great social reform movements of the last century numbered among their most able advocates brilliant and devoted women. This is true of temperance, abolition of slavery, prison reform, the treatment of the insane and defectives, and nearly every branch which this Guide has enumerated, especially in Part 4, where there is a general outline of these reforms. For the part played by women see the biographies of the women just mentioned and, among many others, Jane Addams, Clara Barton, Baroness Burdett-Coutts, Dorothea Lynde Dix, Emily Faithful, Elizabeth Fry, Octavia and Miranda Hill, Mary A. Livermore and Lucretia Mott. More particularly the following list of names of women connected with educational progress will supplement what has been said in the chapter of this Guide For Teachers and in the part of the Guide dealing with advances in education and educational problems in the chapter Questions of the Day:

And see also the articles Co-education and articles on different colleges for women, e.g., Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Smith, etc. One who wishes to realize the extent of feminine talent or genius should read the lives in the Britannica of the sculptor Harriet Hosmer and of women painters including Cecilia Beaux, Rosa Bonheur, Artemisia Gentileschi, Kate Greenway, Angelica Kauffmann, Teresa Schwartze and Mme. Vigée-Lebrun. But the reader who is eager rather to know whether woman’s intellectual powers—not her talent and her genius—compare favourably with those of the male, will find material in the biographical sketches of the physicist Mme. Curie; the geologist Mary Anning; the travelers Isabella Bird Bishop and Alexandrina Tinné; the biologists Marianne North and Eleanor Ormerod; the American ethnologist Alice C. Fletcher; and above all—since mathematics has always been considered above the capacity of women—the mathematicians Maria Gaetana Agnesi and Sophie Kovalevsky and the astronomers Agnes Mary Clerke, Maria Cunitz, Caroline Herschel, Maria Mitchell and Mary Somerville.

It is pertinent to add that the present 11th edition of the Britannica indicates the advance of women not only by embodying their collaboration to an unprecedented extent and devoting an unprecedented amount of its space to biographies of women, but by the circumstance that it has, to a far larger extent than any previous edition, been purchased by women.

Part VI
Readings In Connection With Recreation and Vacations

CHAPTER LXVI
RECREATION AND VACATION

“Laying out your work” is a familiar phrase, and describes a common practice. But hardly one man in a hundred deliberately “lays out” his play, planning his recreation so as to get the best value out of every hour of his leisure time. Yet when he consults a doctor because his work is not running smoothly, one of the first questions he has to answer is about the amount and form of recreation he takes.

Recreative Reading about Recreation

An important branch of the art of playing is to learn the value of reading about play. The more a man knows about any form of amusement, the more he will enjoy the hours he devotes to it, and the better he will succeed in keeping his mind off his business during these hours. But there is another and an even greater advantage in this kind of reading: it will take your mind out-of-doors during hours of leisure that you are compelled to spend in-doors. Everyone recognizes that out-door recreations, involving some degree of bodily activity, are the most wholesome for men whose work is sedentary, as is the case with nearly every reader of this Guide, and the best forms of out-door recreation are those in which the contrast with your work is accentuated by the complete change of scene and of habits which most men can only hope to get once a year, at vacation time.

Turn to the next best form of relaxation, the out-door amusements that lie close at hand. Here, again, your opportunities are limited, for all these pleasures require daylight, which, during a great part of the year, ends before your work is done; and most of them require weather conditions that you can only get at certain seasons. An hour spent in reading and thinking about out-door amusements and travel, and in making plans for such delights, even if the planning must be for a future that seems far away, is therefore always refreshing.