The question of the value of the product or process, as measured by its usefulness or beneficent influence on mankind, is so vast that a flood of answers sweep over one, embracing the whole field of women's usefulness and the whole realm of education. The usefulness of the discovery of radium has scarcely been estimated as yet, nor has the beneficent influence of teaching defectives, and of many of the household inventions been fully enjoyed up to this time. The question involves much of the scientific success of the future along both physical, mental, moral, and educational lines, and, judging by the past, we feel assured that many brilliant achievements will owe their origin and accomplishment to women.
There was naturally nothing lacking in the merits of the installation of any exhibit presented by women, nor in the taste manifested in the placing of the same. The women's college booths were always effectively arranged and sometimes made up for the lack of range of exhibit by unusual artistic grouping and tasteful placing of the displays.
Several times I have referred to the progress in art displayed by woman at St. Louis. This was evidenced not only in the magnificent specimens of her brush and chisel in the Fine Arts Museum in both the home and foreign art schools, but in the prolific efforts of her skill in outside exposition sculpture, where woman's work, side by side with man's, was pointed to with exultation as one of the greatest triumphs of the twentieth century exposition. We all recall how many of the most notable pieces of statuary crowning the various great palaces were the work of divinely endowed women. Such was the superb "Victory," surmounting Festival Hall, the conception of Mrs. Evylyn B. Longman, while the spirit of "Missouri," which winged its flight from the summit of the great Missouri Building, was executed by Miss Carrie Wood, of St. Louis. To Miss Grace Lincoln Temple, the beautiful decorations of the interior of the United States Government Building were due. The two "Victory" statues on the Grand Basin and the Daniel Boone statue were executed by Miss Enid Yandell, by birth a Kentuckian, but now of New York. The statues of James Monroe, James Madison, George Rogers Clark, on Art Hill, were, respectively, done by Julia M. Bracken, Chicago; Janet Scudder, Terre Haute, and Elsie Ward, Denver. The reclining figures over the central door of the Liberal Arts Building were by Edith B. Stephens, of New York, and the east and north spandrels of the Machinery Building were done by Melva Beatrice Wilson, New York.
Glancing at the portrait painting of Cecelia Beaux, the work of Mary MacMonnies, of Margaret Fuller, of Mrs. Kenyon Cox, and of Kate Carr, of Tennessee; of Virginia Demont-Breton, of France: of Lady Tadema and Henrietta Rae, of Great Britain, we feel, as well as see, the exalted place woman's genius has given her in the art world of to-day. While in science we point with gratification not only to Madame Currie, but to the astronomical work of Miss Whitney, of Vassar; of Miss Agnes Clerke, of Cambridge, England, and of Dorothea Klumpke, born in San Francisco, but connected with the Paris Observatory and one of the foremost astronomers of France. In archaeological works Miss Elizabeth Stokes, of Alexandra College, Dublin; in research work, Miss Skeel, of Westfield College, London; and in mathematics, Sophia Kowalevski, of Stockholm, and Charlotte Angus Scott, born in England and professor at Bryn Mawr, stand out preeminent—adding even greater luster to the woman's page of science, on which in the past the names of Caroline Herschel, Mary Summerville, and Maria Mitchell were written in illumined letters.
In medical works, especially in the United States, and more particularly in the profession of surgery, women have scored for themselves many glorious successes, though it is not possible here to enter into an amplification of the subject.
In conclusion, I would say that the Louisiana Purchase Exposition markedly showed the setting aside by women of former traditions and her expansion into a new life, where, though by no means giving up the ornamental and social, she has yet demonstrated her rights to be recognized in the broader and more useful fields of discovery, investigation, and invention in art, science, and industry. She is everywhere the rival of man, everywhere entering with enthusiasm his chosen paths, excepting perhaps in naval and military operations, and as nurse and ministering doctor she is even there.
As the World's Fair at St. Louis was a stupendous triumph of modern times in manufactures, in economic and liberal arts, in electricity, in history, in science, in architecture, in agriculture and forestry, in landscape gardening, in machinery, in archaeology, in education, in fine arts—in fact, along every line of practical work as well as in the sciences and arts—so woman's progress in every department was such as to gleam forth from even the superb and marvelous splendor everywhere reflected as worthy of her highest ambition and as suggestive of untold and signal possibilities for the future.
GROUP 4, MRS. E.H. THAYER, OF DENVER, COLO., JUROR.
Under the group heading "Special Education in Fine Arts," the two classes into which it was divided represented: (Institutions for teaching drawing, painting, and music. Art schools and institutes. Schools and departments of music; conservatories of music. Methods of instruction, results obtained. Legislation, organization, general statistics.)
Mrs. Thayer writes as follows: