What shall we do with our girls? One of our well known daily papers came to the conclusion some time ago that our girls must be disposed of in some way, and feeling that it lacked the ability to solve the problem alone and unaided, sent a request abroad for help in settling this momentous question.
If we were in China, they would say “drown them.” Horace Greeley might have suggested sending them West to keep house for his “young men.” Many, in answer to the before-mentioned paper’s appeal, advocated making business women of them; while others said: “Teach them to be good housekeepers.”
Now, as all our girls cannot be housekeepers, neither can they be business women, is it not the best plan where there are two girls in a family, to teach one how to minister to the wants of the household, and let the other help to provide the means, wherewith to supply the necessities of life? We are not all Vanderbilts or Astors.
But whether it be “Yea” or “Nay,” woman is making her way in the world. She has been heard of as making rapid progress in law; and it was only a short while ago we read of a young lady being admitted to practice in Pennsylvania. We have doctors without number; one of our Western towns boasts of a woman for Mayor, and they have aspired to the Presidency. Much has been said of woman’s sphere, but she knows her own place in life, and if given a little help in the various directions necessary to reach the place, she will win, and has won for herself respect and admiration for her courage and independence.
But this is not a Woman’s Rights Meeting, nor a sewing circle, in which the minister has been invited to tea, and where we are making the poor luckless man suffer for his sex in general, but the Graduation Exercises of a band of girls who have worked hard for success, and gained it.
A society of men organized many years ago, instead of sitting with folded hands lamenting their inability to dispose of “our girls,” went to work and established a class; placed at its head one of the best of teachers, and called it the Stenographic and Typewriting Class of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen. “Now,” they said, “we have opened a way, let us see what the girls can do for and with themselves.”
In the Fall of 1886 the first class was formed, and since then more than 100 girls owe their present advantages to this noble institution.
The Class of ’90 graduating from here to-night met for the first lesson on October 1st of last year.
Of our troubles and disappointments, it is not for me to tell, but we have bravely toiled on, and have at last reached the end we have so eagerly and anxiously looked forward to, and the feeling that we have learned something which will help us in more ways than we at present fully realize, repays us for our perseverance.
To-night we graduate from this school into one compared to which the trials and disappointments of this course will seem trifles. We go forth to battle with the world, and if we do not keep up with it, it will mercilessly leave us far behind. But the Class of ’90 is not going to be laggard. Indeed we hope that when we graduate from that higher and more exacting school, it will be with the same satisfactory results with which we leave here, and, like Longfellow’s “Great Men,” we may leave