A Mother's Answer

Editor Argus: - A communication in Argus signed "Woman" should be answered. It seems that the lady has not kept herself informed. Women first moved for teaching cooking and sewing in the public schools of Boston, and persisted till it was introduced and Mrs. Mary A. Livesraore says: "Industrial training (including cooking and sewing) has captured the heart of the American people and it will be made part of every system of popular education, will include girls as well as boys, young women as well as young men." It is not the object of the public school to teach girls cooking lessons to make expert hotel cooks, or sewing to make dressmakers, and no garments are made to sell in the public school. The object is education, and what parent will not take pride that their daughters can, on graduating in our high school, design, cut and make their graduating dresses and prepare and serve a dinner for the school board that would be a credit to Hangstefer or any professsional caterer? And what young man in search of a wife would not highly regard a young lady thus cultured? Let mothers do their best at home, but how many mothers in Ann Arbor, for instance, can teach their daughters how to design a dress or prepare a soup to be served as a first course at a dinner? In how many homes in Ann Arbor are the latter, so delicious, so appetizing, that they are always served first at every first class hotel dinner, now regularly enjoyed? Sixty years ago there were no colleges for women, then came Oberlin, Vaesar, Wellesley, Smith, Mt. Holyoke and Bryn Maur, all but the first exclusively for women, besides thirty-six colleges and great universities are educating women. Then it was thought by men that the home would suffer because of this college or brain education for women. Nnw a woman in Ann Arbor under the shadow of our great university, where over 500 girls are acquitting themselves so honorably that the foundation of society are unshaken, trembles for the home because the hand is to be educated as well as the brain! But the world moves and homes are purer and brighter and more elevated aswomen become better educated. Ann Arbor, May 3, 1894.