THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

567

spirited girl to marry John Smith and risk this questionable extension of her liberty. Anything to avoid being thrown on the kin. Poor girls, they would gladly have earned their living, but then it wasn’t genteel. Sometimes a little school was made up in the family. By and by the more ambitious were sent off to Philadelphia or Baltimore boarding schools to be finished in style; so to keep the patronage at home seminaries were chartered and institutions built; but the teachers had to come from the North. The Yankee school, more in jest than derision, was a necessity till, as her admirable work went on, no other teacher could win the respect due her higher culture. By an unreasoning perversion of sentiment the Kentucky girl, who was thought ever so much better than her teacher, was not considered able enough to take charge of a school. Then, too, you heard the silly mothers who had been made dunces from necessity, remark, in the sweet bliss of ignorance: “I took Mary Eliza away before commencement—so much is expected of a graduate, you know.” How is it now? The normal schools are flooding the country with capable young women. The once dangerous forests of the dark and bloody ground now gleam with steeple and spire, and not one of Kentucky’s one hundred and nineteen counties is without its common school fund, and women are being admitted to the school boards. Colleges, universi­ties, institutes, seminaries, academies, kindergartens, whatever the name, have fol­lowed the wake of railroads, and the children are sure of intelligent training from the state’s own cultured daughters. The loss of property in slaves, and in devastated homes, brought a change that was destined to work only good. Necessity gradually came to elevate honest endeavor and open the way for woman’s buried talent. Par­don me if I devote a paragraph to Mrs. Nancy Jennings Dunlap, who was very dear to me. She eminently deserves a place in the annals of Kentucky women She came of good old English stock, with every faculty on the alert for whatever was new and progressive, for all that led onward and upward. Married at fourteen, her education was meager; however, it included music and painting, and she had ambition and energy and took up her burden of life with heroic determination. Forty years after she could look back upon a record of doing such as few can recall. She was the mother of eleven children, had sewed for her family white and black, educated herself with her sons and daughters, read everything that was published in that day of compara­tively restricted literature, was conversant with politics and every public movement, entertained guests literally from one year’s end to another, had helped scores of people, old and young, to better their conditions, had accompanied her husband to the state legislature and to Congress, was a staunch church woman, faithful at Sunday- school during many years, founder of the Good Templar Order in her native place, and a devotee to higher education. She was always well dressed and ready to con­verse in her vivacious way upon any topic. She was one of the most graceful, popular leaders in the state. She found time in her busy life to travel much and learn from observation as from the books she so loved, and when at the early age of fifty-three she closed her eyes upon the arena of so much industry and philanthropy, she had fulfilled nearly to the letter the Bible portraiture of action for home and state.

The day has come when we look about us and say, “ It is good.” The shackles of repression that were forged, not by intentional injustice, but by the shortsighted spirit of the times, are not all loosed; nor do we look just yet for a millennium of free­dom from social prejudice. But the daughters of the house are filling places as artists, musicians, poets, novelists, teachers, stenographers, typewriters, postmasters, matrons, housekeepers and all the list of undisputed territory. They are slipping the leash day by day. The labors of Mrs. Josephine K. Henry, Mrs. Mary B. Clay, Miss Laura Clay and others, to secure equal property rights for Kentucky women, have paved the way to much that was before impracticable. Their places shall ever be honored in the archives of the state. Men are beginning to discriminate between usefulness and unwomanliness. The press is falling into line, and we read that Miss Margaret Guthrie, who died recently at the age of ninety-four years, was the first to introduce the cultivation of strawberries in Jefferson County, and that she made $1,000 on her