Plaster fun time franklin12/2/2023 “I so despise the idea that women are not as competent to take care of themselves as men, that they cannot decide for themselves when to go to bed and when to get up, how much exercise to take, how much to pray and go to church.” She once rebelled by loudly refusing to go to the bath time she was assigned by the corridor teacher, Miss Clarke. She found no student who had declared herself for the rights of women and commented acerbically on discovering Confederate sympathies: “The political status of our pastor has just declared itself, and I am suffering a real ostracism for my negro-worship.”Ĭhristine Ladd’s diary also reveals her frustration with the rigid scheduling of activities. Instead of the independent University my imagination pictured, I find a fashionable Boarding-school and instead of the tall intelligent and enthusiastic young women in blue merino that I fancied, I find a troupe of young girls who wear black chamois and are wholly given up to the tyranny of fashion.” She criticized the college for the elementary level of some courses, “the multiplicity of petty rules”, and the lack of an atmosphere of political discussion. 20, 1866, Christine Ladd wrote in her diary, “With great sorrow I at once confess that I am grievously disappointed in Vassar. With financial support from her aunt, Juliet Niles, Christine Ladd enrolled in Vassar’s second entering class, in 1866.Īt first, Vassar seemed not the school she expected it to be. Therefore since I could not find a husband to support me I must support myself and to do so I needed an education. I assured her that it would afford me great pleasure to entangle a husband but there was no one the place who would have me or whom I would have and out of this place I was destined never to go, gave her statistics of the great excess of females in New England and proved that as I was decidedly not handsome my chances were very small. She objected that at the end of four years I should be too old to get married. She says she thinks Auntie ought to send me to Vassar. I have gained an important point with my grandmother. I must prevail upon my father to send me….Let me study diligently now as preparation.” An entry for July 23, 1866, is a record both of the realization of her dream and of the clarity of argument her later admirers and opponents her would come to recognize: In an entry, for March 27, 1863, the 16 year old exulted in a “glorious emancipation proclamation for woman….I have been reading an account of the Vassar female college that is to be. The diary is a rich record of her intellectual and moral discussions with herself and of her life and studies-at Vassar and later. Although she would later berate the practice ( “There is nothing more foolish than to write a journal, except the very act and fact of being such a foolish, stupid person”) she continued it at least until 1873. Ladd began keeping a diary in 1860, around the time of her mother’s death. She spent two years at the Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, completing the same courses as the young men preparing for Harvard and graduating in 1865 as class valedictorian. Christine moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to live with her paternal grandmother. Her mother died of pneumonia when she was twelve, and her father remarried two years later. Influenced by this atmosphere, accordingly, it is not surprising that when Vassar College was founded, I wanted to go there.” In spite of the fact that they were widely separated by marriage, they would return in the summers to our family home in Windsor, Connecticut, and there led a delightful intellectual life together. “My mother was one of four sisters, all of whom were brilliant women. Ladd-Franklin told an interviewer from The Buffalo Express in April,1918. “The first specific influence that led me toward serious intellectual pursuits was my mother’s character and family circle,” Mrs. Six of her maternal ancestors were members of the Constitutional Convention of the Colony of Connecticut. John Milton Niles, Christine Ladd’s great uncle.
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