Friday, January 16, 2009
As America enters a new chapter in its existence, there is great hope that things will be better for everyone. Many young people feel that a new beginning is at hand; and young and old alike are all hoping for the best. My interest is to lend a hand to young women who are seeking to make their way in these challenging times. And for this occasion I have chosen to pass on the words of a rather unique woman leader. When I came upon her writing a few years ago I found it quite refreshing.
This is her message:
How can a young woman in America be prepared and prepare herself for all that life will bring to her? America is a country where, to its own undoing, individualism has reigned supreme.
The first period of a young woman’s existence is a period of preparation. The most extreme of our modern educators feel that it is not the education which is given that is of any value in the development of the individual, but that which is created and developed from within. So far is this principle carried by some advanced teachers that no student must be urged to follow any line of established fact or principle. Her imagination is chiefly fed by the recurrent thought of self-study and self-development; everything must come to her in a subjective form. Discipline is unknown because, in modern eyes, discipline is blind acceptance of what is, rather than what might be.
There can be but one result of this development: the miserable little victim, taught only to follow her own whims, comes face to face with life as it really is, and finds herself utterly unable to cope with its problems and difficulties. The essentials of all character-building must be developed in early life along lines far different from these. Discipline and order must be the foundations of any creative individualism.
Freedom of choice is indeed one of the greatest gifts possessed by mankind, but it must come to a well-trained and spiritually developed character, not to an ignorant and uninformed child. The young woman who faces her problems with high-souled courage and profound thought is generally the one who can look back to a childhood where order and discipline were accepted and understood, because of a great faith and a great love that lay behind and beyond all physical manifestation of law and order.
The young woman, then, whose early environment has taught her the necessity of self-control and self-discipline is ready to take her place in the general scheme of the universe. What a glorious sense of growing strength develops in the young woman who is constantly learning to understand her environment rather than herself!
The problem now facing the young woman of America is her utter inability to realize that her future can only be a logical development of her present. Her mental attitude pictures the distant years as a flowery period when the man of her destiny shall place at her feet the fruits of his toil, so that together they may wander through the sunny paths of life.
The average young woman does not really come into her own until she reaches the stage when the present ceases to be a desire for the possession of some coveted object, and the future ceases to be a vague dream of accomplishment without effort. With her maturity comes the growing sense of the enormous value of the immediate present and the conscious discarding of that rule of life which never does today what can be put off until tomorrow, and which, until now, has governed her every action.
Suddenly comes the awakening, the consciousness that no day is long enough to accomplish what should be done here and now. This desire to see something develop into immediate existence brings with it, however, an intolerance of the wasted hours of the past. The moment of discouragement and discontent with the past must be faced with a true courage which quickly leads to a present determination for other and better things.
Here we come back again to the habit of sustained effort acquired in our young woman’s early education. Once having established the doctrine of thoroughness, the value of hard, honest work becomes apparent. Never mind the nature of the work itself, the young woman’s responsibility lies in her own individual relation to it, to her home, and to the community as a whole.
Her power is the power of creation, but she must learn to receive before she can freely give. She must become clear of understanding before she can become forceful of expression; she must develop individuality before she strives for a freedom in which it may be expressed. She must be sure of having an open-minded and interested hearing for her own thoughts and ideas, so that they in turn may deepen and develop.
A woman’s appeal is supposed – it is said with scorn – to be an emotional appeal. Let us accept the fact and glory in it. Let us train our quick instincts and emotional reaction to be the biggest and best force in the community. As a motive power it is unsurpassed; its idealism, when used properly, can conquer any difficulty; its strength of purpose knows no defeat.
The individualism that has run riot in the last decade is neither cooperative nor creative. It is a form of egotism pure and simple. It causes the young woman to break down all standards of taste or consideration in her treatment of her own contemporaries or her manners towards older people. Manners are really nothing more than a sympathetic understanding of other people’s point of view. The young woman of the future will have too fine a self-respect to fail to recognize the rights of others.
What women throughout the country still need is a freer association with other women whose standards, social, intellectual and moral, are higher than their own. As a people we are too inclined to seek a lower standard for our recreation, to level down. Many a popular magazine secures a large circulation by fiction which is utterly valueless in quality; other publications containing literary and historical articles written by serious authors reach but a few homes.
In our recreation, as in our work, we want immediate results with minimum effort; to be entertained generally means to be relaxed. The splendid rest and refreshment that comes with a great, but different, intellectual or physical effort are known only to a few.
The ideal life would be for the daily existence to be so ordered that no definite holiday time would be necessary – each twenty-four hours would bring its own period of work, play, and rest. In our complicated civilization, this is well-nigh impossible.
The young woman whose leisure hours are spent amongst the precious works of art that the ages have provided will be less interested in spending her hard-earned salary in vying with her companions to dress in the most extreme and the most inappropriate of the season’s fashions.
The young woman whose taste has led her to seek for companionship the best writers and musicians of the past will create in her own environment and every-day life an opportunity for satisfying her hunger.
The newer and better liberty which has come to her will give her a deeper appreciation of the eternal feminine within her soul; she will learn to use and not to waste the love of the beautiful, the eternal desire to please. Her dress, her language, her accomplishments will fall into their natural positions, forming the attributes of a rounded and developed personality.
Our young women of the future will work as they have been created to work – with fearlessness, honesty of purpose, courage and determination, and with trained intelligence and moral integrity, ready to cope with life’s problems as they present themselves.
But above all and beyond all will be within her the woman, with a standard and an ultimate ideal, the woman who bears within herself the life of the generations yet unborn.
Anne Morgan – 1914
Excerpted from The American Girl
About Anne Morgan:
Anne Morgan is the daughter of J.P. Morgan, regarded by many as the greatest businessman of all time. He is in no small way responsible for raising the standard of living of Americans above the rest of the world. In his strong vision of corporate growth the rights of the individual worker were often overlooked. However, he was known to get a powerful earful from one of the only people who could stand up to him, his daughter, Anne. He once described her as “the woman who runs me.”
Anne was a woman of integrity who grew up in a life of privilege. Though she believed differently on many issues than her father, she never publicly dishonored him. She thought of him as “a man filled with the splendid spirit of the pioneer, a man of great vision and infinite capacity.” She saw her duty in life was to make good that which her father created.
She was a powerful advocate for women’s rights in the workplace, and played an active role in helping women secure the right to vote. In 1903 she helped create the Colony Club, the first women's social club in New York. She also established a clubroom in the Brooklyn Navy Yard so that workers could receive nutritious meals. From 1928 – 1943 she was president of the American Woman's Association.
During the peak of World War I (1914 -1917) she took up residence along the French front and established the American Fund for French Wounded, which after the war evolved into the American Friends for Devastated France. This was the first large-scale relief effort funded by a private citizen. In 1932, in honor of her relief work, she became the first American woman appointed a commander of the French Legion of Honor. She also led efforts to rebuild France after World War II.
Anne Morgan dedicated much of her life and virtually all of her wealth to helping others.
This is her message:
How can a young woman in America be prepared and prepare herself for all that life will bring to her? America is a country where, to its own undoing, individualism has reigned supreme.
The first period of a young woman’s existence is a period of preparation. The most extreme of our modern educators feel that it is not the education which is given that is of any value in the development of the individual, but that which is created and developed from within. So far is this principle carried by some advanced teachers that no student must be urged to follow any line of established fact or principle. Her imagination is chiefly fed by the recurrent thought of self-study and self-development; everything must come to her in a subjective form. Discipline is unknown because, in modern eyes, discipline is blind acceptance of what is, rather than what might be.
There can be but one result of this development: the miserable little victim, taught only to follow her own whims, comes face to face with life as it really is, and finds herself utterly unable to cope with its problems and difficulties. The essentials of all character-building must be developed in early life along lines far different from these. Discipline and order must be the foundations of any creative individualism.
Freedom of choice is indeed one of the greatest gifts possessed by mankind, but it must come to a well-trained and spiritually developed character, not to an ignorant and uninformed child. The young woman who faces her problems with high-souled courage and profound thought is generally the one who can look back to a childhood where order and discipline were accepted and understood, because of a great faith and a great love that lay behind and beyond all physical manifestation of law and order.
The young woman, then, whose early environment has taught her the necessity of self-control and self-discipline is ready to take her place in the general scheme of the universe. What a glorious sense of growing strength develops in the young woman who is constantly learning to understand her environment rather than herself!
The problem now facing the young woman of America is her utter inability to realize that her future can only be a logical development of her present. Her mental attitude pictures the distant years as a flowery period when the man of her destiny shall place at her feet the fruits of his toil, so that together they may wander through the sunny paths of life.
The average young woman does not really come into her own until she reaches the stage when the present ceases to be a desire for the possession of some coveted object, and the future ceases to be a vague dream of accomplishment without effort. With her maturity comes the growing sense of the enormous value of the immediate present and the conscious discarding of that rule of life which never does today what can be put off until tomorrow, and which, until now, has governed her every action.
Suddenly comes the awakening, the consciousness that no day is long enough to accomplish what should be done here and now. This desire to see something develop into immediate existence brings with it, however, an intolerance of the wasted hours of the past. The moment of discouragement and discontent with the past must be faced with a true courage which quickly leads to a present determination for other and better things.
Here we come back again to the habit of sustained effort acquired in our young woman’s early education. Once having established the doctrine of thoroughness, the value of hard, honest work becomes apparent. Never mind the nature of the work itself, the young woman’s responsibility lies in her own individual relation to it, to her home, and to the community as a whole.
Her power is the power of creation, but she must learn to receive before she can freely give. She must become clear of understanding before she can become forceful of expression; she must develop individuality before she strives for a freedom in which it may be expressed. She must be sure of having an open-minded and interested hearing for her own thoughts and ideas, so that they in turn may deepen and develop.
A woman’s appeal is supposed – it is said with scorn – to be an emotional appeal. Let us accept the fact and glory in it. Let us train our quick instincts and emotional reaction to be the biggest and best force in the community. As a motive power it is unsurpassed; its idealism, when used properly, can conquer any difficulty; its strength of purpose knows no defeat.
The individualism that has run riot in the last decade is neither cooperative nor creative. It is a form of egotism pure and simple. It causes the young woman to break down all standards of taste or consideration in her treatment of her own contemporaries or her manners towards older people. Manners are really nothing more than a sympathetic understanding of other people’s point of view. The young woman of the future will have too fine a self-respect to fail to recognize the rights of others.
What women throughout the country still need is a freer association with other women whose standards, social, intellectual and moral, are higher than their own. As a people we are too inclined to seek a lower standard for our recreation, to level down. Many a popular magazine secures a large circulation by fiction which is utterly valueless in quality; other publications containing literary and historical articles written by serious authors reach but a few homes.
In our recreation, as in our work, we want immediate results with minimum effort; to be entertained generally means to be relaxed. The splendid rest and refreshment that comes with a great, but different, intellectual or physical effort are known only to a few.
The ideal life would be for the daily existence to be so ordered that no definite holiday time would be necessary – each twenty-four hours would bring its own period of work, play, and rest. In our complicated civilization, this is well-nigh impossible.
The young woman whose leisure hours are spent amongst the precious works of art that the ages have provided will be less interested in spending her hard-earned salary in vying with her companions to dress in the most extreme and the most inappropriate of the season’s fashions.
The young woman whose taste has led her to seek for companionship the best writers and musicians of the past will create in her own environment and every-day life an opportunity for satisfying her hunger.
The newer and better liberty which has come to her will give her a deeper appreciation of the eternal feminine within her soul; she will learn to use and not to waste the love of the beautiful, the eternal desire to please. Her dress, her language, her accomplishments will fall into their natural positions, forming the attributes of a rounded and developed personality.
Our young women of the future will work as they have been created to work – with fearlessness, honesty of purpose, courage and determination, and with trained intelligence and moral integrity, ready to cope with life’s problems as they present themselves.
But above all and beyond all will be within her the woman, with a standard and an ultimate ideal, the woman who bears within herself the life of the generations yet unborn.
Anne Morgan – 1914
Excerpted from The American Girl
About Anne Morgan:
Anne Morgan is the daughter of J.P. Morgan, regarded by many as the greatest businessman of all time. He is in no small way responsible for raising the standard of living of Americans above the rest of the world. In his strong vision of corporate growth the rights of the individual worker were often overlooked. However, he was known to get a powerful earful from one of the only people who could stand up to him, his daughter, Anne. He once described her as “the woman who runs me.”
Anne was a woman of integrity who grew up in a life of privilege. Though she believed differently on many issues than her father, she never publicly dishonored him. She thought of him as “a man filled with the splendid spirit of the pioneer, a man of great vision and infinite capacity.” She saw her duty in life was to make good that which her father created.
She was a powerful advocate for women’s rights in the workplace, and played an active role in helping women secure the right to vote. In 1903 she helped create the Colony Club, the first women's social club in New York. She also established a clubroom in the Brooklyn Navy Yard so that workers could receive nutritious meals. From 1928 – 1943 she was president of the American Woman's Association.
During the peak of World War I (1914 -1917) she took up residence along the French front and established the American Fund for French Wounded, which after the war evolved into the American Friends for Devastated France. This was the first large-scale relief effort funded by a private citizen. In 1932, in honor of her relief work, she became the first American woman appointed a commander of the French Legion of Honor. She also led efforts to rebuild France after World War II.
Anne Morgan dedicated much of her life and virtually all of her wealth to helping others.
Page 1 of 1 pages
