18-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Thursday, July 17, 1913: Nothing doing.
Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:
Grandma was feeling down about something during mid-July, 1913. She graduated from high school the previous spring. Yesterday, I wondered if she was sad because she’d been unsuccessful in getting a teaching job for the upcoming school year.
There weren’t many careers open to women back then. Nursing was another field that was open to women. Did Grandma ever consider becoming a nurse?
I wonder too 🙂
Did she ever speak to you of her dreams as a young woman? It always amazes me of how she was a woman of so few words! Me? My journal entries are pages long!! I write like I talk – 🙂
As far as I know she never talked about her dreams as a young woman. It’s almost like her life was divided into several different stages–and she didn’t talk much about previous stages. She married a farmer when she was 26 and was a farm wife and mother.
That seems to be part of that generation, my mom and dad were the same way. Even my grandmother who loved to tell stories only told a select few and that only after we kept after her to know more about her life.
Nursing was incredible hard work and usual you had to leave home and work/study/live in the hospital. Was there a hospital close to her home?
There was a hospital about 10 miles from where she lived in Lewisburg. A hundred years ago I think that it was quite small. It still exists, but is in a different location and is much larger.
ps I used to be a nurse myself in the eighties and early nineties: how happy I was not havig to wear those silly hats;0)
I had a friend who graduated from nursing school in the 70s. She had to wear one of those hats for the graduation ceremony, but I think that was the last (and only) time that she ever wore it.
What is settlement work, I wonder?
It was the concept of helping people in poverty-stricken neighborhoods. There was a focus on social reform. There were (and still are) settlement houses which serve as a type of community center. The most famous settlement house was Jane Addam’s Hull House in Chicago.
I found a nice history of settlement houses on the United Neighborhood Houses site:
http://www.unhny.org/about/history
Wow, that’s awesome! Thanks for finding that link.
Poor Helena. Seems maybe the transition from child to adult may not have been a smooth one.
Both then and now I think that we sometimes don’t realize how hard to is to transition into adulthood.
My grandfather grew up with that understand and asked me when I graduated high school (1973) if I was going to go to college for teaching or nursing. But that was the world he had lived in up to that point. I like what Flora above said about nursing being such hard work and how it was all-consuming. So true.
I’ve about the same age as you, and I have similar memories.
I did used to read the Sue Barton student nurse books ;).
I do hope that Helena finds something that will make her happy.
Even though I can tell that it was a difficult summer for her, I enjoy being able to see what she was thinking via the diary entries.
I love the whole idea about your blog. Thanks for sharing with us! 🙂
Thanks for taking a moment to write the note. I have a lot of fun doing this blog, and It’s always wonderful to hear when someone enjoys it.
This picture reminds me of my mother-in-law, dressed in her nurses uniform. Times have certainly changed from those starched whites. I can’t believe they offered a home study course.
My thoughts exactly. Back then nursing must not have been nearly as professionalized. I think that many nurses back then went into private duty nursing and often cared for “convalescents and invalids” in their homes.
Hi. I know from my own family that nursing was a very popular way for a woman to get both educated and a way to support herself. My grandmother went to nursing school in Boston in the 1910s. Jane