Bessie Louise Pierce

The School and the Spirit of Nationalism

as 1642 the Massachusetts Puritans charted a course to be followed thereafter by their descendants, when they legislated that every child be taught enough &dquo;to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of the country.&dquo; It was they who thus first in America recognized the force of education to preserve and transmit the pattern of thought held most sacred. And although the religious conception appeared to them the most important, it is not strange that long before the middle of the nineteenth century, it had been enlarged to include among its functions the making of good citizens. These good citizens were thus equipped through the education of the day to maintain the liberties preserved in a written document, whose spirit could be made known to all Americans through vital, personal contact with the tax-supported school. Americans of this time felt the pulsating force of a democratic awakening, given shape in the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency. They had, too, the certain knowledge of a boundless area of free land where all men were able to become self-re-

The Political Pattern of Some Women's Organizations:

THE womans club movement of the present is one of the effects of a leisure unknown before modern technology wrought its transformations and woman gained occupational, political, and cultural freedom. It is part of the struggle of that sex to acquire a place in activities not centered entirely in homemaking. Since the 1860s it mirrors womans new sphere of influence and bears testimony to an everwidening horizon of interest.