But that insistence on colorless statement
which in our time the needs of trade and science have made current
among men, she did not feel. Lapses from exactitude which do not
separate person from person she easily condoned."
Surely the manly virtues of truthfulness and courage could be no
better exemplified than in the writing of this passage. Whether
his readers, especially the women, will agree with Professor Palmer
that, in woman, truthfulness and courage "take a subordinate place,
subservient to omnipresent sympathy", is a question.
Between 1876 when she was graduated from Michigan, and 1879 when
she went to Wellesley, Miss Freeman taught with marked success,
first at a seminary in the town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where
she had charge of the Greek and Latin; and later as assistant
principal of the high school at Saginaw in Northern Michigan. Here
she was especially successful in keeping order among unruly pupils.
The summer of 1877 she spent in Ann Arbor, studying for a higher
degree, and although she never completed the thesis for this work,
the university conferred upon her the degree of Ph.D. in 1882, the
first year of her presidency at Wellesley.
In this same summer of 1877, when she was studying at Ann Arbor,
she received her first invitation to teach at Wellesley.
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