Henrietta Buckmaster, "Women Who Shaped History"

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Henrietta Buckmaster, "Women Who Shaped History" (1966)

 

'Encyclopedia of Cleaveland History'에 의하면,  Henrietta Buckmaster "was a novelist, activist, and journalist known best for her books detailing the historical struggles of African Americans and women in the United States" and "is most well known for her book "Let My People Go" (1941)." 

 

책 겉표지 안쪽에서는 책 내용을 이렇게 소개하고 있다:

 

This book presents profiles of six American women of the nineteenth century whose courage and determination shaped history. All had one characteristic in common -- the unswerving conviction that injustice must be exposed and eradicated.

● For Dorothea Dix, this responsiblity was focused on medical and penal reforms.

● Prudence Crandall pioneered, against almost insuperable opposition, for Negro education in the North.

● Elizabeth Cady Stanton devoted her life to securing the rights of women.

● Elizabeth Blackwell challenged convention to become the first woman doctor in America.

● Harriet Tubman, a fugitive slave, risked her freedom and her life countless times to free others.

● Mary Baker Eddy surmounted illness and personal tragedy to found a new religious movement and to establish the internationally known Christian Science Monitor.

 

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Elizabeth Blackwell이 당시 여자 의사는 가당치 않다는 미국 사회 통념에 굴하지 않고 결국 미국의 첫 여성 의사가 되었지만, 우리나라에서는 여성이 첫 의사(양의)였다는 걸 읽은 게 기억나서 책장에서 Samuel Hugh Moffett, "The Christians of Korea" (1962)를 꺼내 다시 읽어본다:

 

"The seven Sevrance graduates were not the country's first korean doctors, however.... In 1887 Dr. Meta Howard, of the Women's Division of the Methodist Board of Missions, began medical work in Korea 'by women for women,' inaugurating a form of service that led to the establishment of the first Women's Hospital, now a part of Ewha Women's University in Seoul. Dr.Rosetta Hall, taking up the same work, trained and sent to America Mrs. Esther Kim Park, who was graduated from Johns Hopkins University. She returned to Korea in 1900 as the country's first Korean doctor of modern medicine, serving her country faithfully until her death in 1911." (p. 158)

 

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아래는 "Women Who Shaped History" 본문에서

 

"Dorothea was fourteen when she opened her school.... The school became popular.... But at the end of three years ... she realized how little she knew. She closed her school and returned to her grandparents in Boston. For two years she studied, She studied every book she could borrow.... In her grandparents' home she opened another school, a far more ambitious one. Here she taught astronomy, minerology, and the natural science. Life opened up before har so fully that she hated to waste time even in sleep. She opemed a second school for poor children and divided her time between the two." (p. 5)

 

"When she[Dorothea Dix] was seventy-three she watched a class of nurses graduate, the first class in the world especially trained for the care of the insane. She watched with tears in her eyes. She died within the walls of that New Jersey hospital she called her 'first born.' She was stil planning what she would do next." (p. 21)

 

"Harriet Tubman was a Negro child, a slave, born to slave parents and owned by a maryland master. She was born in 1821, the year of the great slave uprising in South Carolina led by a black man, Denmark Vesey.... As a very small child, Harriet was taught to sing a song that Vesey had made popular:

 

Go down Moses,

Way down to Egypt land!  

And tell old Pharaoh

To let my people go

 

It was a dangerous song to sing.... But in the years to come, it became Harriet's song." (p. 102)

 

"When she died [at ninety-two]  the town of Auburn erected a monument in her honor....

 

IN MEMORY OF HARRIET TUBMAN

. . .

CALLED THE MOSES OF HER PEOPLE.

WITH RARE COURAGE SHE LED OVER

THREE HUNDRED NEGROES UP FROM

SLAVERY TO FREEDOM

AND RENDERED INVALUABLE SERVICE

AS NURSE AND SPY.

WITH IMPLICIT TRUST IN GOD

SHE OVERCAME EVERY OBSTACLE.

. . . .

THIS TABLET IS ERECTED

BY THE CITIZENS OF AUBURN.

 

" (p. 121)

 

"Mary Baker was born in New Hampshire in the same year as Harriet Tubman and Elizabeth Blackwell -- 1821. She too was a child of that passionate protest of independence which claimed the right of every individual to address his conscience freely." (p. 125)

 

"Very gradually recognition of the book [Mary Baker's Scienceand Health] began to grow until one day Mary found herself holding a letter from the philosopher and teacher Bronson Alcott, friend of Emerson and father of Louisa who wrote Little Women." (p. 144)

 

 

 

Henrietta Buckmaster