Her Career | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 25, 1886

Her Career.

THIRTY years ago two young girls were classmates in the academy of a New England town. One, whom we shall call Sarah, was the daughter of a poor farmer; the other, Anna, was the only child of a man of great wealth and influence in a neighboring city.

Anna was an eager advocate for the opening of new careers for women; and she talked so incessantly of her desire to help the world, to lift humanity to higher levels, that her friends prophesied for her a brilliant, useful future.

Sarah had no exalted theories or ambitions, though probably in her secret heart she hoped to become some day a wife and mother. However, she never married. She was a healthy, cheerful woman, with large motherly tenderness. There was much sickness in her family and in the neighborhood, and she fell into the habit, when she could be spared at home, of going about to help nurse those who needed her.

She saved the money she earned in the dairy, and went to Philadelphia to enter a Quaker training-school for nurses, established forty years ago. "If I would really help the sick, I must know how to help them," she said.

When she returned, she became the helper of the whole county, giving skilled service in every kind of disease, but never taking a penny for payment. So able and efficient a manager was she, that ten years ago she was persuaded to take charge of an orphan asylum in which a contagious disease was raging, and later, when her work there was finished, offered her services as nurse when a virulent fever broke out in one of the mining towns of Pennsylvania. It is impossible to compute the number of lives saved at that time by her coolness, intelligence, and skill.

The teacher of both girls called on Anna lately, and found her a nervous, discontented woman. "There is no high career open for our sex!" she complained. "I tried lecturing, but could not catch the public ear. I have written two or three books; they did not sell, and my publishers cheated me. I studied law, and for years tried in vain to fight my way into the courts. I am making no effort now. I was born a century too soon. The world is not yet ripe for women of my kind."

Our work is always near to us; it lies under our hands.—Youth's Companion.