This is the last we’ll hear from Edith Russell in the Millennial Star (except for Christmas stories in December), but it isn’t the last we’ll hear of Edith Russell. At the time this article appeared in the Star, Edith was beginning an entirely new adventure, which we’ll see next week. Hint: It has to do with what she writes about here: Women and Education.

From the Millennial Star, August 1945 —

A Woman’s Point of View

By Edith Russell

Women and Education

August is a month specially included (I believe) in the calendar for the express purpose of giving kid brothers and sisters an opportunity to leave school. Permanently, I mean, not merely for a vacation, but for the big adventure – getting a job.

In lots of instances the boy’s intelligence and education make the choice of a job simple to the point of inevitability, but where academic training has been sparse and the child shows no signs of being a prodigy, the problem of how to act becomes more acute.

My own experience of this situation centres around by young brother. He is a likeable youngster, not brilliant, with decent manners without being a prig, and at fourteen he wants a job.

Now, we could pen him to a terrible respectable job in an office which he will hate and probably lose after a week, and with it much of his self-confidence and self-respect, or we can let him try what he thinks he would like to try, which is to work on a farm, and make sure that we who love him are right at his back.

My mother is a wise soul, she is not delighted that her youngest son has chosen the life of a farm-labourer. But she has vision, and she is prepared to teach him what men have sometimes derided – that is “the dignity of labour.” She has let. him feel that, contrary to being ashamed of his choice, she is going to feel very proud — if he lets her.

Good manners will still be expected of him. even after a day in the sty’s. And he will be encouraged to read the sort of stuff which will make his mind fertile and fruitful as the fields which, one day he will plough.

His mother and I, his sister, will not omit to mention his calling, with pleasure and dignity, to our friends. Lots of women, like my mother, are facing this same set of circumstances. And this August they must find within themselves a greater understanding, consummate tact and that intangible possession of the few, which is – VISION.

Incidentally –

There is a film which you are sure to find really enjoyable:

“Henry V” with Laurence Olivier in the title role, brings Shakespeare to the screen and is not too Hollywoodish to impart a really Globe Theatre effect. Educational and manages to be entertaining and often amusing.

Women of the Pen – “The Brontes”

“Arnold in the grave and fifteen wild Decembers.” The tiny black village of Haworth, home of the famous Bronte sisters, also nurtures these terrible, soul-depressing seasons. To know the Bronte Sisters, one must see and know their home, the wild beauty of the moors, their starkness; which has a cruel loveliness, set to the music of a moorland wind.

You must see the real “Wuthering Heights” washed by a sea of heather, ugly and pitiless in December, solitary and desolate in June. You must know, as I have known, the villages among whom they lived, if you would understand how the consumptive Charlotte came to write “Jane Eyre ” and how the passionate Emily dipped her pen in bitter frustration and gave the world Heathcliffe and Catherine Linton and love and agony and called her first born “Wuthering Heights”.

You must see the “Black Bull” into which Bramwell Bronte used to slip, to drink himself to death and to add to the misery of his sisters. You must feel for yourself the gimlet gaze of Old Reverend Patrick Bronte, because that look dominated the pen which produced “Villette” and ” The Professor ” and “Jane Eyre.”

You must see all these things, for it was the wind-haunted moors which fanned the spark of genius into flame and gave the world great literature from the inspired pens of Charlotte. Emily and Ann Bronte.