Autobiography of Margaret Floy Washburn
First published in Murchison, Carl. (Ed.) (1930).History of Psychology in Autobiography(Vol. 2, pp. 333-358).
Republished by the permission of Clark University Press, Worcester, MA.
© 1930 Clark University Press.
SOME RECOLLECTIONS
Nothing gives the writer of the following paper courage to present it but the fact that she herself can read with interest the autobiography of anything human. Even this thought is hardly relevant, for an account merely of one's intellectual life can hardly avoid depicting a prig rather than a human being. Nevertheless, the temptation not to be left out of the autobiographical enterprise is irresistible.
There are progressive persons, interested in educational theory, who love to describe the defects of their own early training, but I seem to remember chiefly what was helpful in mine, so that, like Marcus Aurelius, I begin my meditations by thanking the gods for having given me "nearly everything good."
I was born in New York City on July 25, 1871, in a house built for my mother's father. It stood surrounded by a large garden, on a tract of land belonging to my mother's maternal grandfather, Michael Floy, which originally extended from 125th to 127th streets and from Fourth to Fifth Avenues. At the time of my birth both sides of 125th Street from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River were occupied by white-painted frame mansions set in gardens. This great-grandfather of mine came from Devonshire and had won success as a florist and nurseryman in old New York. I have reason to thank the gods for his diligence, which enabled me to finish my professional training without having to earn my own living. All my other ancestors were in America before 1720; one-fourth of them were Long Island and Westchester County Quakers, five-sixteenths New York Dutch, one-fourth Marylanders, and one-sixteenth Connecticut Yankees.
I was an only child, and the first eight years of my life were spent in the Harlem house; my father then entered the Episcopal ministry and for two years had a parish at Walden, an Orange County village. We next moved to the small Hudson River city of Kingston, where I got my high-school training and whence I went to Vassar.
It seems to me that my intellectual life began with my fifth birthday. I remember a few moments when I was walking in the gar-[p. 334]den; I felt that I had now reached an age of some importance, and the thought was agreeable. Thinking about myself was so new an experience that I have never forgotten the moment.
I was not sent to school until I was seven, but, like many other persons, I cannot remember the time when I could not read, nor when I learned. The first school was a private one kept by the Misses Smuller, the three accomplished daughters of a retired Presbyterian minister who lived in the next house. It would be hard to find better teaching anywhere at the present time. In my year and a half there I gained, besides the rudiments of arithmetic, a foundation in French and German that saved me several years in later life, and the ability to read music and play all the major and minor scales from memory, a musical grounding that has been the chief aid to one of my greatest sources of enjoyment.
When we left New York for the two-years' sojourn in Walden, my school was, though still a private one, much like the district-school type, housed in a single-room building. I learned very little there: some American history and a little elementary physics. During these two years, between the ages of eight and ten, I wrote stories, of which one or two examples remain. They display no literary talent whatever except a precocious vocabulary, due to my constant reading. A family legend, by the way, was that the subject of this autobiography, aged seven, having had a bad tumble at school and been established as an invalid for the rest of the day, described the behavior of a playmate in the following impressive terms: "And Enid stood rooted to the spot with amazement at beholding me comfortably established on the sofa." Besides children's books such as the immortalAlice-- in which the only thing I found funny was Alice's play with the black kitten before she went through the looking glass: the rest was highly interesting but not at all amusing --, George MacDonald's enchantingThe Princess and the Goblin, which kept me awake the night of my seventh birthday and was read to pieces; all of Miss Alcott, Susan Coolidge, and Sophie May, I read between the ages of nine and twelve the whole of Dickens and the Waverley Novels.
The removal to Kingston came when I was eleven; here I entered a public school. By a blunder I was put into a grade too high for me, and suffered much anguish with arithmetic; in the spirit of M. Aurelius, however, it may be said that this was a piece of good fortune, for, managing somehow to scramble through the Regents' [p. 335] examinations, I entered the high school at twelve. New York State's system of Regents' examinations is, I believe, considered by all enlightened educators as below contempt, but I had much reason for gratitude to it. The terrifying formalities attending these examinations, where one's teachers with trembling fingers broke the seals on the packages of question papers sent from Albany, and one signed at the end of one's production a solemn declaration of having neither given nor received help, made all subsequent examinations in college and university seem trivial. What could be more comfortable and less awe-inspiring than being examined by one's own instructors?
The curriculum at Ulster Academy covered three years and would deeply distress a modern authority. It consisted of short-term courses in a large variety of subjects, each of which supplied a certain number of "Regents' credits." This method gave very poor results in the sciences, and my entire class failed twice to pass the Regents' examination in chemistry, having had no laboratory work. Our teacher performed some demonstration experiments, of which I can remember only sodium scurrying over the surface of water as a little silver ball and potassium bursting into flame under similar circumstances; also Prince Rupert's drop falling into dust when its tip was pinched; why, we had not the slightest idea. However, the course in "political economy" firmly fixed in one's mind the rudiments of the theory of supply and demand, and that in "civil government" equipped one with some lasting idea of the structure of state, county, township, and city. We had to learn the Constitution of the United States thoroughly, and a few years ago I was able to impress my colleague of the Department of Political Science at Vassar by answering test questions on it. Passing Regents' examinations in Latin had somewhat the nature of a sporting event. Having read four books of Virgil, we tried the examination on all six, reading at sight the passages from the last two. Several of us got over this hurdle, and theAeneidknew us no more. What we lost in literary appreciation was gained in confidence for sight reading.