In cultivated urban society there were girls who received a private education fully as rich, broad, and thorough as did their brothers at the university, and even at the popular level women flocked to lyceum lectures for intellectual stimulation and instruction. But the highest formal education to which a girl in a village like Sanbornton might aspire was the academy, that select, private predecessor of the public high school or junior college of later years. Of the comparatively small number of girls who went on from the district school to one or another of the local academies, the majority would be content to take the course provided for young ladies who fancied a little literature and languages along with their embroidery.
Yet there was hardier fare for those who wanted it. The academies of those days offered, in addition to the classical course, an introduction to the natural sciences and philosophy, as well as to modern languages and literature. In her autobiography Mrs. Eddy mentioned as her favorite girlhood studies natural philosophy (i.e., natural science), logic, and moral science (i.e., ethics), and elsewhere she spoke of chemistry, astronomy, and rhetoric as among those studies.79
The academies were not free, as the common schools were, so Mary’s and Martha’s attendance was conditioned by finances as well as health. Tradition has it that Mary attended Holmes Academy at Plymouth in 1838, and she definitely attended Sanbornton Academy in 1842.80 Very probably she attended other terms in between, possibly ● ● ●
79 Eddy, Retrospection and Introspection, p. 10; and Mary Baker Eddy, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany (Boston: Christian Science Board of Directors, 1941), p. 304. Milmine’s charge that Mary Baker’s education ended when she reached long division in the district school has been repeated by two generations of critical biographers despite the easily accessible documentary evidence to the contrary. The Milmine statement rested on the assertion of the same old lady who was the source of so many other remarkably inaccurate charges (see p. 53, note 24). The Milmine description of Sanbornton Academy is equally unsupported by the facts. [Milmine, “Mary Baker G. Eddy,” McClure’s, p. 237.] The New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette on August 5, 1841, ran an advertisement for Sanborn’s High School (as it was called briefly in one of the verbal changes which so confuse the picture): “Instruction will be given in the Latin and Greek languages, and in such other departments of science as have been pursued in other Literary Institutions under his instruction. . . . [The] whole number of scholars the past year has been 286” (p. 3).
↑80 Bates-Dittemore accept as a proved fact the tradition that she attended Holmes Academy, but they cite only the Mary Bean letters (see p. 68, note 68) as evidence. [Bates and Dittemore, Truth and Tradition, pp. 21–22. The academy catalogue for the terms in question does not list her as a student, though this might be accounted for by her having been there for only part of the term or terms.
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