The Textbooks She Read

Instead of Dick and Jane, the reader Ellen Harmon used had none other than a little girl named Ellen as a heroine. The sketches that illustrate the primer show Ellen wearing a long, straight, light-colored skirt. The hem had a little ruffle that came just to the top of her shoes. The blouse had a broad collar and short, puffed sleeves and was fastened down the front with hooks and eyes. Other pictures of the primer depict long-sleeved dresses for older girls and sometimes a hat with a gracefully upturned broad brim and a low, round top. One lesson about Ellen is titled “A Good Girl.”1BIO 26.1

No pains were spared to indoctrinate the youngsters with the virtues of hard work and obedience. In other lessons Christian theology was forthrightly taught, and every scholar who could read was required to have a Testament of his own from which several verses were read each day at the opening and close of school.1BIO 26.2

Among the prescribed books for children, and possibly some of the same ones she referred to in later years, was the Methodist Sabbath School. Ellen was to recall that she had “read many of the religious biographies of children who had possessed numberless virtues and lived faultless lives.” She would repeat to herself again and again, “If that is true, I can never be a Christian. I can never hope to be like those children.”—Notebook Leaflets from the Elmshaven Library, 1:146, 147. Such thoughts drove her almost to despair.1BIO 26.3