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Rolling Down Black Stockings is a personal recollection of Esther Royer Ayers's youth spent in a highly restrictive and confined religious community. Her story is as much a search for identity and a longing for a mother's love as it is a tale about a totalitarian culture that led to her departure from the Old Order Mennonite religion. This poignant story is told in three books: book 1 describes her youth in a farm community on the outskirts of Columbiana, Ohio; book 2 follows the struggles of Ayers as she tries to fit in with another culture after leaving the church when her family moves to Akron, Ohio; and book 3 discusses the history and cultural dynamics of the religion. Ayers recounts how the Old Order Mennonite Church came into existence. Her personal account begins when she was eight years old, watching as her mother took care of her sick father. With intel-ligence and insight, Ayers describes how her family coped with the burden of not having enough income, which meant that the children were expected to work instead of getting an education. her Mennonite community, Ayers relates her difficulties trying to fit in at the public school and how she and her siblings were required to fall classes so that they would be expelled. It concludes with reflections on what all this meant to her. A rare and moving memoir, Rolling Down Black Stockings is also a valuable piece of social history that will appeal to historians as well as those interested in separatist communities and women's studies.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1873.
This book celebrates the lives of the students and former students of Southend High School for Girls during its first one hundred years. Through their words we are able to experience key events of the twentieth century and come to understand how much has been achieved by them. In 1913 women did not even have the vote, including the highly educated and formidable Head Mistress. One year later World War I broke out. Sister Mary Ruth Brewster, on her hundredth birthday in 2005, wrote from South Africa about the air raids, 'we had to get out of our desks, sit cross-legged on the floor on the side away from the window, with our big atlases open and held over our heads.' In World War II the Old Girls faced even more dangers, including imprisonment by the Germans in France and internment by the Japanese in China. Others who went out as teachers and missionaries in the final days of the British Empire also faced dangers from those fighting for their independence. Finally, this would not be a true history of the school without chapters on the uniform, success in sport, and the School Birthday in October with its cards, presents, cakes and celebrations.