A Report To The Committee For Men Blinded In Battle: Hon. John H. Finley, Acting President, Along With Accounts Of The Opening Of The Phare At Sevres, ... In Paris, New Year's At The Phare In Paris
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
The Light Which Cannot Fail: True Stories of Heroic Blind Men and Women and a Handbook for the Blind and Their Friends
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
(A Life of Henry Fawcett, the Blind Postmaster-General. Fa...)
A Life of Henry Fawcett, the Blind Postmaster-General. Fawcett (1833-1884) was a British academic, statesman and economist who was blinded in a shooting accident aged 25. This biography published in 1914 is by the American welfare worker who founded the New York Association for the Blind.
Winifred Holt was an American welfare worker. She was the founder of the New York Association for the Blind.
Background
Winifred Holt was born on November 17, 1870 in New York City, New York, United States. She was the second daughter and fourth of seven children of the publisher Henry Holt and his first wife, Mary Florence W. Through her father she was descended from a mid-seventeenth-century settler of New Haven, Connecticut; her mother, who died when Winifred was eight, was the daughter of a New York financier.
Education
Holt attended the Brearley School in New York but later attributed her real education to the conversation of the artists and writers who were entertained in the family home.
Career
Holt early developed a fine singing voice and talent for both the piano and sculpture. At the age of sixteen a "new and absorbing world" of "suffering humanity" opened up when her father took her to the Neighborhood Settlement House in the Bowery, where for some time she spent one afternoon each week working with members of a boys' club. Because of prolonged ill health in her early twenties she was sent abroad with her younger sister, Edith, and settled in Florence, where her sculpture earned her admission to a studio.
In 1897 she returned to New York and continued her study at the Art Students' League, but the pleasures of art and social life did not satisfy her, and continued poor health caused her to return to Florence in 1901. There her concern for the handicapped was revived; the illness of her maid revealed the lack of medical care for the poor, and a chance encounter with a group of blind boys, enjoying a concert through the use of unsold tickets provided by the government, roused her sympathy for those deprived of sight.
After returning to New York in 1903, Winifred and Edith Holt established a bureau to provide theater and concert tickets for the blind in the home they shared with their brother Roland. Winifred's meetings with individual applicants soon convinced her that the blind were a neglected segment of society and that in general they led empty lives, without occupation or hope. She came to believe that their most important need was employment, a way to become self-reliant and financially independent--a revolutionary view at a time when informed opinion agreed that unlimited charity was the only humane treatment. Thereafter, although she continued to work at her sculpture, studied with Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and executed several notable portrait busts (including one of Helen Keller), Holt devoted her life to improving opportunities for the blind. One of her first steps was to travel to London in 1904 to study methods of training at the Royal Normal College and Academy of Music for the Blind, founded by Sir Francis Campbell, who was himself sightless. To appreciate the problems involved in learning, she wore a blindfold while carrying out the assignments. After her return, she and her sister Edith organized in November 1905 the New York Association for the Blind.
After her sister's marriage in 1908, she carried on the crusade single-handed. One of Miss Holt's objectives was teaching the public that much blindness could be prevented. Her lectures and writing, together with the work of Louisa Lee Schuyler and Dr. F. Park Lewis, led to the organization (1915) of the National Committee (later Society) for the Prevention of Blindness, and helped secure the passage of laws requiring treatment of infants' eyes at birth with silver nitrate solution. Her second goal, in which she took an even stronger interest, was educating the blind to become useful and self-supporting members of society. Her home had quickly become a meeting place for the sightless, and there she set up classes in which they could learn remunerative skills, such as sewing, basket and broom making, rug weaving, piano tuning, and the operation of telephone switchboards.
To obtain funds for expansion, she enlisted the aid of prominent people in public life, and in 1913, with help from the Russell Sage Foundation, the New York Association for the Blind was able to open "The Lighthouse, " on East 59th Street, a social settlement for the sightless. Her pioneer work there won worldwide recognition, and in 1914 she received the gold medal of the National Institute of Social Sciences. That summer in London she addressed the International Conference on the Blind. Miss Holt advocated a wide variety of academic, vocational, and athletic training for the sightless. She opposed segregating them in special classes in separate institutions and was able to prevail upon the New York City Board of Education to abandon this practice in the public schools.
Having taught herself braille, she made a study of the various tactile prints then in use for the blind and was instrumental in having braille adopted in the city schools, again setting an influential precedent. Upon the outbreak of World War I, Holt offered her services to the Allies. She established Lighthouses in France at Bordeaux and Paris while acting as consultant on the rehabilitation of men blinded in war. The French Lighthouses achieved remarkable results in reeducating the blind of all backgrounds. Holt's standards were high; the quality of the Lighthouses' knitted goods was such that the designer Worth utilized them to launch the fashion of knitted dresses.
She died that June of congestive heart failure at the House of Mercy in Pittsfield, Massachussets, at the age of seventy-four. After funeral services in St. John's Episcopal Church in Williamstown, her ashes were buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Morristown, New Jersey.
(A Life of Henry Fawcett, the Blind Postmaster-General. Fa...)
Personality
Holt, who combined wit and charm with a commanding intellect and an iron will, displayed a masterful talent for fund raising and publicity, superb oratorical ability, and a mystical faith in her cause.
Connections
In Rome Holt met Rufus Graves Mather, an American expatriate engaged in research on Italian art and a member of the Italian Lighthouse board. They were married at the New York Lighthouse on November 16, 1922, and for a number of years toured the world to initiate programs for the blind, visiting, in all, thirty-four countries. In 1937 they settled in Williamstown, Massachussets, where she continued to supervise the expansion of the American Lighthouses.