Student Quote by Mary A. Ward

Progress arrives here as a quiet flex: Mary A. Ward drops a casual "of course" and lets the decades do the boasting. The line is built like a before-and-after photograph, but with the emotional restraint of someone who knows nostalgia is a trap. By anchoring it in two dates (1858 and 1867), she frames her authority as lived experience, not theory, and turns schooling into a measure of national modernization.

The key move is the phrase "equipped as scores are now equipped throughout the country". "Equipped" isn’t just desks and maps; it signals an entire infrastructure of seriousness. She’s implying that girls’ education has shifted from improvised accommodation to an institutional commitment. "Scores" does cultural work too: not one exemplary school in London, not a rare philanthropic experiment, but a mass phenomenon. The subtext is political, even if it’s delivered like memoir. Ward is normalizing what would have once been radical: that modernity includes girls.

There’s also an edge of generational critique. The sentence doesn’t romanticize the past; it treats the absence of such schools as self-evidently backward. Yet she avoids triumphalism by keeping herself small in the frame: a former boarder marking the gap between then and now. The effect is persuasive because it’s understated. She invites the reader to accept progress as common sense, then nudges them to ask the sharper question: if this is "of course" now, why did it take so long?