How do you raise a young girl? What values do you share with it, what experiences do you want her to have? Our well-known Elisabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken write about this, in their last major work, now reissued since 1802: the Writings of an elderly woman. They show how an elderly woman looks back on her life. The woman records the values she has learned as a growing girl. How her education went. How she was confronted with the reality of life: nature, death, poverty, differences in position, men, culture. How she learned to build a philosophy of life. This woman's retrospective shows how a wise parental policy can lead to self-development, enlightened Christianity, maturity. The writers demonstrate this, not by explaining positions, but by sketching experiences, by having parents (s) and child) talk to each other in direct speech, by many other means. |