There is Nobody Home - Undated, circa 1942

The bold-faced text below was underlined in the original transcript.

MISS BURROUGHS APPEALS TO PARENTS

TO SAVE THEIR GIRLS - NOW.

“There is nobody home.”

If ever that aphorism was true, it is today. Mothers are war workers. Little children and teen-age girls are left at home to shift for themselves. What the harvest (moral and social) will be, God only knows.

Too many parents are going to lose more than they gain. What will it profit them to make money and face the fact that while they were busy here and there, their children went to the dogs or the dogs came into their homes and got their daughters. Mothers of teen-age girls, take our advice, “you better mind” before it is too late.

Our race will be morally bankrupt if parents do not put first things first in the care and protection of their daughters. If they must be away from home all day, they should send their daughters to the best Christian boarding schools, so that they can get the kind of training that will prepare them for the great day of economic competition that is surely coming.

Girls must be given definite basic training in character ideals. If there is nobody at home to do it, they should be sent to schools that will lay the foundation. Primping, painting, polishing, parading and philandering are the biggest things that our little girls are doing now. There are girls who are too fine and talented to be allowed to go to waste.

Our schools can and must give them the kind of training that they should get in their homes. Our educators, who have their eyes open and their vision clear know conditions. The truehearted ones are grieved and baffled over them. We must improve the moral quality of our teaching, and show by our own lives what character in education really is. We must make noble living contagious.

Education to be of value must prepare students to do their work skillfully, and tackle it enthusiastically. The greatest service that a school can render is to help young people discover their talent and glorify it through training and devoted service.

This is the real end of education. This is the only reward that parents and friends, who invest in education, expect or desire. This is the only way to make education pay.

Our schools must produce a fine brand of graduates. By that I mean we must work harder than ever to develop in them common sense, genuine culture, and a passion for work.

You might ask what I am trying to do to meet some of those needs?. In our school we offer a program that is shot through with the teaching of good manners, (after all, good manners have not gone out of style, you know(), morals and the teachings of Jesus Christ about life and its high purpose.

We bring our students into vital contact, daily, with the greatest motivating force of human life -- religion. We teach them how to live it. We employ well trained Christian leaders, who are examples for young people. All of the fundamental values of life are integrated with academic subjects. We make these basic principles the leaven in the lump/. When academic subjects are enriched by proper teaching of Christian ideals, mixed well and taken regularly, they transform lives and give life strength and meaning.

Our greatest desire is to send young women out from this school to contribute their part in helping to improve home life and remake their communities. We insist that every girl should know how to do at least one thing SUPERBLY WELL. To this end, we offer standard academic courses - Junior High, High School and Junior College. In trades, we offer:

Business and Secretarial Training

Beauty Culture

Christian Social Service

Cooperatives - The new program for economic security.

Home Making & Professionalized Household Management

Needle Craft - all branches.

Interior Decorating.

Public Speaking.

Our two-fold purpose is:

1. Develop in every student positive character traits - the right attitude towards work and pride and skill in their chosen trade or profession.
2. Prepare them to enter into competition with any and all workers who are engaged in the same fields, without fear or apology.
3. Prepare them to clean up the environment in which they live. We call our school “The School of the Three B’s. Bible - Bath and Broom” - symbolic of clean lives, clean bodies, and clean homes. This more than a felicious sobriquet because the race that excells in the use of these three instruments is the most highly civilized. The America of tomorrow will stress skill and pride in those services that contribute most to the health, strength and character of each individual in the nation, wherever he or she lives, and in the definite improvement of home life.

The whole world is moving towards a new day in all types of service. Our young women must PREPARE NOW. Tomorrow will demand that they KNOW.

We want mothers who have daughters who are upright and promising to send them to the -

NATIONAL TRADE & PROFESSIONAL SCHOOL FOR WOMEN & GIRLS

LINCOLN HEIGHTS, WASHINGTON, D.C.

and we will help them to become “as corner stones, polished after the similitude of a palace”.

Yours for the highest development of Christian womanhood.

NANNIE H. BURROUGHS

Washington, D.C.