A Print Dress from the Greatest Holy Leaf
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When in Bahá'í history
'Akká (today: Acre, Israel)
Describing ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s household in ‘Akká, Mary Hanford Ford wrote:
The ladies of the family are admirable housewives. They make all their own simple wearing apparel, by the aid of a sewing machine from the western world. ...They typify the modern saint, the conception of whom obliges us to revolutionize our entire spiritual cosmogony. A fashionable woman of the western world, as helpless as are some of these artificial dames, and as eager for spiritual culture, was caught in the gentle household without a trunk, and so handsomely garbed that she felt disgraced in the presence of the lovely simplicity that reigns there. The Greatest Holy Leaf thereupon made her a print dress with her own beautiful hands, which was a model for grace and adjustment. The western woman is still puzzling perhaps over the problem of how such profound spirituality can be associated with such excellent practical skill and sense, but in reality they are always found side by side.
Source: Mary Hanford Ford, The Oriental Rose (1910), ch. IX, pp. 162–3; quoted in Janet Khan, Prophet's Daughter, p. 92
Collected from bahaistories.com (Subject: homemaking).
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