1. Murray, Judith Sargent [Constantia], The Gleaner, 3 vols. (Boston: I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, 1798), vol. 3, pp. 188–89Google Scholar. An earlier version of this essay was presented as the Third Annual Presidential Lecture, Dartmouth College, February 28, 1990. I am indebted to Norma Basch, Jeanne Boydston, William Freehling, Lee Heller, Judith McGaw, Sharon O'Brien, Nell Irvin Painter, Barbara Sicherman, Brenda Silver, Amy Dru Stanley, and Judith White, all of whom provided counsel in the preparation of this essay. Katherine Monteiro has proved yet again that she is the research assistant par excellence. Robert Eaton Kelley has combined limitless support with invaluable criticism.

2. Brickley, Lynne Templeton, “‘Female Academies Are Every Where Establishing’: The Beginnings of Secondary Education for Women in the United States, 1790–1830” (Unpublished Qualifying Paper, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1982), pp. 48–49Google Scholar. The schools are listed in Appendix C. Brickley notes that this list “is just a beginning and only meant to be suggestive.”

3. In a study in which literacy was defined in terms of the ability to sign one's name, Kenneth Lockridge estimated that only 40–45 percent of women in late-18th-Century New England were literate in comparison with 80 percent of their male counterparts. More recently, William Gilmore has suggested higher percentages, at least for those residing in northern New England during the same period. In his analysis of Windsor District, Vermont, Gilmore has documented an increase in women's literacy rates from 60 percent in the early 1780s to nearly 80 percent for the decade from 1787 to 1796. Male rates, which remained stable, indicate nearly universal literacy. E. Jennifer Monaghan has demonstrated that colonial girls and boys were generally instructed in reading before writing. Girls' schooling in the basics of literacy was more likely to conclude with reading, while boys were schooled in both skills. Gloria Main has shown that increasingly in the 18th Century girls were taught writing as well as reading. Both Monaghan's and Main's analyses are based upon New England. It should be noted that the evidence employed in these quantitative studies is biased in terms of class and race. Because the sources employed reflected only those with access to property, they exclude poorer people, white and black, who left relatively few such records. See Lockridge, , Literacy in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, 1974), pp. 38–42, 57–58Google Scholar; Gilmore, William, “Elementary Literacy on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution: Trends in Rural New England, 1760–1830,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 92 (1982): 126–28Google Scholar; Monaghan, E. Jennifer, “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England,” American Quarterly 40 (03 1988): 18–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Main, Gloria, “An Inquiry into When and Why Women Learned to Write in Colonial New England,” Journal of Social History 24 (Spring 1991): 579–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Belknap, Jeremy, Boston Evening Post, 02 2, 1782Google Scholar. Quoted in Norton, Mary Beth, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 290Google Scholar. Tyack, David and Hansot, Elisabeth examine public education in Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), esp. chs. 1–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Rush, Benjamin, A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Dobson, 1786), p. 6Google Scholar. Rush's promotion of female education had its limitations. His elaborate “plan” included a publicly funded university, four colleges, and academies in every county; only the elementary schools would enroll females.

6. The Connecticut Courant, 05 18, 1795Google Scholar; April 17, 1797; November 6, 1797; March 5, 1798; May 7, 1798; December 17, 1798; May 20, 1799; June 17, 1799; January 6, 1800; October 26, 1801; February 8, 1802; May 24, 1802; October 21, 1802; November 2, 1803; November 16, 1803; April 10, 1805; October 30, 1805; April 6, 1806; April 9, 1806; July 23, 1806; July 13, 1808; April 19, 1809; August 30, 1809; June 6, 1810; December 21, 1813; March 15, 1814; May 4, 1813; May 13, 1813; May 21, 1814; April 15, 1817; April 22, 1817; and April 29, 1817. The advertisement for Mrs. Value's academy appeared in the issue dated December 21, 1813.

7. Elliott, William to Smith, Ann, 06 6, 1817Google Scholar, Elliott Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

8. Gilmore, William J., Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780–1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), pp. 44–47.Google Scholar

9. Using data from the federal census of 1840, Maris Vinovskis and Richard Bernard have found that 91.5% of the nation's white population was literate. This figure does not indicate the considerable regional variation that persisted well into the 19th Century. Vinovskis and Bernard have estimated that one out of every five white Southerners was illiterate, compared with one out often of their counterparts in Western states and one out of thirty-five in middle Atlantic states. See Vinovskis, and Bernard, , “Beyond Catharine Beecher: Female Education in the Antebellum Period,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3 (Summer 1978): 856–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Degler, Carl, “The Two Cultures and the Civil War,” in The Development of An American Culture, ed. Coben, Stanley and Ratner, Lorman (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 99.Google Scholar

10. Kerber, Linda K., Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 192–93Google Scholar. In an analysis of the diaries of six 19th-century women, Richard Brown has also commented on the multifaceted purposes served by reading. Not only did it foster a richer and more diverse interior life, but it also provided readers with subjects for conversation with family and friends. See Brown, Richard D., Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 160–96.Google Scholar

11. Campbell, Maria to Humes, Mary, 09 21, 1819Google Scholar, Campbell Collection, Special Collections, Manuscript Department, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

12. Heaton, Hannah, “Experiences or Spiritual Exercises.”Google Scholar A typescript of the diary is deposited at the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford. Quoted in Lacey, Barbara E., “The World of Hannah Heaton: The Autobiography of an Eighteenth-Century Connecticut Farm Woman,” William and Mary Quarterly 45, no. 2 (04 1988): 288–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. In her research on colonial women's reading, Alice Mary Baldwin found that women also included Price, The Spectator, Congreve, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and Addison. See Linda Kerber's commentary on Baldwin's unpublished research, “‘Why Should Girls Be Learned and Wise?’: Two Centuries of Higher Education for Women as Seen Through the Unfinished Work of Alice Mary Baldwin,” in Women and Higher Education in American History: Essays from the Mount Holyoke College Sesquicentennial Symposia, ed. Faragher, John Mack and Howe, Florence (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 24Google Scholar. Baldwin's papers are deposited at Duke University, Durham, N.C.

14. Gibbes, Sarah Reeve to Gibbes, John, 09 30, 1783Google Scholar, Gibbes-Gilchrist Collection, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston.

15. Journals of Mary Howell, April 21, 1801, and February 7, 1802, Manuscripts, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford.

16. Iredell, Anne to Iredell, James Jr., 12 14, 1805Google Scholar, and August 27, 1806, Charles Johnson Collection, North Carolina Department of Archives and History, Raleigh. Quoted in Norton, , Liberty's Daughters, p. 280.Google Scholar

17. Davidson, Cathy N., Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. In her analysis of the relationship between text and reader, Davidson cites Mikhail Bakhtin's observations about reading as a process that empowers the individual. The reader of a novel, he has said, “acquires the ideological and linguistic initiative necessary to change the nature of his own image.” See esp. pp. 3–14, 55–79.

18. James Madison to Susan Randolph Madison [1811], Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, ed. Thomas J. Buckley. Reprinted in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 91 (01 1983): 98–104.Google Scholar

19. Miller, Samuel, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1803), vol. 2, pp. 177–78.Google Scholar

20. Anonymous, “On Novels and Novel Reading,” Mirror of Taste and Dramatic Censor 3, no. 2 (02 1811): 86–87.Google Scholar

21. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, “Early Remembrances,” in Autobiography, Correspondence, Etc., of Lyman Beecher, 2 vols., ed. Beecher, Charles (New York: Harper and Bros, 1864), vol. 1, p. 526.Google Scholar

22. Journals of Mary Howell, 04 2, 1802Google Scholar, Manuscripts, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford.

23. Elizabeth Ruffin Diary, 02 9, 1827Google Scholar, and February 10, 1827, Harrison Henry Cocke Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

24. Susan Nye Hutchinson Diary, 02 25, 1833Google Scholar, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

25. Caroline Brooks Lilly Diary, 07 14, 1838Google Scholar, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

26. More than a decade ago, Anne Firor Scott showed that voluntary associations provided women a bridge into public life. In her recent survey of American women's history, Sara Evans has also stressed the role of these organizations in redefining gender relationships and remapping the boundaries separating private and public. Lori D. Ginzberg's analysis of 19th-century voluntary associations has provided extensive documentation of this phenomenon, as has Scott's exemplary study of these organizations over two centuries. I would add that female educational institutions have also been influential in this regard. See Scott, , Making the Invisible Woman Visible (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), pp. 259–94Google Scholar, and Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Evans, , Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Ginzberg, , Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

27. Pierce, Sarah, “Address at the Close of School, October 29, 1818,” in Chronicles of a Pioneer School from 1792 to 1833, comp. Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, ed. Barney, Elizabeth C. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1903), p. 177.Google Scholar

28. In their examinations of gender, historians are beginning to consider the signal importance of race and class. See Hewitt, Nancy's “Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women's History in the 1980s,” Social History 10 (10 1985): 299–321CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Alice Kessler Harris has cast the relationship between gender, race, and class as a circle. In calling upon historians to leave behind an exclusive focus upon gender, she has suggested that “we attempt to understand difference, not as a single necessary dichotomy, but as a set of intersecting circles of experience that together structure consciousness.” See Kessler-Harris, , A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990), p. 67.Google Scholar

29. Although the document entitled “Upon Virtue in General and Female Education and Manners in Particular” at the Georgia Historical Society is identified only as an “Anonymous Booklet,” Mary Beth Norton has compared the address with a collection of Penuel Bowen's papers deposited at the South Carolina Historical Society and shown Bowen to be the author. See Norton, , Liberty's Daughters, p. 368Google Scholar. Linda K. Kerber examined the claims made for female education in “Daughters of Columbia: Educating Women for the Republic, 1787–1805,” in The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial, ed. Elkins, Stanley and McKitrick, Eric (New York: Knopf, 1974), pp. 36–59.Google Scholar

30. Bowen, Penuel, “Upon Virtue in General and Female Education and Manners in Particular,”Google Scholar Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, pp. 1–2. Recently, feminist scholars have begun to explore the implications of the hegemonic categories of equality and difference. I am particularly indebted to Joan Wallach Scott's analysis. Ann Snitow's subtly nuanced commentary has been very helpful. See Scott, , “The Sears Case,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 167–77Google Scholar; Snitow, , “Pages from a Gender Diary: Basic Divisions in Feminism,” Dissent (Spring 1989): 205–24Google Scholar. Legal scholars have addressed the constitutional and statutory implications of this binary opposition. Martha Minow has highlighted the conundrum entailed in the dualism: “if women claim they are the same as men in order to secure rights, any sign of difference can be used to deny those rights; and if women claim they are different from men in order to secure rights, those very differences can be cited to exclude women from the rights that men enjoy.” Catharine MacKinnon has also noted that either men or masculinity become the referent for both categories. See Minow, , “Adjudicating Differences: Conflicts Among Feminist Lawyers,” in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Hirsch, Marianne and Keller, Evelyn Fox (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 149–63Google Scholar; and MacKinnon, , “Difference and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination,” in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 32–45.Google Scholar

31. Bowen, , “Upon Virtue,” pp. 5–6, 7Google Scholar. In studies that have shaped the perspective of a generation of historians, Bernard Bailyn and Gordon S. Wood made virtue central to analysis of the Revolution and establishment of the republic. See Bailyn, , The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; and Wood, , The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969)Google Scholar. Robert Shalhope's historiographical essays have highlighted the importance of this approach. His most recent is “Republicanism and Early American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (04 1982): 334–56Google Scholar. Linda K. Kerber's essay indicates the current tendencies in the scholarship. See Kerber, , “The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation,” American Quarterly 37 (Fall 1985): 475–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

32. Ruth Bloch's insightful article is helpful in this regard. In bringing the importance of gender to the fore, she has suggested that ideas about sexual difference “underlay some of the most basic premises of the Revolution, and shaped important ideological changes in the early Republic.” She locates the origins of these masculine connotations in classical literature and notes as well that they were also encoded in the Renaissance republicanism of Machiavelli. As Bloch notes, the idea itself can be found in the Homeric concept of arete, a concept that emphasized strength and prowess in athletic competition and armed conflict. Virtu derived from the Latin virtus, and thus originally from vir. Hannah Fenichel Pitkin has addressed the inscription of gender in Machiavelli's political theory. See Bloch, , “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13 (Fall 1987): 37–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pitkin, , Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).Google Scholar

33. Bowen, , “Upon Virtue,” p. 5Google Scholar. The use of a double possessive adjective suggests that Bowen, a late-18th-Century clergyman, understood the distinction between “man” and “human,” a distinction that still escapes some today. Linda K. Kerber identified this concept in her pathbreaking article on the construction of republican motherhood. See Kerber, , “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment: An American Perspective,” American Quarterly 38 (Summer 1976): 187–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar. She elaborated on the concept's implications in Women of the Republic. See also Zagarri, Rose Marie, “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly 44 (06 1992): 192–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34. Bowen, , “Upon Virtue,” pp. 19–20, 20–21Google Scholar. Historically, engagement in armed conflict has served as a signal means by which to designate appropriate gender behavior. In highlighting the masculine connotations of virtue, Ruth Bloch has noted that “exemplary citizens were above all daring soldiers and inspired orators — those who risked danger and won glory in valiant defense of liberty” (“Gendered Meanings,” p. 43Google Scholar). That gender remains an issue today has become obvious in the controversy about women's appropriate role in the military.

35. Bowen, , “Upon Virtue,” pp. 24, 28Google Scholar. One of the early participants in this revaluation of the emotions, Bowen's construction of human psychology became a typical 19th-century challenge to the privileged position accorded rationality by the Enlightenment.

36. Bowen, , “Upon Virtue,” pp. 28–30.Google Scholar

37. Martin, J. P., “Extract from an Address on Female Education,” American Museum 11, no. 5 (05 1792): 219–20Google Scholar; Bradford, Alden, “An Address Delivered at the Opening of the Academy, Wiscassett, Maine,” (Hallowell, Maine: Cheever, 1808), p. 13Google Scholar; and Milnor, James, “On Female Education,” Port Folio, 3rd ser., 1 (1809): 387.Google Scholar

38. Martin, , “Extract,” p. 220Google Scholar; Bradford, , “Address,” p. 13Google Scholar; and Milnor, , “On Female Education,” p. 387.Google Scholar

39. Winthrop, John, The History of New England from 1630 to 1649, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1853), vol. 2, p. 266.Google Scholar

40. Rush, Benjamin, Thoughts Upon Female Education. (Boston: Samuel Hall, 1787), pp. 5–6, 20, 21Google Scholar. Shortly after founding the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia early in 1787, John Poor began to invite speakers to address the students at their quarterly examinations. Rush's speech was the first in the series, all of which were later published separately and also included as part of a pamphlet describing the Academy. Joseph Pilmore, who stood at the podium at the next quarterly examination, was much more optimistic about the republic's possibilities for survival. The students were indeed fortunate “to live in an age of light and refinement,” an age that he was confident would continue if they remembered the lessons of “an education properly calculated for opening the understanding, enriching the mind, and the promotion of virtue.” Lest they forget the latter, he stressed that their “delight in learning, [their] diligence in acquiring mental improvements” should always be coupled with their “love of virtue.” The next year John Sproat made exactly the same point, telling the students that their education had been designed to “mollify the temper, refine the manners, amuse the fancy, improve the understanding, and strengthen virtue.” See Rush, , The Rise and Progress of the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Stewart and Cochran, 1794), pp. 6, 11–12, 26Google Scholar. Ann D. Gordon has examined the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia in Berkin, Carol and Norton, Mary Beth, eds., Women of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), pp. 69–91Google Scholar. An excerpt from Rush's essay was included in The American Lady's Preceptor. Published in 1810 and issued in nine subsequent editions, this collection of essays, historical sketches, and poetry was, as the subtitle suggests, “designed to direct the female mind in a course of pleasing and instructive reading.” Rush would have been pleased by the appearance of such a volume.

41. There are at least two possible reasons why these male theorists constructed this model of behavior. Perhaps they simply could not envision women engaged in any role other than wifehood and motherhood. However, the highly charged character of the rhetoric belies that interpretation, suggesting instead a fear that female education might have unanticipated consequences. Inadvertently, the intensity also highlights the concern, indeed the fear, that one of those consequences could be a challenge to the model itself.

42. Milnor, , “On Female Education,” p. 388.Google Scholar

43. Anonymous, “Dialogue on Female Education,” Portico: A Repository of Science and Literature 2, no. 3 (09 1816): 215.Google Scholar

44. Rowson, Susanna, “Concluding Address for 1810,” in A Present for Young Ladies: Containing Poems, Dialogues, Addresses, As Recited by the Pupils of Mrs. Rowson's Academy (Boston: John West, 1811), pp. 151–52.Google Scholar

45. Anonymous, The Female Advocate (New Haven: Thomas Green and Son, 1801), pp. 3, 21.Google Scholar

46. Murray, [Constantia], The Gleaner, vol. 3, pp. 191, 197.Google Scholar

47. Murray, [Constantia], The Gleaner, vol. 2, p. 6Google Scholar. Lest her readers then wonder what she would consider an adequate education, she immediately told them that mothers would need at least a command of English, French, geography, and astronomy. She added that it should not be considered “unsexual, if they were capacitated to render the rudiments of the Latin tongue familiar.”

48. Murray, [Constantia], The Gleaner, vol. 3, p. 219.Google Scholar

49. Journal of Louisa May Alcott, 02 14, 1868Google Scholar, in Cheney, Ednah D., Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1889), p. 197.Google Scholar

50. Mason, Priscilla, “Salutatory Oration,” in The Rise and Progress of the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Stewart and Cochran, 1794), pp. 90, 91, 92, 93Google Scholar. Following this address, Mason apparently disappeared from the historical record.

51. Howard, Hepsy to Wainwright, Elizabeth, 06 29, 1801Google Scholar, Peter Wainwright Papers, Special Collections, Manuscripts Department, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

52. Journal of Mary Howell, 05 21, 1799Google Scholar, Manuscripts, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford.

53. Southgate, Eliza to Porter, Moses, 06 1, 1801Google Scholar, in A Girl's Life Eighty Years Ago: Selections from the Letters of Eliza Southgate Bowne (New York: Scribner's, 1903), p. 60.Google Scholar

54. Palmer, Elizabeth to Peabody, Nathaniel, 02 17, 1800Google Scholar, Peabody Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was the mother of Elizabeth Peabody, Mary Peabody Mann, and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne. I am indebted to Megan Marshall for sharing this letter with me.

55. Journal of Eliza Southgate, 07 6, 1802Google Scholar, A Girl's Life, pp. 109–10.Google Scholar

56. Kathryn Kish Sklar's exemplary biography explores Beecher's multifaceted pursuits. Joan Hedrick's forthcoming biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe contains three chapters on the Hartford Female Seminary in which she demonstrates the importance of the school in the development of Stowe's literary life. In two articles that focus upon Emma Willard's career, Anne Firor Scott has explored the larger implications entailed in the education of women. See Sklar, , Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Hedrick, , Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Literary Life (Forthcoming 1993)Google Scholar; Scott, , “What, Then, Is the American: This New Woman?” Journal of American History 45, no. 3 (12 1978): 679–703CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “The Ever-Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822–1872,” History of Education Quarterly 19 (Spring 1979): 3–25Google Scholar. Both of these articles by Scott have been reprinted in her Making the Invisible Woman Visible. Although her career has received little consideration, Susanna Rowson established a precedent earlier than Beecher. In addition to founding an academy and serving as one of its teachers, she was a novelist, actress, playwright, and author of textbooks.

57. Initially, the Hartford Female Seminary was publicized as a joint enter prise undertaken by Beecher and her sister Mary, although the latter left early in 1827. Long before that Beecher had taken sole leadership of the school. The advertisement signaled Catharine's ambitions. The school, she declared, was “intended exclusively for those who wish to pursue the higher branches of female education.” Beecher described the institutional changes in Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions (New York: J. B. Ford, 1874), pp. 30–33Google Scholar. She also recorded them in the Catalogue of the Officers, Teachers, and Pupils of the Hartford Female Seminary for the Summer Term of 1828. The advertisement and catalogue are deposited at the Stowe-Day Foundation, Hartford, Conn.

58. Beecher, Catharine to Lyon, Mary, 07 10 [1828]Google Scholar, Archives, Williston Memorial Library, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts. Beecher had hoped that Lyon would join her and the other teachers, but she chose to remain at Ipswich (Mass.) Seminary.

59. Sophia Peck to William Peck, Henry Watson Papers, August 2 [1834] and October 4, 1834, Sophia's enthusiasm for Hartford Female Seminary was tempered by the prospect of spending at least three years separated from her family. When she told her father shortly after her arrival that three years was the most she could envision, he responded that everyone wanted her “home the moment your education is completed, but since you have set out for an education, we are anxious you should have a thorough one — not superficial as is very common with young ladies at the present time, particularly at the South” (Frederic Peck to Sophia Peck, May 30, 1834). This correspondence is deposited in the Henry Watson Papers, Special Collections, Manuscripts Department, Duke University, Durham, N.C.

60. Catalogue of the Officers, Teachers, and Pupils, of the Hartford Female Seminary, for the Summer Term of 1828, Stowe-Day Foundation, Hartford, Conn.

61. Beecher, Catharine, “Female Education,” American Journal of EducationGoogle Scholar nos. 16 and 17. Beecher included this commentary in her prospectus for the Seminary that she issued shortly before the school's permanent building was constructed in 1827. The prospectus is deposited at the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford.

62. Beecher, Catharine, Educational Reminiscences, pp. 14–16Google Scholar. In reference to her parents, Beecher also recalled that Lyman, a minister carefully schooled in rhetoric and logic, had found Roxana who obviously had none of his training “the only person he had met that he felt was fully his equal in an argument” (pp. 15–16).

63. Beecher, Catharine, “Household Recollections,” in Charles Beecher, ed., Autobiography, vol. 1, p. 148.Google Scholar

64. Beecher, Catharine, Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education (Hartford: Packard and Butler, 1829), p. 42.Google Scholar

65. Beecher, Catharine, Suggestions, pp. 45, 46, 52, 53.Google Scholar

66. Scott, , Gender and the Politics of History, p. 172.Google Scholar