In Her Father’s Library: Margaret Fuller and the Making of the American Miranda

Summary

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, America’s ‘mighty evangelical churches and benevolent organizations’ began a fervent crusade to educate the nation’s women. By financing and propagating what came to be known as ‘female seminaries’, these groups helped make secondary education available to more women – including middle- and lower-class women – than ever before in the nation’s history. Their goal was to influence ‘women s supposedly unique self-sacrificial virtues’ so that they might in turn guarantee ‘the “salvation” of an otherwise overly expansive and competitive republic’. Believing that women could exert the greatest influence in the private realm, they prepared their students to enter one of two occupations, that of wife and mother, or, ‘in the case of middle- or lower-class single girls’, teacher. While women welcomed even these modest advances, they by no means found them sufficient. The gifted Abigail Adams, for instance, wrote that she considered the education offered her female contemporaries to be ‘trifling, narrow, [and] contracted’. Adams’s pointed criticism was not only succinct, but also quite valid. As Faith Chipperfield has demonstrated, in even ‘the best New England families’, women’s education ‘was traditionally confined to writing and arithmetic, with perhaps a little music and dancing’.