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Literacy, Schooling, and Teaching among New England Women, 1730–1820

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Joel Perlmann ,
Silvana R. Siddali  and
Keith Whitescarver
Joel Perlmann
Affiliation:
Jerome Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
Silvana R. Siddali
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Keith Whitescarver
Affiliation:
College of Education, Ohio University
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Extract

Some time before 1830, girls in New England began to attend town schools more or less on par with boys, and women's mastery of basic literacy in the region rose to levels comparable to those of men. Women also came to assume increasingly important teaching roles. Each of these changes had some bearing on the other two and establishing the timing of the changes with some precision is important. First, the timing of the changes in levels of female literacy, school attendance, and teaching matter for their own sake. More especially, these changes are important because historians, insofar as they have attended to these changes, have seen them as reflections of wider cultural shifts—changes in views of women and women's roles.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 37 , Issue 2: Special Issue on Education in Early America , Summer 1997 , pp. 117 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Abstract of School Returns for 1829 (Boston, 1829); Perlmann, Joel and Shirley, Dennis, “When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 48 (Jan. 1991): 50–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Kerber, Linda K., Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York, 1980), 185–231; Norton, Mary Beth, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, 1980), 155–56, 195–96, 228–29, 272; Sklar, Kathryn Kish, “The Schooling of Girls and Changing Community Values in Massachusetts Towns, 1750–1820,” History of Education Quarterly 33 (winter 1993): 511–42; Main, Gloria L., “An Inquiry into When and Why Women Learned to Write in Colonial New England,” Journal of Social History 24 (spring 1991): 579–89. Google Scholar

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4 Letters to Massachusetts Centinel, 19 Feb. and 5 Mar. 1785. In the mid-nineteenth century, a memoir of Caleb Bingham noted that Bingham had come to Boston in the mid-1780s in order to establish a private girl's school and adds, “It certainly is a remarkable fact, that while the girls of every town in the state were allowed and expected to attend the village schools, no public provision seems to have been made for their instruction in the metropolis.” Fowls, William B., “Memoir of Caleb Bingham with Notices of the Public Schools of Boston Prior to 1800,” American Journal of Education 14 (Sept. 1858): 325–49 (quotation, 327). Note the similar wording in Fowls and the quoted Centinel text.Google Scholar

5 Monaghan, E. Jennifer, “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England,” in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Davidson, Cathy N. (Baltimore, Md., 1989), 53–80; Hall, David D., Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York, 1989), 31–43. Google Scholar

6 Lockridge, Kenneth A., Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York, 1974), 38–42. Perlmann, and Shirley, , “When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?”; Auwers, Linda, “Reading the Marks of the Past: Exploring Female Literacy in Colonial Windsor, Connecticut,” Historical Methods 13 (fall 1980): 204–14; Beales, Ross W. Jr., “Studying Literacy at the Community Level: A Research Note,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9 (summer 1978), 93–102; Gilmore, William J., “Elementary Literacy on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution: Trends in Rural New England, 1760–1830,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 92, pt. 1 (Apr. 1982), 87–179; Main, , “An Inquiry into When and Why Women Learned to Write in Colonial New England.” Google Scholar

7 Lockridge, , Literacy in Colonial New England; Perlmann, and Shirley, , “When Did New England Women Acquire Literacy?”; Auwers, , “Reading the Marks of the Past”; Beales, , “Studying Literacy at the Community Level”; Gilmore, , “Elementary Literacy on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution”; Main, , “An Inquiry into When and Why Women Learned to Write in Colonial New England.” Google Scholar

8 Main herself is at least as interested in establishing a second, and we think secondary, theme: that some of the expansion of female literacy was acquired by women who were adults when they mastered the skills. Although the evidence to support her contention is slender, it is a plausible contention—especially, as she argues, in a period of change. Main, , “An Inquiry into When and Why Women Learned to Write in Colonial New England.” Google Scholar

9 Ibid., 586.Google Scholar

10 Our discussion of the institutional evolution draws especially on the work of Small, Walter Herbert, Early New England Schools (Boston, 1914); Murphy, Geraldine Joanne, “Massachusetts Bay Colony: The Role of Government in Education” (Ph.D. diss., Radcliffe College, 1960); and Teaford, Jon, “The Transformation of Massachusetts Education, 1670–1780,” History of Education Quarterly 10 (fall 1970): 287–307. See also Small, Walter Herbert, “Girls in Colonial Schools,” Education 22 (May 1902): 532–37; Updegraff, Harlan, The Origin of the Moving School in Massachusetts (New York, 1908); Sklar, , “The Schooling of Girls,” and idem, “Public Expenditures for Schooling Girls in Massachusetts Towns, 1750–1800” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the History of Education Society, Cambridge, Mass., October 1976); Monaghan, , “Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England”; and Tyack, David and Hansot, Elisabeth, Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (New Haven, Conn., 1990). Google Scholar

11 Cremin, Lawrence A., American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783 (New York, 1970), 173–75.Google Scholar

12 Shurtleff, Nathaniel B., ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England (Boston, 1853), 203. Murphy, , “Massachusetts Bay Colony,” esp. chs. 5 and 7. Google Scholar

13 Murphy, , “Massachusetts Bay Colony.” Google Scholar

14 See Small, , Early New England Schools, 14–29, 47–57.Google Scholar

15 Monaghan, E. Jennifer, “Noted and Unnoted School Dames: Women as Reading Teachers in Colonial New England,” in History of Elementary School Teaching and Curriculum, International Series for the History of Education, vol. 1, ed. Genovesi, Giovanni et al. (Hildesheim, Germany, 1990), 47–53.Google Scholar

16 Small, , Early New England Schools, passim and 166–67; and Monaghan, , “Noted and Unnoted School Dames,” 50. Google Scholar

17 Small, , Early New England Schools, 179–80, 69–70.Google Scholar

18 Murphy, , “Massachusetts Bay Colony”; and Small, , Early New England Schools. Google Scholar

19 Small, , Early New England Schools, 379, 162–86; Slafter, Carlos, The Schools and Teachers of Dedham, Massachusetts, 1644–1904 (Dedham, Mass., 1905), 64. Google Scholar

20 Drake, Samuel Adams, ed., History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts (Boston, 1880). First tabulated by Bentley, Kris, “Women and Education in Middlesex County in the Eighteenth Century” (seminar paper, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, Mass., April 1991). Google Scholar

21 Teaford, , “The Transformation of Massachusetts Education,” 298–303; Monaghan, E. Jennifer, “Readers Writing: The Curriculum of the Writing Schools of Eighteenth-Century Boston,” Visible Language 21 (spring 1987): 167–213. Google Scholar

22 Provincial legislation also displayed a flagging commitment to the grammar school since it ceased to increase the penalty for noncompliance after 1718. As the salaries of grammar schoolmasters rose in the eighteenth century, it became cheaper for towns to pay the fine for noncompliance (if indeed the courts would compel them to do so) than to hire the masters. Teaford cites the evidence on Middlesex county presentments and the General Court's failure to raise fines for noncompliance. Teaford, , “The Transformation of Massachusetts Education,” 295–96. In addition to wars and dislocations, Robert Middlekauf stresses an increased resistance to tax burdens after 1783, which would have centered attention on the expensive Latin teacher. Middlekauf, Robert, Ancients and Axioms: Secondary Education in Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven, Conn., 1963), 137. The new Massachusetts school law of 1789 reduced the scope of the legal compulsions by declaring that towns of two hundred families must support a Latin master. Yet it was changes other than those in the wording of the law that counted most; at the dawn of the nineteenth century, only thirty of over one hundred larger towns seem to have complied with the legal requirement to maintain a Latin master. See Middlekauf, , Ancients and Axioms, on the preservation of the old tradition through 1783 (29–30); on its rapid decline thereafter (129–30); and on the academies (136); and, on the law of 1824, see Martin, George H., The Evolution of the Massachusetts Public School System: A Historical Sketch (New York, 1894; reprint, 1915), 116. Google Scholar

23 Burton, Warren, The District School As It Was by One Who Went to It, rev. ed. (Boston, 1850). Carter's description appeared in a series of newspaper articles (which were soon published) on the condition of New England schools. Carter was also a leader of school reform efforts in the late 1820s and 1830s. When it came time, in 1837, to appoint the first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, many were surprised that Horace Mann, rather than Carter had been selected (Carter did in fact join the board). See the article on Carter in Johnson, Allen et al., eds., Dictionary of American Biography (New York, 1929), 3: 538; and Cremin, Lawrence A., American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York, 1980), 135–36, 154–55. Carter, James G., Letters on the Free Schools of New England (Boston, 1824; reprint, New York, 1969), 31–32 (quotation). Google Scholar

24 The first systematic data that indicate the number of teachers by gender and session appeared in Horace Mann's report of 1842. It showed that 33 percent of winter and 95 percent of summer school teachers were women, for a total of 62 percent of all district teachers. By comparing this evidence to less detailed figures from 1829, we can extrapolate to that year. In 1829, 53 percent of all rural district teachers were women. Even if the entire increase in the proportion of woman teachers over the period between 1829 and 1841 occurred in the winter sessions, the comparison suggests that in 1829 13 percent of winter session teachers must have been women. And if we assume that only half of the increase in the fraction of women teachers between 1829 and 1841 occurred in the winter sessions, then in 1829 21 percent of winter session teachers would have been women. These figures can be calculated as follows: in 1829: .53 female teachers (based on 128 towns); in 1834: .54 (based on 256 towns); in 1841: .62 distributed thus: 97 males and 2,717 females (.97) in the summer and 2,101 males and 909 females (.30) in the winter for a total of 2,198 males and 3,626 females (.62). The number of female teachers in 1841 who would have been male teachers had there been no increase in the percentage of female teachers between 1829 and 1841: .62 – .53 = .09; .09 X [2198 + 3626] = 524. Assuming all the increase in the percentage of female teachers between 1829 and 1841 was in winter sessions: [909 – 524]/[2101 + 909] = .13; and assuming only half the increase in the percentage of female teachers between 1829 and 1841 was in winter sessions: [909 – 524/2]/[2101 + 909] = .21. Maris A. Vinovskis compared the Massachusetts towns that reported in 1829 and those that did not. He believed the underreporting was not a crucial bias, at least for the study of enrollment rates. Vinovskis, Maris A., “Trends in Massachusetts Education, 1826–1860,” History of Education Quarterly 12 (winter 1972): 501–29. The fit between the 1829 and 1834 figures suggests the same may be true for studying the gender of the teacher.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Sklar, , “The Schooling of Girls,” suggests that the increasing funding of summer schools might serve as a measure of increasing prevalence of girls in the town schools, and of changing town commitments to girls' education. However, we suspect that, unfortunately, the budget devoted to each cannot be a good measure either of town commitment to female schooling or even of female prevalence in the schools.Google Scholar

26 Small, , Early New England Schools, 278.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., v (quotation). In particular, we used Holbrook, Jay Mack, Massachusetts Vital Records to 1850 (Oxford, Mass., 1982).Google Scholar

28 Copeland, Alfred Minot, ed., Our County and Its People: A History of Hampden County, Massachusetts (Boston, 1902), 2:42229.22.Google Scholar

29 Norton, , Liberty's Daughters. 155–56, 195–96, 228–29, 272, 289–90.Google Scholar