A more glorious revolution: Women's antebellum reading circles and the pursuit of public influence

New England Quarterly-A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters

Volumn 76, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 163-196

  Kelley, Mary ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33746053532     PISSN: 00284866     EISSN: 19372213     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1559902     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Margaret Fuller to Sophia Ripley, 27 August 1839, in The Letters of Margaret Fuller, ed. Robert N. Hudspeth, 6 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983-94), 2:87;
2. Nancy Craig Simmons, "Margaret Fuller's Boston Conversations: The 1839-1840 Series," Studies in the American Renaissance, ed. Joel Myerson (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), p. 203. Simmons's edition is based on her transcription of a thirty-five-page manuscript deposited in the Elizabeth Palmer Peabody Papers at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. The manuscript is in Elizabeth Hoar's handwriting, although the most likely source of information is Elizabeth Peabody.
3. Hannah Mather Crocker, Letters on Free Masonry (Boston, 1815), n.p.
4. Crocker, Letters on Free Masonry, n.p.;
5. On the manuscript circulation of colonial women's writings, see Carla Mulford's "Only for the Eye of a Friend": The Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995). pp. 7-11;
6. and Sharon Harris's "Early American Women's Self-Creating Acts," Resources for American Literary Study 19 (1993): 223-45.
7. On the collaborative dimensions of colonial intellectual and cultural life, see these works as well as David Shields's Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Charlottesville: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1997).
8. Hannah Adams, A Memoir of Miss Hannah Adams, Written by Herself with Additional Notices by a Friend (Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1832), pp. 4, 4-5, 7.
9. In an illuminating essay on reading as a cultural practice, sociologist Elizabeth Long notes that the archetypal female reader has been represented as "the solitary woman [who] reads, encompassed by an interior that is no less timeless than the [man's] scholarly study, but [is] profoundly domestic." In addition, as Long remarks, scholars have dismissed the reading in which the female subject engages as "epiphenomenal, marginal, or inconsequential. " See Elizabeth Long, "Textual Interpretation as Collective Action," in The Ethnography of Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 182, 187, as well as her "Women, Reading, and Cultural Authority: Some Implications of the Audience Perspective in Cultural Studies," American Quarterly 38 (Fall 1986): 591-612. The women who participated in post-Revolutionary and antebellum discursive institutions challenge virtually all the premises about this putatively universal reader and the books that occupied her attention.
10. Janice Radway, "Interpretive Communities and Variable Literacies: The Functions of Romance Reading," Daedalus 113 (Summer 1984): 54.
11. The social character of reading in women's literary societies in nineteenth-century America is explored by Ann Ruggles Gere in her Writing Croups: History, Theory, and Implications (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987), esp. pp. 9-52, "Common Properties of Pleasure: Texts in Nineteenth-Century Women's Clubs," Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 10 (1992): 647-63,
12. The Journal of Mary Peacock: Life a Century Ago as Seen in Buffalo and Chatauqua County by a Seventeen-Ycar-Old Girl (Buffalo, N.Y.: Privately printed, 1938), 8 January 1838.
13. See also the more narrowly focused examinations of literary societies at individual colleges: David B. Potts's Wesleyan University, 1831-1910: Collegiate Enterprise in New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 40-44;
14. Louise L. Stevenson's "Preparing for Public Life: The Collegiate Students at New York University, 1832-1881," in The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present, ed. Thomas Bender (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 150-77;
15. For quotations from and information about the Sigourney Club and the Social Circle, see Sigourney Club Records, Southern Historical Collection, UNC; Catalogue, 1851, Limestone Springs Female High School, AAS; Recording Secretary's Report, Annual Report of the Whiting Association or Social Circle of the Charlestown Female Society, 1845-46 (Higham, Mass.: Fanner's Press, 1847), pp. 10-13. All further annual reports of the Whiting Association will be cited by title and date.
16. Annual Reports of the Young Ladies Association of the New-Hampton Female Seminary for the Promotion of Literature and Missions, 1846-53, all published in Boston by Freeman and Bolles. Copies of the reports of both seminaries are deposited at the American Antiquarian Society. Nine yearly reports (from 1834-35 to 1842-43) of the New Hampton Female Seminary's literary society are deposited at the Library Company, Philadelphia. Records of Sigoumey Club, Southern Historical Collection, UNC.
17. Whiting Association, Annual Reports, 1845-46, 1848-49, 1850-51;
18. Charlotte Gregg, Whiting Association, Annual Report, 1849, p. 21; Bessie Lacy to Horace Lacy, n.d., Drury Lacy Papers, Southern Historical Collection.
19. Priscilla Mason, "Salutatory Oration," The Rise and Progress of the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Stewart and Cochran, 1794), pp. 90, 92, 93.
20. Elizabeth Buffum Chace, Diary, undated, in Two Quaker Sisters: From the Original Diaries of Elizabeth Chace and Lucy Buffum Lovell, ed. Malcolm R. Lovell (New-York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1937), pp. 31-32;
21. where the description of an association as a "little republic" can also be found. On voluntary associations in post-Revolutionary and antebellum America, see Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
22. Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986), pp. 221, 223.
23. See also Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).
24. Maria Drayton Gibbes, Commonplace Book, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston; Elizabeth Phillips Payson, Commonplace Book, Elizabeth Phillips Payson Collection, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Cambridge, Mass.
25. Catalogue of Books in the Library of the Ladies Social Circle (Fitchburg, Mass.: J. F. D. Garfield, 1857).
26. Elizabeth Jennings, "Address on the Improvement of the Mind," excerpted in We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Dorothy Sterling (New-York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1984), p. 112,
27. Freedom's Journal, 24 August 1827;
28. Sarah Mapps Douglass, "Address," Liberator, 21 July 1832;
29. Constitution, Female Literary Association, Liberator, 3 December 1831.
30. The scholarship on African-American literary societies includes Dorothy B. Porter's "The Organized Educational Activities of Negro Literary Societies, 1828-1846," Journal of Negro Education 5 (October 1936): 555-76;
31. Julie Winch's '"You Have Talents-Only Cultivate Them': Philadelphia's Black Female Literary Societies and the Abolitionist Crusade," in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Home (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 101-18;
32. Shirley Yee's Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828-1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), esp. pp. 62-85;
33. and James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton's In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 125-54.
34. Jennings, "Address on the Improvement of the Mind," p. 112; Constitution of the Female Literary Association, p. 110.
35. Carolyn J. Lawes, Women and Reform in a New England Community, 1815-1860 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000), pp. 55-57.
36. Journal of Mary Ware Allen, undated, quoted by Judith Strong Albert, in "Margaret Fuller and Mary Ware Allen: 'In Youth an Insatiate Student' - A Certain Kind of Friendship," Thoreau Quarterly Journal 12 (1980): 17;
37. Mary Ware Allen, Greene Street Journal No. 1, p. 77, quoted by Albert, in "Margaret Fuller and Mary Ware Allen," p. 13;
38. Fuller to Emerson, 1 March 1838, Fuller Letters, 1:327.
39. Simmons, "Margaret Fuller's Boston Conversations," pp. 214, 215.
40. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years or More: Reminiscences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (New York: European Publishing Co., 1898), p. 152;
41. Phyllis Cole has established the long neglected connections between nineteenth-century America's two most important theoreticians of women rights in "Stanton, Fuller, and the Grammar of Romanticism," New England Quarterly 73 (December 2000): 533-59.