The future good and great of our land: Republican mothers, female authors, and domesticated literacy in antebellum New England

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

Volumn 75, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 562-591

  Robbins, Sarah ^a  

^a KENNESAW STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249205179     PISSN: 00284866     EISSN: 19372213     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1559860     Document Type: Review

References (40)

1. "Literary Notices," Ladies' Magazine, May 1833, pp. 237-39.
2. Carolyn Karcher's biography of Child emphasizes the writer's interventions in public life (The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child [Durham: Duke University Press, 1994]).
3. see also Kelley's Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1984]).
4. See Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
5. Mary Beth Norton, "The Evolution of White Women's Experience in Early America," American Historical Review 89 (1984): 616-18.
6. Norton, "White Women's Experience in Early America," pp. 609, 616.
7. Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), p. 6.
8. Nina Baym, "Onward Christian Women: Sarah J. Hale's History of the World," New England Quarterly 63 (1990): 249-70,
9. "Woman," Ladies' Magazine, September 1830, p. 441,
10. Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 91. Schudson pays particular attention to the relation between this sociopolitical transformation and the development of the "common school" curriculum, whereas my analysis focuses on education in the home. Maternal teaching at home and new pedagogies for the schools increasingly overlapped as the century progressed and more women worked as schoolteachers. In the twentieth century and to the present, a relatively impersonal and frequently suburbanized model privileging citizens' rights has dominated.
11. Robert H. Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 62-63,
12. and Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). p. 5.
13. See, e.g., Lora Romero's Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 14.
14. Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodics: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 87.
15. Jennifer E. Monaghan, "Literacy Instruction and Gender in Colonial New England," in Reading in America: Literature and Social History, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 53-80, esp. pp. 68 and 73.
16. See also Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 15-16.
17. Baym, Women Writers and the Work of History, pp. 35-36. Baym counts among the women writing such historical texts a number who also wrote in the overlapping genre of the domestic literacy narrative - e.g., Hannah Foster, Lydia Sigourney, and Judith Sargent Murray.
18. "Critical Notices," Ladies' Magazine, April 1828, p. 191.
19. [Sarah Josepha Hale], "Sketches of American Character. No. V. The Village Schoolmistress," Ladies' Magazine, May 1828, pp. 202-19;
20. Memoir of James Jackson: The Attentice and Obedient Scholar, Who Died in Boston, October 31, 1833. Aged Six Years and Eleven Months. By His Teacher, Miss Susan Paul (1835), ed. Lois Brown (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
21. L. H. Sigourney, Letters to Mothers (Hartford: Hudson and Skinner, 1838);
22. L. H. Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies, 3d ed. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1837).
23. Lydia Maria Francis Child, Good Wives (Boston: Carter, Hendee and Co., 1833);
24. Lydia Sigourney, Examples from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New York: Charles Scribner, 1857).
25. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, A Love Token for Children, Designed for Sunday-School Libraries (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1838);
26. Mrs. Lydia H. Sigourney, The Book for Girls, Consisting of Original Articles in Prose and Poetry (New York: Turner and Hayden, 1844);
27. Mrs. L. H. Sigourney, The Boy's Book; Consisting of Original Articles in Prose and Poetry (New York: Turner, Hughes & Hayden; and Raleigh, N.C.: Turner & Hughes, 1845).
28. Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 386 n. 2.
29. Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Facts and Fancies for School-Day Reading, a Sequel to "Morals and Manners" (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1873);
30. Stories for Young Persons (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1841).
31. See Deborah Fitts, "Una and the Lion: The Feminization of District School-Teaching and Its Effects on the Roles of Students and Teachers in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts," in Regulated Children/Liberated Children: Education in Psychohistorical Perspective, ed. Barbara Finkelstein (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979), pp. 140-57.
32. See Jeanne Boydston's Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
33. Sigourney, Letters to Young Ladies, p. 15.
34. "Female Seminaries I," March 1833, pp. 139-42;
35. "Female Seminaries II," April 1833, pp. 176-79;
36. "Troy Female Seminary," September 1833, pp. 402-5.
37. See Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen, "Monitoring Columbia's Daughters: Writing as Gendered Conduct," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 23 (Summer/Fall 1993): 51;
38. Susanna Rowson, A Present for Young Ladies: Containing Poems, Dialogues, Addresses, &c. as Recited by the Pupils of Mrs. Rowson's Academy at the Annual Exhibitions (Boston: John West, 1811), p. 40.
39. "Mrs. Willard on Female Education," Ladies' Magazine, April 1834, pp. 162-63.
40. See Elizabeth Alden Green, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1979).