Mere Equals

Lucia McMahon

Description

In Mere Equals, Lucia McMahon narrates a story about how a generation of young women who enjoyed access to new educational opportunities made sense of their individual and social identities in an American nation marked by stark political inequality between the sexes. McMahon's archival research into the private documents of middling and well-to-do Americans in northern states illuminates educated women's experiences with particular life stages and relationship arcs: friendship, family, courtship, marriage, and motherhood. In their personal and social relationships, educated women attempted to live as the "mere equals" of men. Their often frustrated efforts reveal how early national Americans grappled with the competing issues of women's intellectual equality and sexual difference.In the new nation, a pioneering society, pushing westward and unmooring itself from established institutions, often enlisted women's labor outside the home and in areas that we would deem public. Yet, as a matter of law, women lacked most rights of citizenship and this subordination was authorized by an ideology of sexual difference. What women and men said about education, how they valued it, and how they used it to place themselves and others within social hierarchies is a highly useful way to understand the ongoing negotiation between equality and difference. In public documents, "difference" overwhelmed "equality," because the formal exclusion of women from political activity and from economic parity required justification. McMahon tracks the ways in which this public disparity took hold in private communications. By the 1830s, separate and gendered spheres were firmly in place. This was the social and political heritage with which women's rights activists would contend for the rest of the century.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• United States of America
• History of education
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780801465888
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

 MERE EQUALS

MERE EQUALS n T HE PARADOX OF E DUCAT E D WOME N I N T HE E ARLY AME RI CAN RE PUBL I C

L u c i a M c M a h o n

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2012 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2012 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data McMahon, Lucia.  Mere equals : the paradox of educated women in the early American republic / Lucia McMahon.  p. cm.  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 9780801450525 (cloth : alk. paper)  1. Women—Education—United States—History— 18th century. 2. Women—Education—United States— History—19th century. 3. Women—United States— Social conditions—18th century. 4. Women—United States—Social conditions—19th century. I. Title.  LC1752.M35 2012  371.822—dc23 2012009966

Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetablebased, lowVOC inks and acidfree papers that are recycled, totally chlorinefree, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Elizabeth McMahon Kroll and Jackson McMahon Kroll

  Co nt e nt s

Preface ix Acknowledgments xv

Introduction: Between Cupid and Minerva 1. “More like a Pleasure than a Study”: Women’s Educational Experiences 2. “Various Subjects That Passed between Two Young Ladies of America”: Reconstructing Female Friendship 3. “The Social Family Circle”: Family Matters 4. “The Union of Reason and Love”: Courtship Ideals and Practices 5. “The Sweet Tranquility of Domestic Endearment”: Companionate Marriage 6. “So Material a Change”: Revisiting Republican Motherhood  Conclusion: Education, Equality, or Difference

List of Archives 171 Notes 175 Index 223

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  P r e f a c e

Between the 1780s and 1820s, American women acquired education during an expanding but experimental stage when scores of female academies proliferated across the new nation, yet decades before colleges and other institutions of higher education admitted women. The literary public sphere eagerly took notice of women’s educational efforts, publishing prescriptive essays on women’s education, accounts of com mencement ceremonies held at female academies, and numerous examples of educated women founded in both fact and fiction. In the midst of sweeping institutional advancements, the prescriptive literature could not agree about the forms, uses, and effects of women’s education; it offered everything from enthusiastic praise of women’s intellectual equality to didactic parodies of pedantic women. At the time, even the most ardent supporters of women’s education could not resolve the tensions between intellectual equality and sexual difference that informed the era’s understandings of women’s educa tion. Thus, an author who proudly proclaimed, “Nature has formed the sexes upon an equality in mind,” was careful to assure his readers, “I would not 1 have it supposed I am an advocate for female independence.” InMere Equals,I address the issue of women’s education in early national America explicitly within the context of an equality versus difference debate. As I argue, the education of women revealed an unanswered conundrum that was at the heart of how notions of gender and society functioned in the early national period: How does a society committed to equality maintain what are perceived as necessary differences? If properly educated women were capable of becoming the intellectual equals of men, how would Americans continue to justify women’s formal exclusion from politics and other male dominated professions? If women achieved intellectual equality, what other forms of equality would they seek? Would educated women, as critics warned, abandon their domestic responsibilities and compete with men for economic and political power? Would women’s intellectual equality challenge the very notion of sexual difference—and perhaps more important, the social, politi cal, and economic structures of male power and privilege sustained by gender

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