The Spaces of the Schoolhouse and the City: Gender and Class in Boston Education, 1830–1832

In 1830, Boston’s school committee reorganized its schools to match its spatial imagination: an idealized spatial model that reflected the lives and social experiences of its elite members. To unify individual schools and regulate student sexuality, the committee created single-sex schools with one male master. To unify the overall system, the committee redistributed students by sex and adopted a hierarchical teaching staff commanded by the committee. However, the committee’s spatial imagination conflicted with physical buildings and geography, with the different spatial imagination of middle-class parents, and with the irreconcilability of individualized buildings and a unified system. The committee backtracked in 1832.