Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic

Preface

ix  Preface 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 commencement 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 education . 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 have it supposed I am an advocate for female independence.”1 In Mere 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 maledominated 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, political ,and economic structures of male power and privilege sustained by gender x PREFACE difference and hierarchy? These questions found various expressions—but no easy resolutions—in the literary public sphere as early national Americans repeatedly debated the place of educated women in the early republic. The organizing concept for this book—“mere equality”—reflects how early national Americans grappled with the issue of women’s intellectual capacity. Mere equality represented an imperfect, paradoxical attempt at compromise—implicit in the mere was the persistent notion that women were different from men and, further, that to become merely the equals of man would represent a loss of women’s influence and power as women. The mere was underwritten and sustained by notions of sexual difference. At the same time, equality was, of course, a powerful concept in the young nation, so powerful that it was not inconceivable that women (and other previously disenfranchised groups) might very well desire some of the social, economic, and political benefits that equality promised. Mere equality attempted to reconcile the persistent belief in gender difference of the era with its more liberating and enlightened ideas about equality. It was a vague, malleable concept that was subject to multiple interpretations. Its positive connotations enabled some women to explore how a sense of intellectual equality could transform their everyday lives.Yet,for many prescriptive writers,mere equality functioned as a constraint, an effort to remind intellectual women that they were still women, whose lives remained primarily defined by cultural models of sexual difference. Thus, although mere equality enabled educated women to achieve some measures of personal and social equality, it failed to fundamentally challenge the structural underpinnings of male patriarchy and privilege. Individuals could support the notion of women becoming the mere equals of men without having to cede much ideological, political, or economic ground. What did educated women gain—and lose—in their pursuit of mere equality? To answer this question, this project goes beyond prescription and examines, through women’s own words and experiences, how educated women attempted to live merely as the equals of man. This approach offers a unique contribution to the historiography, exploring the intersections between prescriptions and experiences to uncover how early national women responded to and negotiated cultural aims regarding the forms,uses,and purposes of education.2 My analysis has been informed by recent scholarship that has mapped the early national literary and educational landscapes. Historians and literary scholars, such as Elizabeth...