Reinventing the Peabody Sisters

Like One Happy Family: Mary Peabody Mann’s Method for Influencing Reform

Mary Tyler Peabody Mann was among the most influential women in America’s emerging educational system and in American women’s increasing self-determination. Her many causes included abolition and the elimination of racism, Transcendentalism, health care, reform of mental asylums , and educational progress. However, in many ways the life of Mann accorded with the pervasive antebellum Christian ethos in which a woman surrendered herself to her family and her Heavenly Father. As dutiful daughter, wife, and mother, Mann positioned herself as an extremely articulate and well-educated private servant of the Republic, a “True Woman” instructing her children in Christian values. Scholarship to date typically presents her in such supporting roles; these depictions do not misrepresent her, but they do underrepresent and underestimate her vitality and her authority.1 Most of her life Mann subtly exerted her power and voice through teaching young children and providing support to her husband’s various careers .2 However,Mann,like other nineteenth-century New England women —influenced by the death of a male figure in her life, travel beyond the Boston area, and wars fought in part for democratic ideals—transformed her domestic role into a more visibly public one.3 Certainly Mann published more after her husband Horace died in August 1859 and the Civil War began in 1861. Her last twenty-five years of life, in fact, proved her most prolific in terms of publication and her most daring in terms of advocacy . Challenging accepted cultural norms, she calls for educational reform in textbooks such as Moral Culture of Infancy and Kindergarten Guide with Like One Happy Family Mary Peabody Mann’s Method for Influencing Reform deshae e. lott • 91 • 92 • politics on the home front Music for the Plays; she criticizes cultural oppression such as slavery in her novel Juanita; and she advocates giving all women a voice in the culture,as evidenced in her efforts to arrange the publication of Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Life among the Piutes. Because her advocacy and written expressions prefigure the increased integration of the domestic and public spheres, Mann is a literary mother important in the context of conversations about women’s work, mothering, and writing. Publicly, Mann positioned herself as “contained” while simultaneously suggesting ways of living “outside the container.” Among her contemporaries, Mann demonstrated an exceptional aptitude for creating and embracing opportunities to express her political ideology. By respecting certain boundaries of female containment, Mann maintained an esteemed position in her society; this position, in turn, enabled her through private influence and public directives to reinforce, criticize, and propose ways that her culture might act upon its ideal of responsibility to personal and societal edification. This dual influence is particularly evident in her work for public education and kindergarten.4 For example, in her midthirties Mann writes a female friend and articulates her commitment to educational reform as a means for facilitating individual perfection: “how joyfully I look forward to the realization of some of my wishes through your help,such as that of perfecting some beautiful plan of education,which you and I, with our faith in perfectibility, might invent, but which I could not make alone” (MCI 105).5 She merges the Transcendentalist belief in human perfectibility and self-reliance with a desire to develop prescriptive guides—her instruction manuals on cooking, hygiene, and pedagogy—and methods for cultivating individual perfection through the support of a collaborative , similarly driven community. By seeking solidarity in and support for her particular political focus, Mann eschews appearing like a female rebel arrogating an inappropriate role. Mann’s work centers upon edifying both the children she cared for and a larger American population on whom she could be a maternal, guiding influence. As Nancy Chodorow writes in her study of gender socialization within the family, in Western cultures “feminine personality comes to include a fundamental definition of the self in relationship” (169); moreover, this culturally acquired attitude of existing interdependently influences the mother-child relationship (3–5, 11–39). On one level, Mann’s expressed deshae e. lott • 93 sense of benevolence or noblesse oblige actually appropriates techniques and attitudes of nineteenth-century male social reformers in the United States and Britain. However, she recognizes the inherent struggle between democratization and assimilation and subtly rejects the limitations of a paternalism that imposes restrictions based upon gender, ethnicity, creed, or socioeconomic...