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3 Equally Their Due Women’s Education and Public Life in Postrevolutionary and Antebellum America —mary kelley Practically every page of this essay bears the imprint of Anne Firor Scott. Scott’s “The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female Seminary, 1822–1872” introduced historians to one of the first schools to offer women an education equal to that offered by the male colleges. Scott invited us to explore with her the social and cultural implications of this unprecedented emphasis on women’s intellectual capacities. In “What, Then, Is the American: This New Woman?, ” the pathbreaking article she published in the Journal of American History in 1978, Scott identified the female counterpart to Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s “new man. ” Emma Willard, founder of the Troy Female Seminary, built institutions and female networks that were decisive in the rapid expansion of women’s higher education in the decades before the Civil War. Equally important, Scott’s Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History alerted historians to the powerful role played by voluntary associations in shaping both women’s subjectivities and American public life. Like so many scholars of American women’s history, I have drawn on all this scholarship and in the process have incurred a lasting debt.    Standing before students and teachers at Litchfield Female Academy in the fall of 1818, Sarah Pierce called on the women who were attending the school she headed to “vindicate the equality of female intellect.” Four years earlier, Pierce had introduced a curriculum that provided the tools with which her students might achieve that vindication. Grounded in the subjects then being taught at the male colleges, Litchfield’s course of study focused on mathematics, moral philosophy, logic, the natural mary kelley 4 sciences, and Latin. Assigned the same texts as students at the colleges, young women were expected to master William Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric, and Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste. Pierce’s curriculum was gendered in one telling respect. Inaugurating a tradition that teachers and students subsequently practiced at many female academies and seminaries , the woman who identified with British luminaries such as Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Hester Chapone invited her students to read books by and about learned women. Women for whom the exercise of intellect was a daily practice, the Mores, the Edgeworths, and the Chapones became the students’ exemplars.1 With the exception of Oberlin College in 1833, America’s colleges and universities began to admit women only after the middle of the nineteenth century. The earliest women’s colleges, Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith, opened their doors in 1865, 1873, and 1875, respectively. Mount Holyoke College, which had been founded in 1837, continued to call itself a seminary until 1888. For nearly two centuries after the founding of Harvard College, then, female academies and seminaries were the only institutions that welcomed women into the world of higher learning. In a letter to her cousin in 1819, Maria Campbell of Virginia spoke to the difference the presence of these schools made in women’s lives. “In the days of our forefathers,” she told Mary Humes, who was attending the acclaimed Salem Academy in North Carolina , “it was considered only necessary to learn a female to read the Bible.” Times were changing. Those who claimed that women had the same intellectual potential as men were gaining ascendancy. They were institutionalizing the claim’s obvious corollary: female educational opportunities ought to reflect that equality. Now receiving what was “equally their due,” women who had been educated at female academies and seminaries were dedicating that knowledge to an instrumental end: the making of public opinion.2 Mary Humes, a student at Salem Academy in the second decade of the nineteenth century, was one of the thousands of women who attended a female academy or seminary in the decades between 1790 and 1840. Residents of both the North and the South, women came to these schools from cities and villages and from towns large and small. In their subsequent lives, some would earn their livelihood as teachers. Others would take their places in elite planter or wealthy merchant families. Still others would join their lives with those of ministers, shopkeepers, or farmers . What these socially, economically, and regionally diverse individuals shared was as significant as what distinguished them. They...

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