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Reviewed by:
  • Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century
  • Amy Cummins
Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century. By Jaime Osterman Alves. New York: Routledge, 2009. xv + 187 pp. $105.00.

In Fictions of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century, Jaime Osterman Alves considers how literature, primarily fiction, explores the possibilities of young women's lives as they contested the values of the systems in which they studied. Closely examining texts that include Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons, Sophia Alice Callahan's Wynema: A Child of the Forest, Frances E. W. Harper's Trial and Triumph, and newspapers such as A Wreath of Cherokee Rose Buds, the author explains how the works present academic instruction and "collateral learning": In and through these works, schoolgirls absorb the "expectations of adult women" and develop attitudes about "intellectual work, marriage, sexuality, self-expression, and vocation" (6). [End Page 149]

Appropriately, Alves grounds her book in women's educational history, incorporating the arguments of scholars such as David Tyack and Elizabeth Hansot, Barbara Finkelstein, Elizabeth Alden Green, and Sarah Robbins as she interprets the selected texts. For girls in the mid to late nineteenth century, schools were places both to learn about gender expectations and "to challenge traditional feminine roles and norms while on the very threshold of adulthood" (145). The author claims that the book "showcases adolescent girls, real and imagined, who 'talked back' to teacher, parent, and culture" (8), causing cultural anxiety. Although Alves could provide more evidence for the claimed adolescent assertions and their resulting cultural concerns, her point is clear. For example, educational achievement by the African American protagonist of Frances E. W. Harper's novel Trial and Triumph disproves the dominant culture's claims of nonwhite intellectual inferiority. So also did the students of the Cherokee National Female Seminary in the 1850s. When writing and publishing their newspaper, they expressed themselves in two languages and even "challenge[d] the applicability of Christian belief systems to their own bicultural lives" (145).

The latter topic comprises the volume's most innovative chapter, titled "Reading, Writing, and Re-presenting: The Newspaper and the Schoolgirl in the Wreath of Cherokee Rose Buds and S. Alice Callahan's Wynema: A Child of the Forest." Here this study fills a scholarly gap about educational institutions for Native American girls from the 1850s and the 1890s, offering material that would merit a full-length study or, at least, two chapters, rather than merely the one devoted to it. The chapter's first half argues that Native American schoolgirls used the press "to further their educations about themselves and their role[s] in the world around them, and also to resist the sometimes oppressive force of the educational institutions themselves" (71). Alves examines several different publications: A Wreath of Cherokee Rosebuds at Cherokee Female Seminary in the 1850s, Our Monthly at Tullahassee Mission in the 1870s, and the Harrell Monthly at Harrell International Institute in the 1890s, linked by the influence of Cherokee Elias Boudinot's call in 1826 for printing presses and high schools. Boudinot held that "the Native press" would serve an uplifting function to help Native Americans acculturate and become more similar to whites, but he "expresse[d] an ambivalence" about women's education and contradicted himself about the abilities of Native Americans (77). Native women students, however, resisted Boudinot's "brand of accommodationism" (72); they used newspaper writing "both to acculturate to white society and to preserve some of the distinctive features of their own cultural heritage" (70). In addition, "[t]he school-newspaper nexus" was a place where the girls could "create themselves" and discover "choices for behavior and thought" (95). For instance, an 1855 issue of Wreath offers two versions of what is purportedly the [End Page 150] same short story, one in English and one in Cherokee; Alves argues that the Cherokee version "encourages readers to question the influence of Christian values upon their lives, challenge the authority figures at the school, and reject passive reading practices in favor of active ones" (94-95).

The chapter also argues for Boudinot's influence upon Wynema. Alves finds that the schools and newspapers in the book encouraged assimilation rather than...

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