Heading South to Teach: The World of Susan Nye Hutchison, 1815–1845 by Kim Tolley (review)

Kim Tolley’s account of Susan Nye Hutchison’s teaching career in North Carolina demonstrates how women could successfully challenge middle-class expectations while remaining within the parameters of acceptable behavior in the antebellum United States. Drawing extensively on Hutchison’s personal journal, Tolley presents the life of an ambitious woman who embraced teaching as a career and a chance for entrepreneurship rather than as simply a job to surrender upon marriage. Inspired by the ideals of the Second Great Awakening and driven by her personal ambition, Hutchison traveled far from her home and her parents in Amenia, New York, to teach in Raleigh, North Carolina. Tolley describes how Hutchison, first as a teacher at the Raleigh Academy’s Female Department and then as head of her own school, became a respectable community member who contributed to humanitarian reform in many ways. Teaching became more than a labor of love for Hutchison. Her husband Adam Hutchison’s business failures and his early death made her the primary provider for her family, which included five children. Despite these challenges and many limitations on ambitious women, Hutchison successfully provided her children future opportunities while securing middle-class respectability. All the while Hutchison secretly taught slaves and ministered to prisoners condemned to execution. Tolley’s account of Susan Nye Hutchison illustrates how women could skirt the conventions of domesticity that Nancy F. Cott’s The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, 1977) and other works identify as the dominant cultural ideal for women during the 1800s.

Tolley’s book has much to offer both lay readers and academics interested in nineteenth-century intellectual and social history. Through her biographical account of Hutchison, Tolley not only offers readers a window into the challenges ambitious antebellum-era women faced but also provides a view of the institutions and values that tied antebellum America together and then split the nation apart. Tolley nicely builds off Nathan O. Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989) by giving readers a sense of how the Second Great Awakening united Americans by inspiring reform and connecting people between different regions while also dividing them on the morality of slavery. Through the book, readers will also discover a diverse South—or North Carolina at least—where some white southerners embraced the antislavery movement, valued expanded educational opportunities for women, and supported a state-funded common school system. Tolley’s book complements Jonathan Daniel Wells’s Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (New York, 2011), which examines how women increased their acceptance in publishing careers. Tolley also captures how gender inequality and slavery played out on a personal level by detailing Hutchison’s struggles with her abusive husband and her experience at witnessing the breaking up of enslaved families. Finally, through Tolley’s description of Hutchison’s journey to North Carolina, readers gain a sense of the riskiness of travel between regions before railroads had been built.

The book’s one shortcoming is that it never compares North Carolina with other southern states where Hutchison might have found teaching success more difficult. Kentucky was the only other southern state after North Carolina to allot money for common schools before the Civil War, and this was a small amount. Addressing this issue would highlight the uniqueness of teaching in North Carolina. Nevertheless, by detailing Hutchison’s entrepreneurial spirit, intellect, and sense of social justice, Tolley illustrates how antebellum-era women, despite society-imposed limitations, found avenues to reshape American culture while securing respectability for their families. Tolley offers readers a new and interesting perspective on teaching in the antebellum South. I highly recommend her book to those interested in women’s roles in reforming the South.