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

Introduction: Between Cupid and Minerva

1 Introduction Between Cupid and Minerva In an 1802 essay provocatively titled, “Plan for the Emancipation of the Female Sex,” an anonymous author suggested that women “would willingly relinquish that authority which they have so long enjoyed by courtesy, in order to appear formally on the theatre of the world merely as the equals of man.” To achieve mere equality, women could “petition the legislature to sanction their emancipation by law.” To gain equality, women needed only to ask for it—equality was, in essence, already theirs for the taking because no “gallant man”would allow his wife or mother to “sue in vain.” This author recognized the law as one road to female emancipation, but he also underscored the early national connection between education and equality. As part of his “Plan for Emancipation,”he proposed that the nation “found a college for the instruction of females in the arts and sciences.” The faculty at this college would be women devoted entirely to their careers. “For the better preservation of female rights,”he insisted, “the professors should all be enjoined celibacy.” In addition to teaching, these “fair sages” would publish works on “the nobler subjects of civil polity or philosophy.”Yet female students would be trained not to emulate their professors’ public careers but to assume traditional domestic roles: “Young women entrusted to the tuition of female philosophers in this university, may when they become mothers, instruct their children;...and thus a gradual increase of wisdom, and consequently , of happiness, will be diffused throughout the community.”1 2 INTRODUCTION By 1802, when this essay was published, scores of female academies were being established throughout the young nation, yet the idea of a college for women was still outside serious consideration. Indeed, it is difficult to discern if the essay’s author was principally serious or sarcastic. If the “Plan for Emancipation” was meant as a parody, its stance on women’s education did not contain enough true derision. The author presented the female college and its students in largely positive terms and failed, unlike most critics, to disparage educated women as pedants or bluestockings. As another author noted, “Few men would (I imagine) wish their wives and daughters to prefer Horace and Virgil to the care of their families.”2 Whatever the intentions of this 1802 “Plan for Emancipation,” the fluid, nebulous nature of early national ideas about women’s education and gender roles made it difficult to distinguish where possibility ended and parody began. In 1819, less than two decades after the publication of the “Plan for Emancipation,”Emma Willard,educator,echoed many of its suggestions and strategies in her “Plan for Improving Female Education.” Willard petitioned the New York legislature not for female emancipation as such but, rather, for official improvements in and government support of women’s education . Willard insisted that schools for women needed the same “respectability , permanency, and uniformity of operation” that characterized male institutions. As Willard argued, “It is the duty of a government, to do all in its power to promote the present and future prosperity of the nation, over which it is placed. This prosperity will depend on the character of its citizens.” Women were citizens, and their proper education was vital to the success of the nation. Yet, according to her nineteenth-century biographer, Willard struggled “to find a suitable name for her ideal institution,” and reportedly asserted, “It would never do to call it a ‘college,’ for the proposal to send young ladies to college would strike everyone as an absurdity.” She instead decided upon the term “female seminary,” hopeful that such naming “will not create a jealousy that we mean to intrude upon the province of the men.” Willard was careful to insist that she had no desire to offer “a masculine education,” stressing that education needed to reflect men and women’s “difference of characters and duties.”3 Whether presented as parody or possibility, early national articulations of women’s education were marked by this persistent tension between intellectual equality and sexual difference. In essence,proponents of women’s education insisted that women were at once equal to and different from men. This paradox found expression in Willard’s rejection of “masculine education” for women, as well as in the assertion in the 1802 “Plan for Emancipation” that education would put women in positions merely as the equals of man. BETWEEN CUPID...