The Cosmopolitan Lyceum: Lecture Culture and the Globe in Nineteenth-Century America

2. Women Thinking: The International Popular Lecture and its Audience in Antebellum New England

42 2 Women Thinking The International Popular Lecture and Its Audience in Antebellum New England Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray On the evening of December 11, 1838, Bostonian Annie Lawrence walked over to the Masonic Temple in the bustling city center to hear the first in a course of lectures on the “domestic manners and habits of the Turks.”1 It was to be given by Christopher Hatchik Oscanyan, a New York University student who was a recent Armenian immigrant from the Ottoman Empire. The hall was packed to the gills with New Athenians who had perhaps read about his stint in New York, where he had spoken on Constantinople.2 But this night in Boston he would focus on the Osmanli Turks. He told the crowd that “it was his object . . . to disabuse those who might favor him with an attendance of his lectures, of . . . erroneous notions ” about this people. He appealed to auditors’ sympathies by invoking British authors Fanny Kemble, Frances Trollope, and Basil Hall for their “shamefully inaccurate accounts” of American manners.3 Annie was entranced . She thought he was “a handsome man . . . exceeding graceful in his movements,” and she fastened on his every word, even though “he occasionally made a droll mistake,” despite his fluent English. After returning home, she wrote a lengthy synopsis of his lecture: He spoke much of the Harem & the erroneous ideas we had formed of it. The word itself Harem being Arabic signifies home, a place of rest & reserve— where the women & children remain, indeed the same word is applied to the e f 43 Women Thinking cabin of a steam boat or any place appropriated to women. . . . He showed the pipes used with the Houkah . . . & contradicted the notion we have that the Turks smoke opium with tobacco; . . . they also had formed the same wrong idea that we mixed opium with our bread. He showed also the tiny cup in which they drink their coffee & the manner by which they prepare it for use. “On the whole,” she concluded, the lecture “was instructive.” After returning the next week for his second talk, she wrote another substantial summary in her journal.4 Eighteen-year-old Annie said little, if anything, that was ethnocentric about Oscanyan or the Turks. She embraced the speaker’s relativism and set aside preconceived stereotypes about harems and the hookah.5 She peered beyond her own privileged horizons as a Boston Associate’s daughter and into an exotic world about which she knew very little. After hearing Oscanyan ’s talk, she yearned for wider vistas. That winter she took up Italian, attended a lyceum debate on “whether nations could subsist & prosper on the principle of Non-Resistance,” and, despite a “wretched headache,” listened to a talk on Burma at the Odeon by American missionary Howard Malcom. At the Masonic Temple she heard Francis C. Gray on “English Language and Literature” and later took in a performance by Christophorus Plato Castanis (fig. 2.1) on “the Massacre of Scio.”6 Within three months she had contemplated Burmese customs and the Canterbury Tales, heard out both Greeks and Turks, and wondered if pacifism was tenable in a tumultuous era of revolutions. The agility with which she rebounded after lecture upon lecture, topic upon topic, is astonishing. She wanted to imbibe as much as she could about the history, ethnographies, and arts of diverse cultures. The public lecture fostered in her a spirit of cosmopolitanism. Many literate women throughout New England developed a similar cosmopolitanism by regularly auditing public lectures. Yet their worldliness has been as neglected as their prodigious showing. Women thinking about worldwide topics were everywhere. When Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to “Man Thinking” in his “American Scholar” address, delivered before Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society on August 31, 1837, he probably little thought about the women who had read his book Nature and attended his lectures.7 But his “Man Thinking” might easily have been a woman. After all, the college-educated male scholar risked “becoming the parrot of other men’s thinking,” according to Emerson. So who better embodied his para-institutional intellectual than a woman, denied access to halls of higher learning? “Woman Thinking” was not so unthinkable after all.8 As a sometime pieceworker wrote in 1852, “Have attended lectures &c. and have read considerable, and thought some.”9 It was a natural combination. Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray 44 “Thinking women...