Abstract
Elizabeth Hamilton, author of the popular Letters on Education (1801), was a strong advocate of advanced education for females. When someone suggested that a “triumph of reason over the passions” might be unattractive in a woman, she retorted, “I beg your pardon; I thought we were speaking of the best method of cultivating the powers of human beings. … In this I can make no distinction of sex.”1 Most writers on education in the early republic agreed with Hamilton. The majority of educators believed that both males and females were rational human beings who needed to acquire mental discipline and who were interested in learning about the world around them. Both the curricula and the pedagogical methods proposed by educational theorists in the new republic reflected these beliefs.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Elizabeth Hamilton, Letters on Education (Dublin: H. Colbert, 1801), 15
Kim Tolley, “Mapping the Landscape of Higher Schooling, 1727–1850,” in Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727–1925, Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley, eds. (New York and London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002), 24–26.
Thomas Woody, A History of Women’s Education in the United States, I (New York: The Science Press, 1929), 152–154
Woody, A History of Women’s Education, I, ch. VIII; Robert Church, Education in the United States: An Interpretive History (New York: The Free Press, 1976)
Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1985)
John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, quoted in Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle, The Learning of Liberty (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 54–56.
Quoted in Ann Gordon, “The Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia,” in Women of America: A History, Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton, eds. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 77.
Samuel Knox, “An Essay on the Best System of Liberal Education, Adapted to the Genius of the Government of the United States,” in Essays on Education in the Early Republic, Frederick Rudolph, ed. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 305
Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)
David W. Robson, Educating Republicans: The College in the Era of the American Revolution, 1750–1800 (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1985), 204, 208.
Jean Pond, Bradford: A New England Academy (Bradford, MA: Alumnae Association, 1930), 37–38.
Woody, A History of Women’s Education, I, 299; Cynthia A. Kierner, Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700–1835 (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 158.
For additional discussion on this term, see James D. Watkinson, “Useful Knowledge? Concepts, Values, and Access in American Education, 1776–1840,” History of Education Quarterly 30 (Fall 1990), 351–370.
Hannah More, “Thoughts on the Cultivation of the Heart and Temper in the Education of Daughters” [1794], in The Lady’s Companion (Worcester, MA: The Spy Office, 1824), 92–98.
Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Practical Education [1798] (New York: George F. Hopkins, 1801), 117.
John Adams to Abigail Adams, August 28, 1774; quoted in Edith B. Gelles, Portia: The World of Abigail Adams (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 143
Rollo Laverne Lyman, English Grammar in American Schools Before 1850 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1922), 39–43
Edwin C. Broome, A Historical and Critical Discussion of College Admission Requirements (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1903), 43
John Teaford, “The Transformation of Massachusetts Education, 1670–1780,” in The Social History of American Education, B. Edward McClellan and William J. Reese, eds. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 23–38
Kenneth Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1974), 127.
Samuel Magaw, An Address Delivered in the Young Ladies Academy, at Philadelphia, on February 8th, 1787. At the Close of a Public Examination (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1787), 10.
Kim Tolley, The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective (New York and London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2003), 22.
Jedediah Morse, Geography Made Easy [1784] (Boston: J. T. Buckingham, 1806)
John A. Nietz, Old Textbooks (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1961), 217–218.
Tolley, The Science Education of American Girls, 30–31; William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 118.
Clifton Johnson, Old-Time Schools and School-Books (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963), 320.
Anya Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 11–12.
Joan W. Goodwin, The Remarkable Mrs. Ripley: The Life of Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 14–15.
Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (New York: HarperCollins, 1980), 23.
Jeanne Boydston, Home & Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 41.
John Cossens Ogden, The Female Guide (Concord, NH: George Hough, 1793), 27
Church, Education in the United States, 34; Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), 18
Copyright information
© 2005 Margaret A. Nash
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nash, M.A. (2005). “Cultivating the Powers of Human Beings”. In: Women’s Education in the United States, 1780–1840. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05035-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05035-9_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-6938-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-05035-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)