The Mirror of Antiquity

by Winterer, Caroline

• ISBN13: 9780801475795
• ISBN10: 0801475791
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-01-30
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

In The Mirror of Antiquity, Caroline Winterer uncovers the lost world of American women's classicism during its glory days from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Overturning the widely held belief that classical learning and political ideals were relevant only to men, she follows the lives of four generations of American women through their diaries, letters, books, needlework, and drawings, demonstrating how classicism was at the center of their experience as mothers, daughters, and wives. Importantly, she pays equal attention to women from the North and from the South, and to the ways that classicism shaped the lives of black women in slavery and in freedom. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Caroline Winterer is Associate Professor of History at Stanford University. She is the author of The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
List of Illustrations	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
The Female World of Classicism in Eighteenth-Century America	p. 12
The Rise of the Roman Matron, 1770-1790	p. 40
Daughters of Columbia, 1780-1800	p. 68
Grecian Luxury, 1800-1830	p. 102
Climbing Parnassus, 1790-1850	p. 142
The Greek Slave, 1830-1865	p. 165
Antigone and the Twilight of Female Classicism, 1850-1900	p. 191
Epilogue. The New Colossus	p. 207
Notes	p. 209
Index	p. 235
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