Women's Education In The United States, 1780-1840

by Nash, Margaret A.

• ISBN13: 9781403969378
• ISBN10: 140396937X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-04-16
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

The Origins of Women's Higher Education in America examines female education in the United States from the early national period through the formation of the institutions that are widely recognized as the forerunners of the women's college movement. Margaret A. Nash argues that in this period education was not as strongly gendered as other historians have posited. The rising rhetoric of human rights, Enlightenment thought, and evangelical Christianity, in an age of dynamic economic change, helped build a broad ideological base for the spread of female education. Education was key to the project of class formation, and therefore, Nash contends, class and race were more salient than gender in the construction of educational institutions.

Author Biography

Margaret A. Nash is Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Riverside. She teaches courses on the history of education, history of curriculum, and gender and education. Her research has appeared in the History of Education Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, and the History of Higher Education Annual.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	1	(14)
``Is Not Woman a Human Being?'': Discourses on Education in the Early National Period	15	(20)
``Cultivating the Powers of Human Beings'': Curriculum and Pedagogy in Schools and Academies in the New Republic	35	(18)
Female Education and the Emergence of the ``Middling Classes''	53	(24)
``Perfecting Our Whole Nature'': Intellectual and Physical Education for Women in the Antebellum Era	77	(22)
Possibilities and Limitations: Education and White Middle-class Womanhood	99	(18)
Appendix: Institutions Considered in This Study, by State and Year of Data	117	(6)
Notes	123	(44)
Bibliography	167	(30)
Index	197