A World of Their Own Making:
Student Life at Southern Women’s Colleges, 1800-1865
by
Jessie VanderHeide

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Faculty of Graduate Studies
Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Humanities, History Stream

1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………………. 2
INTRODUCTION …………………………………………………………………………… 4
CHAPTER ONE: ACADEMIC LIFE AT SOUTHERN WOMEN’S COLLEGES …………19
CHAPTER TWO: SOCIAL LIFE AT SOUTHERN WOMEN’S COLLEGES ……………. 40
CHAPTER THREE: RELIGIOUS LIFE AT SOUTHERN WOMEN’S COLLEGES ………60
CHAPTER FOUR: SOUTHERN WOMEN’S LIVES AFTER COLLEGE ........................... 79
CONCLUSION ……………………………………………………………………………… 98
BIBLIOGRAPHY …………………………………………………………………………... 103

2

ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, the majority of historical scholarship on southern women’s education has
concentrated on seeking answers to the question “to what extent was antebellum southern
women’s education an oppressive or liberating force?” While keenly noting that the emergence
of women’s higher education in the early nineteenth-century South did not necessarily entail
advancement for women,1 much of this existing scholarship, because it is focused on analysing
institutional records, looks primarily at college curricula and practices to answer questions
regarding the value of education; accordingly, this scholarship concludes that, while women’s
higher education was new to the early nineteenth-century South, it did not offer southern women
anything “new” in terms of social position and therefore was not ultimately a liberating force.
While the existing scholarship is useful because it points out the engendered nature of southern
women’s education, an exploration of students’ recollections of their college experiences
challenges the conclusion that women’s colleges offered women nothing new and were
ultimately oppressive forces. For while women’s college education was engendered in such a
way that it aimed to reinforce pre-existing ideas concerning southern womanhood this does not
necessarily mean that the ideals of women’s education matched its actual out-workings. Indeed,
assuming that the “ideal” matched the “real” ignores female students’ responses to their
engendered educations. Paying attention to students’ recollections of their college experiences
reveals that the college experience actually granted young women the opportunity to shape their
own female-controlled world in the midst of living in an intensely patriarchal society. Perhaps
surprisingly, though, the world that these students shaped through their cultivation of academic,
social, and religious cultures was one in which they not only challenged the gender ideals of

1

Sally Schwager, “Educating Women in America,” Signs 12, no. 2 (Winter 1987): 365.

3

southern society and thereby formed new identities as women, but one in which they also
(somewhat paradoxically) upheld a hierarchical structure that undermined any type of sisterhood
or collective redefinition of southern womanhood and, at times, even reinforced more traditional
gender conventions. Thus, a study of southern women’s colleges that privileges the agency of
female students not only provides a more complete picture of women’s education, but highlights
the complexity of southern women’s identities and thereby contributes to wider discussions
within southern and women’s history.

4

INTRODUCTION
Since the 1980s, much scholarly work has demonstrated that southern women’s higher
education emerged in the early nineteenth century in order to reinforce existing gender constructs
and, in doing so, to promote the ideals of southern society. 2 Less explored by scholars are the
ways in which southern women responded to the ideals presented in their engendered
educations.3 While analyses of college curricula, advertisements, and catalogues present a rather
bleak picture of women’s education by highlighting the ways in which southern women’s
education worked to shape southern women into ladies,4 an investigation of females’ experiences

2

While the majority of scholarship tends to highlight the ways in which southern women’s education was
engendered, there are some who challenge the idea that it was so. Catherine Clinton, “Equally Their Due: The
Education of the Planter Daughter in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 2 (1982): 49-62, Christie
Anne Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1994), Sally
McMillen, “Education and Religion” in Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, 2nd ed. (Arlington
Heights, IL: Harlan Davison, 2002) and Steven Stowe, “The Not-So-Cloistered Female Academy: Elite Women’s
Education and Family Feeling in the Old South,” in The Web of Southern Social Relations, ed. Walter J. Fraser et al.
(Atlanta, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985) each highlight the ways in which college authorities worked to
remind southern women of gender ideals through formal curriculum and school practices. By contrast, Margaret
Nash challenges historians’ conclusions that women’s educations were engendered in her “‘Cultivating the Powers
of Human Beings’: Gendered Perspectives on Curricula and Pedagogy in Academies of the New Republic, History
of Education Quarterly 41, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 239-50. Similar to Farnham, Nash notes the similarities between
men’s and women’s education in the antebellum period; however, in contrast to Farnham, she argues that historians
exaggerate the different purposes for which men and women were educated (241). The collection of evidence put
forward in this thesis, being particular to the South, disagrees with Nash’s conclusion that the purposes, curricula,
and practices of women’s colleges were not engendered. While disagreeing with Nash on this point, however, this
thesis is similar to Nash’s argument in challenging historians’ emphasis on the frivolous and oppressive nature of
women’s education, but it takes a different route (an examination of women’s experiences and agency rather than
college curricula) to do so.
3

There have emerged a few studies on students’ responses to their engendered education, including Mary
Kelley’s Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2006) and Joan Marie Johnson’s Southern Women at the Seven Sister Colleges:
Feminist Values and Social Activism, 1875-1915 (Atlanta: University of Georgia Press, 2010), which focuses on
southern women, but only those who obtained an education in the North, but these analyses are not focused
specifically on southern women’s responses to their education. Two studies that do analyse the responses of women
to their education include Farnham’s The Southern Belle and Anya Jabour’s Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the
Old South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), both of which will be discussed in this
thesis.
4

McMillen, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, 94; Patricia Palmieri, “From Republican
Motherhood to Race Suicide: Arguments on the Higher Education of Women in the United States, 1820-1920,” in
Educating Men and Women Together: Coeducation in a Changing World, ed. Carol Lasser (Urbana, IL: University
of Illinois Press/Oberlin College, 1987), 49-64. Kathryn Walbert agrees with the contention that southern women’s
higher education is often portrayed as frivolous, useless, and thereby oppressive in her “‘Endeavor to Improve

5

while at college, including a study of the female collegiate culture mentioned in women’s letters
and diaries, presents a more complicated, and therefore complete, picture. For, while female
students may have in some sense lived under the patriarchal authority of college founders,
student life provided a space for women to hold some control over their lives while at college.
What they did with this power proves revealing for female-controlled, collegiate culture was a
space in which women could express their views and either accept or reject the ideals of southern
society. An analysis of this collegiate culture--including an examination of academic, social,
religious, and post-graduate life--reveals that women used the freedom granted them at college to
create communities in which they not only challenged the gender ideals of southern society and
thereby formed new identities as women, but also upheld a hierarchal structure that not only
undermined any type of sisterhood or collective redefinition of southern womanhood but, at
times, even reinforced some of the more traditional gender conventions that their more deviant
actions challenged.
As a review of its historiography reveals, the study of southern women’s higher
education is a relatively new field of historical inquiry. The reason for the historical gap in
scholarship on southern women’s education is twofold. First, the lack of scholarly attention
given to southern women’s higher education stems from neglect in the study of southern history
generally. While scholars who study the South tend to agree that the region inhabited a distinct
culture, they have had to prove to other scholars of American history that this regional
distinctiveness is worth serious historical study. Historians of the South tend to observe and
challenge two interconnected tendencies in American historiography: first, the tendency of some

Yourself’: The Education of White Women in the Antebellum South” in Chartered Schools, ed. Nancy Beadie and
Kimberley Tolley (New York: Routledge, 2002), 116.

6

historians to portray the Northeast as representative of all American history,5 and second, when
actually analyzing the South on its own, the tendency to do so in a way that caricatures the South
as either a mythic place of “moonlight, magnolias, and mansions,” or as a mysteriously bloodthirsty, slave-whipping society.6 Both tendencies ignore the South as a serious topic of study-either by ignoring the South as a distinct region and subsuming southern history under northern
history, or by creating a fictional image of the South that is totally “other” to the rest of
American history.7 This tendency to ignore the South reveals itself in the study of southern
intellectual history. Scholarly works that call themselves compendiums of American intellectual
history and education typically discuss northeastern intellectual history, and, accordingly, the
history of northeastern higher education has often been portrayed as representative of the history
of all American higher education. 8 As Catherine Kerrison helpfully notes, “for generations,
American intellectual history has been heavily weighted toward New England; it is a
comparatively recent idea that the South even possessed an intellectual life worth studying.” 9

5

In their desire to write positive portrayals of American history, historians have often neglected the
“problematic” region of the South. See Laura F. Edwards, “Southern History as U.S. History,” Journal of Southern
History 75, no. 3 (August 2009): 563.
6

David Jansson, “The Haunting of the South: American Geopolitical Identity and the Burden of Southern
History” Geopolitics 12, no.3 (2007): 400-425.
7

Jansson defines the way in which American historiography neglects the South through its mythologizing
as a form of orientalism in his “The Haunting of the South: American Geopolitical Identity and the Burden of
Southern History”, 400-25. Laura Edwards similarly critiques interpretations that picture the South’s violent and
oppressive history as exceptional and “other” from the rest of American history in her “Southern History as U.S.
History,” 535.
8

The tendency in scholarship to privilege northeastern intellectual history is evident when examining the
scholarly works that are deemed “classics” in American intellectual history. See, for example, Perry Miller, New
England Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939) and Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1956), works which earned Miller the title “master of American intellectual history” even
though they focus only on the northeast, and Henry Farnham May, The Enlightenment in America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1976), which focuses on the northeast and devotes only one chapter to southern intellectual
history (133-150).
9

Catherine Kerrison, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South (New
York: Cornell University Press, 2006), 3.

7

Because of the tendency in American historiography to ignore the South, it is only within the
past few decades that the South has been recognized as a region with its own intellectual life.
Richard Beale Davis’s Literature and Society in Early Virginia 1608-1840 and Intellectual Life
in the Colonial South 1585-1763 were two early works to challenge the idea that the South
lacked an intellectual culture and support for higher education.10
In addition to the tendency in American historiography to ignore southern history, a lack
of attention given to women’s history has caused the study of southern women’s higher
education to suffer neglect. In the same way that northeastern history has often been presented as
representative of all American history, so too has men’s history stood as representative of all
American experience. In 1991 Anne Firor Scott noted that historical literature up until the 1960s
made little to no mention of women’s experiences.11 In the newly emerging field of southern
history, attention to women was limited to two sentences in Arthur S. Link and Rembert W.
Patrick’s extensive volume Writing Southern History, and merited even less attention in other
works.12 If women were neglected in the general historiography on the South, however, they
remained even more invisible in scholarship on southern intellectual history. While Davis’s
works prompted a move towards accepting the distinct intellectual life of the South, his
scholarship focused exclusively on the intellectual lives of men.

10

Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in the Colonial South 1585-1763 (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee, 1978); Literature and Society in Early Virginia, 1608-1840 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 1973).
11

Anne Firor Scott, “Preface,” in In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian
South, 1830 – 1900, ed. Carol Blesser (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), xvi. For further discussion on
why southern women have been neglected by historical scholarship see Jacquelyn Dowd Hall’s “Partial Truths,”
Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 902-11.
12

Anne Firor Scott, “Historians Construct the Southern Woman,” in Making the Invisible Woman Visible
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 248. For an extended analysis on the reasons for why southern women’s
history has been neglected see Jacquelyn Hall Dowd, “Partial Truths,” Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 902-11.

8

When historical studies on women’s education eventually did emerge in the 1980s they
were centered on northeastern women. That this is so is demonstrated in both the titles of those
works that are considered “classics” in the history of American women’s higher education and in
the little attention paid to southern women’s education in compiled works (such as dictionaries
and encyclopaedias) that claim to summarize the whole of American women’s and educational
history. The titles cited as classics on nineteenth-century American women’s education include
Barbara Miller Solomon’s In the Company of Educated Women, Louise Schutz Boas’ Women’s
Education Begins: The Rise of the Women’s Colleges, Linda Kerber’s Women of the Republic:
Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America, and Thomas Woody’s A History of Women’s
Education in the United States, all of which focus primarily on the origins of women’s education
in the North.13 Furthermore, some of the most cited works on American women’s education are
studies that examine the treatises of famous reformers like Catherine Beecher, Mary Lyon, and
Emma Willard--all northern proponents of women’s education.14 Similarly, influential
institutional studies such as David Almendinger’s study of Mount Holyoke students, Anne Firor
Scott’s study of Troy Female Seminary, and Lynn Templeton Brickley’s analysis of Sarah’s
Pierces Litchfield Academy all portray the educational experiences of those studying in northern
institutions.15 Even works written with the intent of providing a comprehensive background on

13

Barbara Miller Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1985); Louise Schutz Boas, Women’s Education Begins: The Rise of the Women’s Colleges (Norton, MA: Wheaton
College Press, 1935); Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Thomas Woody, A History of Women’s Education in the
United States (New York: the Science Press, 1929).
14

These works include, but are certainly not limited to: Willystine Goodsell, ed., Pioneers of Women’s
Education in the United States: Emma Willard, Catherine Beecher, Mary Lyon (New York: McGraw-Hill Book
Company, 1931); Alma Lutz, Emma Willard: Pioneer Educator of American Women (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1964); Eleanor Ward McCain, Catherine Beecher: her Educational Views and Activities (Akron: Ohio State
University, 1925); Catherine Uroff, Emma Willard: a Study of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century
(Gambier, OH: Kenyon College, 1987).

9

American women’s education, such as Linda Eisenmann’s Historical Dictionary of Women’s
Education in the United States and Aleman and Renn’s Women in Higher Education: An
Encyclopedia, privilege the history of northern women’s higher education, making only sparse
references to southern women’s education.16 Thus, while perhaps garnering mention, southern
women’s education is not typically the focus of works concentrated on the history of American
women’s education.
While the history of southern women’s education has been, and often continues to be,
understudied because of biases embedded in American historiography more generally, a number
of scholars have recently begun to note the significance of women’s education in the antebellum
South. Convinced that the rapid emergence of southern women’s colleges at the beginning of the
nineteenth century merits attention, scholars of southern women’s history have challenged the
idea that northeastern women’s education stands as representative of all American women’s
education. Some of the most prominent ground-breaking works on southern women’s education
include Catherine Clinton’s “Equally Their Due: The Education of the Planter Daughter in the
Early Republic,” Steven Stowe’s “The Not-So-Cloistered Female Academy: Elite Women’s
Education and Family Feeling in the Old South,” Christie Anne Farnham’s The Education of the
Southern Belle, Sally McMillen’s “Women’s Education and Religion,” Kathryn Walbert’s
“‘Endeavor to Improve Yourself’: The Education of White Women in the Antebellum South,”

15

Numerous studies on individual northern institutions exist, of which these are a few: David Almendinger,
“Mount Holyoke Students Encounter the Need for Life Planning, 1837-1850,” History of Education Quarterly 19:1
(Spring 1979): 27-43; Anne Firor Scott, “The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the
Troy Female Seminary 1822-1872,” History of Education Quarterly 19, no. 1 (Spring, 1979): 3-25; Lynn Templeton
Brickley, Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy: 1792-1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of
Education, 1985).
16

Linda Eisenmann, ed., Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education in the United States (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1998); Ana M. Martinez Aleman and Kristen A. Renn, Women in Higher Education: An
Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2002).

10

and Anya Jabour’s Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South. These studies have
significantly advanced knowledge on southern women’s colleges, especially in regards to the
reason for the sudden expansion of women’s education in the antebellum period.17 Collectively,
these works demonstrate that, contrary to many historians’ assumptions, women’s education was
extremely widespread in the South, as is evident in the sheer number of colleges and academies
opening their doors throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.18 While disagreement
exists among scholars over the exact number of women’s colleges emerging in this period, the
fact that southern women’s colleges outnumbered those in the North remains uncontested.19
Limiting enrolment to elite white women, southern women’s colleges were intended to provide
these women with an education that prepared them to take up their elite position as “ladies”
within a hierarchical society.20 Because it prepared young women for their prescribed roles,
southern women’s education was not viewed by southern society as a threat (as it was perceived
17

Clinton, “Equally Their Due: The Education of the Planter Daughter in the Early Republic”; Stowe, “The
Not-So-Cloistered Female Academy: Elite Women’s Education and Family Feeling in the Old South”; Farnham,
The Education of the Southern Belle; McMillen, “Education and Religion”; Walbert, “‘Endeavor to Improve
Yourself’: The Education of White Women in the Antebellum South,” in Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of
Independent Academies in the United States, ed. Nancy Beadie and Kimberley Tolley (New York: RoutledgeFalmer,
2002); Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters.
18

The first chartered female college in the South was Wesleyan Female College, a school located in
Macon, Georgia that opened in 1836. Mary Sharp College in Tennessee was chartered soon after in 1839. In
addition to these two colleges, some of the most popular and widely acclaimed institutions for female education in
the South (as well as those that left records behind) included: Athens Female Academy (Alabama, 1842),
Greensboro Female College (North Carolina, 1838), Hollins College (Virginia, 1842), Judson College (Alabama,
1838), La Grange College (Georgia, 1847), Louisburg Female Academy (North Carolina, 1815), Mansfield Female
College (Mississippi, 1855), Mary Baldwin College (Virginia, 1842), Oxford Female College (North Carolina,
1851), and Warrenton Female Academy (North Carolina, 1841).
19

The reason for the discrepancies between scholars’ estimations of how many women’s colleges existed in
the South in the antebellum period stems from the problem of deciding exactly which colleges/academies/seminaries
to include in an official count. Farnham notes that because colleges were emerging so rapidly in the South, so too
were educational standards changing dramatically, which makes it difficult to assess exactly which schools acted as
places of higher learning. Because the “demarcations [between colleges, seminaries, and academies] tend to blur
into one another,” the terms ‘college,’ ‘seminary,’ and ‘academy’ are used interchangeably in this introduction and
the following chapters. See Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 65.
20

Because women’s higher education was reserved for elite white females in the antebellum South, the
general use of the terms “women” and “college women” in this thesis are short forms for “elite white women” unless
otherwise noted; these terms are certainly not meant to represent all southern women.

11

in the North where it was paired with feminist ambitions), but rather was advanced as a way of
upholding societal gender constructs and, in doing so, upholding the hierarchal structure of
southern slave society.21
While certainly helpful in creating a foundation upon which to understand southern
women’s education, much of the research conducted by the earliest studies of southern women’s
education is limited by its reliance on institutional records. Gathering evidence from sources
such as college catalogues, curricula and advertisements, studies that concentrate on the
engendered nature of southern education often imply that southern women’s education, while
certainly a new project, was an oppressive force, not offering southern women anything “new” in
terms of female identity, but rather simply reinforcing their subordinate status.22 After
summarizing Clinton’s study on antebellum southern college students, Lynn Gordon concludes
that southern women were, despite their exposure to new forms of knowledge, “nevertheless
confined to the same domestic duties as their uneducated mothers and grandmothers.”23
Similarly, Sally McMillen writes that while schooling could “open women’s eyes and encourage
unconscious challenges that could lead women to question, explore, and see beyond the limits of
their circumscribed world, only a few southern women embraced such challenges enough to alter
their behaviour or expectations.” 24 According to McMillen, “the musings of young women who
questioned the system must not have been too prolonged or deep, for southern girls were well

21

Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 3.

22

Seminal works by Jabour, Stowe, and Walbert that do not rely solely upon institutional records do not
necessarily imply this; in contrast, Clinton, Gordon, and McMillen suggest that education did little to change
women’s lives.
23

Lynn Gordon, “From Seminary to University: An Overview of Women’s Higher Education, 1870-1920,”
in Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University, 1990): 473-495.
24

McMillen, “Education and Religion,” 100.

12

trained to obey and anticipate a life similar to that of their mothers.”25 By suggesting that college
women simply followed in the footsteps of their mothers and grandmothers, interpretations such
as these undermine the value of southern women’s education because they assume that women
did not assert agency in making their educations transformative forces in their lives.
Although it may be true that southern education was advanced in order to reinforce
women’s subordinate status within patriarchal southern society, interpretations that look
primarily at institutional records in order to assess the value of women’s education assume that
prescription was reality, and thereby miss the often-existent gap between the ideal and the “real.”
To gather a more comprehensive analysis of southern women’s education, an examination of
women’s own descriptions of their educational experiences is necessary, for, if it is true that
“higher education is more than books and courses” and includes “the interaction of a person with
a place,”26 then women’s own recollections of their college experiences are pivotal in
understanding the true value of southern women’s education.
While the majority of scholarship focuses on analyzing institutional records and therefore
comes to conclusions accordingly, a few prominent scholars have pioneered work in analyzing
women’s own recollections of their college experiences; however, the conclusions these scholars
reach appear contradictory. Following a similar line of thought as scholars such as Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese,27 Farnham argues that women’s diary entries and letters of correspondence
demonstrate that college women, as elite members of society, did not scorn their prescribed roles
but rather embraced them because they helped maintain these women’s elite status; accordingly,
25

McMillen, “Education and Religion,” 100.

26

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in Women’s Colleges from
Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), xvi.
27

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women in the Old South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 47.

13

female students’ words and behaviour did not articulate an alternative view of southern
womanhood, but rather reinforced the one presented to them in their educations. 28 Conversely,
Anya Jabour, joining a school of interpretation that views southern women as oppressed by
patriarchal southern society and as aware of their oppression, suggests that college women
consciously challenged the gender ideals presented in their educations, actively redefining
womanhood by engaging in academic competition, participating in rebellious activities, and
forming relationships with teachers and fellow students that replaced those of patriarchal
males.29
The seemingly contradictory conclusions reached by Farnham and Jabour demonstrate
that further research on women’s experiences of college needs to be undertaken if southern
women’s opinions are to be considered pivotal in assessing the value of antebellum southern
women’s education. As this thesis will demonstrate, a study of southern collegiate culture sheds
light on this debate because, as analyses of northern collegiate cultures reveal,30 investigations of
collegiate cultures directly address the question of how women responded to their educations,
highlighting what women accepted and rejected regarding them. In the southern context, an
examination of female collegiate cultures--including an analysis of academic life, social life,
religious activities, and post-graduate life--reveals that women both challenged southern gender
conventions by constructing new identities for themselves (as students, friends, and spiritual
28

Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 120.

29

Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 55; Anya Jabour, “‘College Girls’: The Female Academy and Female Identity
in the Old South” in “Lives Full of Struggle and Triumph”: Southern Women, Their Institutions, and Their
Communities, ed. Bruce L. Clayton and John A. Salmond (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003), 7492.
30

These include: Horowitz’s, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in Women’s Colleges from Their
Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s, Horowitz’s Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the
Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1987) and Nancy Beadie’s “Internal Improvement: The
Structure and Culture of Academy Expansion in New York State in the Antebellum Era, 1820-1860,” in Chartered
Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States ed. Nancy Beadie and Kimberley
Tolley (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002): 89-115.

14

leaders) as Jabour suggests and, at times, reflected southern gender ideals in their upholding of
hierarchal structures as Farnham argues.
Chapter One of this thesis reinforces Anya Jabour’s conclusion that women formed new
identities as students at college by offering further examination of the academic life that
developed at female colleges. 31 While those who held authority over women’s colleges,
including founders, principals, teachers, and parents, worked simply to shape young women into
southern ladies by developing curricula and practices that intended to refine girls in such a way
that they could fulfill their roles as passive and agreeable persons, the academic culture
cultivated at women’s colleges enabled women to extend the definition of womanhood and to
find personal fulfillment as scholars. Furthermore, students not only found personal fulfillment in
academic study, but developed a culture of academic competition that challenged the notion that
women’s primary concerns were pleasing others. Rather than being concerned with presenting
themselves as refined, modest, and agreeable, female students aggressively pursued academic
excellence, partaking in academic competition and rivalry. Though repeatedly warned that “the
ostentatious display of intellect in a young lady [was] revolting,” 32 female students developed a
peer culture wherein proving one’s academic prowess was a rewarding experience. At the same
time that students collectively challenged the ideal of refinement espoused by their education and
thereby questioned societal conventions, however, they used academic standing to uphold
hierarchal structures like those in broader southern society; having discovered identities as
scholars, college women did not simply use academics to advance one sisterhood, but instead
drew lines of inclusion and exclusion through their formation of literary societies and, in the

31

32

Jabour, “‘College Girls’: The Female Academy and Female Identity in the Old South,” 74-92.

Marcus Cicero Stephens to Mary Ann Primrose, November 7, 1841, in the Marcus Cicero Stephens
Letters. # 3402-z, SHC, the Wilson Library, UNC.

15

midst of doing so, somewhat ironically reinforced the ideal that the southern lady distance
herself from those deemed inferior. This highlights that, while forming new identities, college
women were not making a conscious effort to redefine southern womanhood in any type of
collectivist fashion.
An analysis of the academic culture that developed at women’s colleges is not the only
kind of examination that reveals that women simultaneously explored new identities as females
and yet resisted sisterhood while at college. Chapter Two argues that an examination of the
social culture that evolved at women’s colleges illustrates how female students shaped new
identities as friends while attending school. While those in authority at women’s colleges
intended to reinforce female students’ identities as intricately tied to family, the formation of
female friendships at college challenged the notion that women were defined primarily by their
links to family. An analysis of the peer culture at women’s colleges suggests that young women,
despite college authorities’ and parents’ insistences, replaced their close connections to family
with female friendships while at school. In doing so, students challenged the assumption that
they were defined according to their gendered roles within the family. In the midst of challenging
gender conventions, however, students formed relationships that were exclusive and oppressed
some of their “sisters.” Through their cultivation of intimate friendships and college sororities,
female students modeled the hierarchal nature of southern society, relying on physical attraction,
academic prowess, and family position to dictate an individual’s social standing within the
college. In doing so, students drew lines of inclusion and exclusion within the female world of
the college and ultimately subverted any collective redefinition of womanhood.
Chapter Three looks to the religious activities that took place at women’s colleges to
reveal that women were agents in not only shaping new identities, but also in exercising an

16

exclusiveness that both undermined any type of sisterhood and reinforced more traditional
gender ideals. While those in charge of women’s colleges established colleges as part of an effort
to evangelize young women and desired that religion play a substantial role in southern girls’
lives while at college, they did not intend for evangelicalism to provide women with the type of
independence that it did. While colleges worked to reinforce the evangelical idea that women
were pious and submissive creatures, female students’ religious activities, and in particular their
preoccupation with Christian “conversion” and the experiences surrounding it, enabled students
to use religion as a means to redefine female identity. Instead of behaving in a manner that was
befitting for pious ladies, female students used the authority granted to them by religion to
challenge the notion that they were gentle, passive creatures who were dependent on male
authority, doing so by using religion to create their own rules and schedules instead of simply
following those outlined by college authorities. While female students gained authority by
redefining their identities through religion, however, the power found in religious activities was
not equally liberating for all female students. Rather, because students often judged how
womanly, and thus elite, a student was based on her religious character, students’ religious
activities could be oppressive for those deemed the least “pious” among them.
Finally, Chapter Four tracks educated women’s lives after college and suggests, contrary
to some scholars’ assumptions,33 that women used their educations to transform their lives when
re-entering southern society. While college curriculum and practices intended to prepare women
solely for their lives as refined and submissive daughters, wives, and mothers, women continued
to challenge the identities prescribed to them by southern society by continuing to engage in
intellectual pursuits, maintaining female friendships, and participating in religious activities after
33

Gordon, “From Seminary to University: An Overview of Women’s Higher Education, 1870-1920,” 474;
McMillen, “Education and Religion,” 100.

17

leaving college. Even in the midst of using their education to broaden definitions of southern
womanhood, however, this redefinition was limited. Most college women did not seek to
establish a sisterhood based on the premise that all women were bound together simply based on
their gendered status. Rather, many educated women distanced themselves from both
northeastern women and women of colour, openly admitting that they were not “women’s rights
women.”34 Instead of engaging in the type of reform that was taking place amongst other women
in the nation, southern college women often worked to reinforce class and race hierarchies and
they used their college educations to do so. This behaviour reveals that these women were not
only agents in redefining their own identities, but that they were agents in upholding often
oppressive gender constructs of black and lower class women.
Rather than deconstructing itself, the seemingly paradoxical conclusion that college
women both challenged and reflected southern ideals simply underscores the complex nature of
southern women’s identities. While female students challenged definitions of southern
womanhood, they did so selectively and only to the extent that they could still maintain their
status as individuals. Thus, rather than envisioning a common sisterhood--as is tempting for
modern-day feminist scholars to read into southern educated women’s actions--students sought
female independence in a hierarchal fashion: that is, an independence that was not egalitarian in
nature, but rather ensconced in social, religious, racial, and class particularities.35
A study of collegiate culture presents a slightly different story of southern women’s
education than the one typically told. Analyzing women’s own recollections of their college

34

Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, 18481889 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 160.
35

In this way, southern college women demonstrate the very constructed nature of ‘feminism’ itself. For
further discussion on how feminism is constructed to suit the interests of particulars groups and individuals, see
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 17-42.

18

experiences highlights the agency of women in shaping their own educations. How these women
used college space to create their own worlds reveals the complicated nature of their identities;
southern college women were not defined simply by one category of identity, but by overlapping
identities. Recognizing this complex nature of female college students’ identities helps make
southern women visible, redeeming them from their long-held status as “victims of myth or
exaggeration.”36

36

McMillen, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, 1.

19

CHAPTER ONE
“To be Awarded Second Honor is More Mortifying than Receiving No Honor at
All”: Academic Life at Southern Women’s Colleges
Historians often look to the formal curricula of women’s colleges to assess whether
southern women’s higher education was a transforming force in southern women’s lives.1 While
looking to college curricula is certainly helpful in addressing the question of southern
education’s value, studies that concentrate solely on curricula prove limiting in their
interpretations of women’s education because they examine only the ideals, and often overlook
the reality, of women’s education. Because of their limited scope, these analyses typically
present, in the words of scholar Steven Stowe, “a bleak study of intellectual bondage,
emphasizing the values that segregated women and held them down rather than the social
conditions women shaped to their advantage.”2 As an examination of collegiate culture makes
clear, taking into account women’s recollections of their learning experiences while at college
reveals a slightly more complicated picture than the one often presented by those studies that
examine only curricula. For, while examinations of college curricula reveal authorities’
intentions for women’s learning, analyses of the academic life that was cultivated through
collegiate culture reveal how women responded to these ideals. Rather than suggesting that
women’s learning was limited by college authorities and their ideals, young ladies’ recollections
of their college experiences reveal that women exercised control over their learning and the
academic culture that it inspired. The goal of women’s education may have been to reinforce
1

For example, Farnham examines college curricula to argue that southern women’s education was as
equally rigorous as men’s education during the period, but that it was, nonetheless, engendered so as to shape young
women into southern belles. See Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle. Margaret Nash also studies college
curricula to examine the value of women’s education and concludes that, contrary to Farnham’s suggestion,
women’s education was not engendered, but rather simply paralleled that of men in every important respect. See
Nash, “‘Cultivating the Powers of Human Beings’: Gendered Perspectives on Curricula and Pedagogy in Academies
of the New Republic”: 239-50.
2

Stowe, “The Not-So-Cloistered Female Academy,” 90.

20

their identities as refined southern ladies, but when they were at college women formed new
identities as students--identities that did not match up with the southern gender ideals espoused
through their education. At the same time that college women collectively challenged gender
ideals by forming new identities as students, however, their cultivation of an academic culture
fostered a type of exclusion that reflected the hierarchal nature of southern society, worked to
reinforce the convention that a southern “lady” distance herself from those deemed inferior, and,
therefore, ultimately subverted notions of a common sisterhood based on gender status alone.
In order to understand how female college students challenged the gender ideals espoused
through their educations by fostering an academic culture, it is first important to establish how
southern society defined female identity and, in particular, white, upper class female identity.
While the prescriptive literature of the era outlined many specific qualities to which white, upper
class women should aspire, ultimately all of these qualities served the purpose of marking a
woman as a “lady.” Thus, one of the defining features of elite southern womanhood was
refinement. As antebellum descriptions of the ideal southern “lady” make clear, being refined
entailed displaying gentleness, patience, poise and charm. Highlighting the ideal for the southern
lady, Sidney Lewis of Sparta, Georgia, wrote in his editorial for the Ishmaelite that the ideal
woman “spoke softly and sweetly with a warm cordiality of manner. From birth she was taught
not to say any unkind things. She was taught to select soft feminine clothes, to learn more about
men than Shakespeare . . . and to be a comforting nurse.”3 Similarly noting the refined
characteristics of the southern lady, Letitia Burwell described her as “a woman of rare attraction,
possessing all the gentleness of her sex . . . Tall and handsome, look[ing] a queen . . . receiving
her guests, and, by the first words of greeting, from her warm, true heart, charm[ing] even
3

Sidney Lewis as quoted by Thomas D. Clark in The Southern Country Editor (Charleston: University of
South Carolina Press, 1991), 96.

21

strangers.”4 In an address delivered to young ladies, George Howe argued that the “principal
virtues which should adorn” southern ladies included “outward delicacy and grace in every
action.”5 Being nervous, delicate, and dependent, a woman’s “weakness” was viewed as her
“strength” and her “true art [was] to cultivate and improve that weakness . . . shrinking from
public gaze and from the competition of life.”6 Rather than seeking to engage in competition, a
young woman was meant to “cultivate those amiable traites [sic] of character” and, in doing so,
“secure [her] own happiness, as well as that of others.”7 The model woman was a person “never
thinking of herself,” but one with a “heart overflowing with sympathy and interest for others.” 8
Southern society defined the ideal upper class woman as a refined and modest “lady”
because doing so served an important social purpose. Taking on the qualities of a “lady,” the
elite southern woman was placed on a pedestal--she was an entity so perfect she was considered
near to God.9 Furthermore, not only was she a near-perfect creature, the southern lady was the
producer of white offspring and consequently served as the very repository of “civilization.”10
While symbolically a very powerful figure, however, the southern lady was, in her refined
delicacy, in actuality, physically and mentally weak and, according to southern ideology,
therefore in need of protection from white males. In white southerners’ minds, protecting the
4

Letitia M. Burwell, A Girl’s Life in Virginia Before the War (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company,
1895), 70, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/burwell/burwell.html#ill5.
5

George Howe, The Endowments, Position, and Education of Woman: an Address Delivered before the
Hermans and Sigourney Societies of the Female High School at Limestone Springs, July 23, 1850 (Columbia, SC:
C. Morgan, 1850), 18.
6

George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South (Richmond, VA: A. Morris Publisher, 1854), 214.

7

Janet Henderson, “A Perfect Woman,” as quoted in Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 44.

8

Burwell, A Girl’s Life in Virginia Before the War, 84-85.

9

Irving H. Bartlett and C. Glenn Cambor, “The History and Psychodynamics of Southern Womanhood”
Women’s Studies 2 (January 1974): 9.
10

Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1997), 147.

22

very valuable sweet, refined, producer of white racial purity was especially important
considering the threat posed by blacks. Characterized as highly sexual beings, blacks’ supposed
sexual impulses threatened racial purity and ultimately threatened white hegemony because, as
Martha Hodes points out, sex between black men and white women complicated the “black
equals slave, white equals free” dichotomy that the South operated within. Producing children of
mixed ancestry eroded the dividing line between white and black that was crucial to sustaining
white supremacy.11 Ultimately, then, southerners’ linking white women’s identity with
refinement and modesty not only served to maintain racial “purity” and, consequently,
civilization, but thereby served as justification for slavery--the very foundation of southern
society.
Because women’s refinement was considered such an integral part of southern women’s
identities and ultimately served as a way to uphold slavery, it is not surprising that southerners
sought to inculcate ladylike behaviour in whatever ways they could, and that one of these ways
included establishing women’s colleges. That colleges were established in the antebellum period
in order to refine women is demonstrated in a number of ways. First, and perhaps most
obviously, the promises of proponents of female education during the period reveal that colleges
were intended to advance refinement. Addressing the Society for the Advancement of Learning
in South Carolina, Chancellor Harper promoted female education by claiming that there was a
need in the South “to elevate the female character” and to preserve the “utmost purity of manners
and the greater severity of decorum than required elsewhere,” and, according to Harper, this need

11

On the supposed sexual threat of the African male, see Gustav Jahoda, Images of Savages (New York:
Routledge, 1999). For further discussion on the threat posed by interracial sex between black men and white women
to the institution of slavery see Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South, 4-5.

23

could be fulfilled through the establishment of female colleges. 12 Also highlighting that female
education was intended to refine women, Daniel Chandler claimed that a woman’s education
would “fit her to perform, with dignity and effect these elevated duties”: to exert “a most serious
influence over outward fashions, habits, manners, and existing institutions . . . to awaken, in the
breasts of men, a suitable taste for decorous and elevating amusements . . . and with secrecy and
the potent spell of an enchantress, to introduce and spread far and wide, throughout the various
departments of society, the elegancies of life and the arts of humanity.” 13 Ultimately, female
education was justified based on the belief that “the continuation of the mind to a high degree
refined and elevated [woman’s] character and tastes and softened and beautified her
disposition.”14
That education was intended to refine southern women is not only evident in the claims
put forward by proponents of women’s education, but also in the promises made by individual
learning institutions. In an effort to attract female students to its institution, an advertisement for
Augusta Female Seminary in Staunton, Virginia promised that the school would “humbly
attempt ever to provide that none of the branches of female education which are calculated to add
worth or loveliness to female character shall ever be wanting.”15 Similarly, a circular for
Harmony Female College of Sumter Mineral Springs, South Carolina assured parents that the

12

Chancellor Harper as quoted by Anna Marie Korfker, “Behind Closed Doors: Southern Upper-Class
Notions of Womanhood in the Plantation Mistress’s Intimate Sphere” (master’s thesis, Utrecht University, 2011),
24, http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/student-theses/2011-0616-200725/Behind%20Closed%20Doors. pdf.
13

Daniel Chandler, “An Address on Female Education” (Washington, GA: William A. Mercer, 1835) as
printed in The Southern Literary Journal and Monthly Magazine, vol. 1, ed. Daniel Whitaker (Charleston: J.S.
Burges, 1835), 279.
14

Elizabeth Roberts Baer, Introduction to Shadows of My Heart: the Civil War Diaries of Lucy Rebecca
Buck (Atlanta, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997), xxvi.
15

B.M. Smith, “Address on the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Augusta Female Seminary,” published in
his The Exclusive Claims of Prelacy, Stated and Refuted (Staunton, VA, 1844), 31.

24

education offered at Harmony would shape southern daughters into refined young women,
boasting that “the experience and observation have led many impartial judges to express their
conviction, that in no Seminary in the State are music, drawing, painting, finer taste, more
graceful manners, and freedom in conversation, and all that makes an accomplished woman,
more successfully attained.”16 An annual catalogue published for Athens Female College in
Tennessee too promised that “especial attention [would] be paid to Drawing and Painting,
Embroidery, and Vocal and Instrumental Music” in order to cultivate refined southern women.17
When colleges failed to live up to parents’ and society’s expectations in producing cultivated
females, they risked closure. This is highlighted in the 1840 board minutes of Greenville Female
Academy, wherein it is implied that the school itself declined because of its inability to produce
southern “ladies.” As Judith Bainbridge notes in her study of the academy, minutes proceeding
the 1840 public exams mention that while the “female department appeared to be well conducted
so far as the recitation of lessons were concerned, there might be some improvement in the
arrangement, orderly deportment, and personal neatness of the pupils.” The school’s enrollment
consequently declined.18
In addition to the claims put forward by both proponents of women’s education generally
and individual institutions, a look at the very students who were enrolled in institutions of higher
education testifies to the college’s purpose of refining young women. According to Mary Kelley,
only 0.59 per cent of white women between the ages of fifteen and twenty were likely to have
16

Harmony Female College, Circular of Harmony Female College, Sumter Mineral Springs, South
Carolina, for 1859, (Sumter Mineral Springs, SC: Harmony, 1859), 6, accessed November 20, 2011,
http://www.archive.org/stream/circularofharmon00pres #page/n17/mode/2up.
17

Athens Female College, Second Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Pupils of Athens Female College
at Athens, Tennessee (July 5, 1860), 14, Internet Archive, accessed November 19, 2011, http://www.archive.org/
details/secondannual.cata1860.atthe.
18

Judith Bainbridge, “‘A Nursery of Knowledge’: The Greenville female Academy, 1819-1854” The South
Carolina Historical Magazine 99, no. 1 (January 1998): 23.

25

been enrolled in college between the revolutionary period and the Civil War.19 The very expense
of college reserved enrolment for the most elite members of society. Sending a daughter to
college in the antebellum period could cost a southern family anywhere between 150 and 400
dollars a year.20 Considering that the average plantation owner made a profit of just 900 dollars a
year, the expense a family paid to have a female member attend college was very high.21 The
high cost of college meant that, in the words of one female student, “only a limited number of
girls were fortunate in securing college education” for “there was not a free school for the masses
throughout the confines of the Empire State of the South.”22 Serving the most elite of society,
schools were “more about gentility” than preparing women for careers.23 After all, “no southern
woman of means ever proposed to work at anything outside of the home”24 because “working
publicly would have been considered an eternal disgrace.”25 Rather than education preparing a

19

Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic, 81.

20

The price of sending a young woman to college depended not only on the prestige of the attended
institution, but also on the students’ desire and/or need for private lessons in music, drawing, painting, or language
learning. For sketches of tuition and other fees see: Farmville Female College, The Next Term of this Institution Will
Commence Thursday, October 1st, 1863, Internet Archive, accessed November 20, 2011, http://docsouth.unc.edu/im
ls/Farmville.html; Greenville Baptist Female College, Catalogue of the Trustees, Faculty, and Students of the
Greenville Baptist Female College, Greenville, SC, 12, Internet Archive, accessed November 20, 2011, http://www.
archive.org/details/catalogueoftrust00gree; Harmony Female College, Circular of Harmony Female College, Sumter
Mineral Springs, South Carolina, for 1859, 10; Richard S. Gladney, Essays on Female Education (Columbia, SC:
Times and Gazette Office, 1832), 10.
21

Harold D. Woodman, Slavery and the Southern Economy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World,
1966), 46-47.
22

Rebecca Latimer Felton, Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth (Atlanta: Index Printing
Company, 1911), 71.
23

Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 69.

24

Felton, Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth, 62-62.

25

Belle Kearney, A Slaveholder’s Daughter (New York: Abbey Press, 1900), 41, http://docsouth.unc.edu
/fpn/Kearney/menu.html.

26

young woman for the workforce, therefore, it was intended to refine a woman and thereby
bolster her and her family’s social status.26
As an examination of college catalogues reveals, southern colleges worked to refine
young women primarily through their curricula. Most obviously, courses in ornamental training
linked white women’s identity to refinement and worked to perfect this feminine virtue.
Typically, female students took courses in Music, Drawing, Painting, and French because they
added to her list of accomplishments. That ornamental courses were meant to enhance students’
refinement is evident in colleges’ descriptions of these courses. According to an advertisement
for Farmville Female College located in Virginia, female students’ instruction in music would
not only be “very thorough,” but would “combine theory with practice, so as to enable the
students to read Music with ease and correctness, and to perform with understanding and
taste.”27 Similarly, a college catalogue issued by Hamner Hall in Montgomery, Alabama assured
parents that its courses in music would be administered by a “gentleman of distinguished ability,
who is noted for . . . his eminent success in rendering his pupils skillful performers.” 28
Furthermore, in addition to aiding women’s accomplishments through instruction in
Music, Art, and French, classes in penmanship, elocution and deportment taught women how to
present themselves with an “elegant style.” 29 One student by the name of Anne Nash recalled

26

Herein lies a difference between higher education for women in the South and in the North. Whereas in
the North, young women from mainly the middle class were being trained for the “useful” profession of teaching,
this was not the case in the South, where education was reserved for the most elite. See Farnham, The Education of
the Southern Belle, 3.
27

Farmville Female College, The Next Term of this Institution Will Commence Thursday, October 1st,
1863. Emphasis mine.
28

29

Catalogue of Pupils at Hamner Hall, a Seminary for Young Ladies, Montgomery, Ala., 3.

Catalogue of Pupils at Hamner Hall, 4. See also Eliza Moore Chinn McHatten Ripley, Social Life in
New Orleans: Being Recollections of my Girlhood (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1912), 10-14.

27

that students “were taught to modulate [their] voices, to walk erectly, to sit well back in [their]
straight chairs and never to cross [their] limbs” 30 so as to appear ladylike at all times. Similarly,
Kathleen Boone Samuels noted that college women were “taught to speak very low and be
delicate in [their] ways.” 31 According to Samuels, female students were not only instructed in
ladylike behavior through formal curriculum, but also through informal practices. Describing her
experiences at Front Royal Academy in Virginia, Samuels recorded how, after regular school
hours, the students were instructed in manners and calisthenics-- they “were taught how to greet
guests in the parlor, how to draw up chairs for them and how to introduce them.”32 That learning
social graces was a central aim of women’s education is clear in one mother’s warning to her
daughter Bessie that she would “never be satisfied with a daughter like some girls [she]
occasionally s[aw]--badly educated--awkward, and unladylike.”33
More surprising than using ornamental courses to refine female students’ behaviour and
appearance, women’s colleges also created rigorous academic courses to cultivate female
refinement. As many course advertisements and catalogues highlight, it was typical for women’s
colleges to offer “solid” courses including Astronomy, Botany, Composition, English Literature,
Evidences of Christianity, Geography, Geology, Grammar, History, Mathematics (including
Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry), Moral and Intellectual Philosophy, and
Physics in their curricula.34 Female students were expected to read and engage with classical
30

Anne Strudwick Nash, Ladies in the Making at the Select Boarding Day School of the Misses Nash and
Miss Kollock: 1859-1890 (Hillsborough, NC: Durham, 1964), 91.
31

Kathleen Boone Samuels as quoted by Elizabeth Roberts Baer in Shadows of My Heart, xvii.

32

Samuels as quoted by Baer in Shadows of My Heart, xvii.

33

Williana Wilkinson Lacy to Bessie Lacy, Aug. 23, 1845, Nov. 28 [1845], Drury Lacy Papers, SHC,
Wilson Library, UNC, as quoted in Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 110. Emphasis mine.
34

Alabama Female Institute, 1835 College Catalogue, as quoted by Isabella Blandin in The History of
Higher Education for Women in the South Prior to 1860 (New York: Zenger Pub. Co, 1975), 82; Athens Female

28

literature, including the works of Virgil, Cicero, and Livy, 35 and participated in conducting
science experiments.36 While women’s education included significant attention to rigorous
academic study, however, the goal in teaching such courses was not simply to help students
discover personal fulfillment.37 On the contrary, academic courses were meant to refine young
women in such a way that they could “render [themselves] interesting and agreeable to others”
so that they might please them.38 Writing to his granddaughter Mary Ann Primrose while she
was attending Burwell School in North Carolina, Marcus Cicero Stevens instructed Primrose to
carefully study academic subjects because this would “greatly add to [her] stock of ideas, and
enable [her], when occasion serves to take part in a rational conversation.” According to Stevens,
“nothing [was] so insipid as some young ladies who [after singing or exhibiting their drawings]
sit mumchanced” until someone engages them in “frivolities.” 39 Instead, young women should
know enough about a subject to accommodate another’s interest. According to a catalogue issued
by Alabama Female Institute in 1835, “the object of the institution [wa]s, to aid young ladies to
educate themselves to answer the great end of their being--to enjoy and impart happiness.”40

College, Second Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Pupils of Athens Female College at Athens, Tennessee (July
5, 1860), 11-12; Elias Marks, Hints Upon Female Education, 33-34, Internet Archive, accessed November 10, 2011,
http://www.archive.org/detailshintsonfemaleedu00mark; Greenville Baptist Female College, Catalogue of the
Trustees, Faculty, and Students of the Greenville Baptist Female College, Greenville, SC, 10-11; Harmony Female
College, Circular of Harmony Female College, Sumter Mineral Springs, South Carolina, for 1859, 3-5.
35

Farmville Female College, The Next Term of this Institution Will Commence Thursday, October 1st,

36

Catalogue of Pupils at Hamner Hall, a Seminary for Young Ladies, Montgomery, Ala., 3-4.

1863.

37

McMillen, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, 94. Kathryn Walbert argues that current
scholarship misinterprets southern education’s goals and argues that parents and authorities actually promoted selffulfillment as primary. See Walbert, “‘Endeavor to Improve Yourself: The Education of White Women in the
Antebellum South,” 116.
38

Stephens, Letter to Mary Ann Promise, November 7, 1841, SHC.

39

Stephens, Letter to Mary Ann Primrose, November 7, 1841, SHC.

29

Women, according to Thomas Dew, could best do this not by using their education to speak in
academic abstractions like men, but by using the style and manner they learned in college to
“fascinate the[ir] hearers” and “delight and charm all those who breathe[d] the atmosphere in
which [they] move[d].41
The fact that women’s education was intended to refine woman’s character so that she
could best please others is evident in parents’ and college authorities’ warnings to female
students not to use their educations for individual benefit--in particular to gain public admiration.
Writing to his daughters, William Wirt, an advocate of women’s higher education in Virginia,
warned them that “the ostentacious display of intellect in a young lady is revolting.” 42 Similarly,
Marcus Cicero Stevens appealed to his granddaughter Primrose, asking her to administer
“prudence and discretion” in revealing her intellect, explaining that “a man may possess great
bodily strength but it would be folly in him to rush into the streets and throw down everyone he
might meet to show his strength . . . [therefore] exercise a due discretion, and depend on it.”43 In
a letter to his two college-age daughters, Rufus Bailey warned that “awakened attention to study
is apt to degenerate into unholy ambition.” 44 According to Bailey, “a simple desire for applause
is a very foolish and a very dangerous one . . . It is the fruitful source of envy towards other, vain
pride in one’s own attainments, a foolish egotism, and many other hurtful and disgraceful

40

Alabama Female Institute, 1835 College Catalogue, as quoted by Blandin in The History of Higher
Education for Women in the South Prior to 1860, 81.
41
Thomas Dew, “Dissertation on the Characteristic Differences of the Sexes, No. 3,” Southern Literary
Messenger (August 1835), 165, accessed February 1, 2012, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajml/acf2679.00012/6
95:14?page=root:rgn=full+text:size=100;view=image.
42

William Wirt as quoted by Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 55.

43

Stephens, Letter to Mary Ann Promise, November 7, 1841, SHC.

44

Rufus W. Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board
of Education, 1857), 176-77.

30

feelings.”45 Students were warned that desires for public admiration and self-display were
ultimately unsexing, not matching up with the feminine ideal: being charming, polite, graceful,
modest, and pleasing in all circumstances. In an address delivered to students at Greensboro
Female College, lecturer George Davis informed students that “whatever degree of mental
superiority you may attain, it will be but harsh and repulsive, unless softened and refined by a
corresponding accomplishment in womanly graces.” 46 Primary among these womanly graces
was “true womanly modesty.”47 Also delivering an address to Greensboro’s female students,
Samuel Talmage exclaimed his disgust with schoolgirls who “parade[d] their
accomplishments.”48 According to Talmage, the “exhibition of a young female . . . tends to foster
vanity . . . and an inordinate love of display; it weakens that delicate sensibility which God has
impressed on woman’s heart.”49 Ultimately, the public display of woman was said to unsex a
woman by “disqualify[ing] her to blush” and thereby “robbed society of its brightest charms.”50
Indeed, Martha Prescott, a student at Mary Sharp College, expressed the southern ideal for
women’s education well when she wrote “I would be a learned woman. I would have treasure in

45

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 180.

46

George Davis, “Address Delivered before the Young Ladies of Greensboro Female College, 14 May
1856,” 12, Internet Archive, accessed November 9, 2011, http://www.archive.org/details/addressdelivere00davi
goog.
47

Davis, “Address Delivered before the Young Ladies of Greensboro Female College,” 12.

48

Samuel Talmage, “A Proper Early Training and its Priceless Value: a Discourse Delivered in the Chapel
of the Greensboro Female College, June 23, 1853,” 22, Internet Archive, accessed December 1, 2011, http://www.
archive.org/details/properearlytrain00talm.
49

Talmage, “A Proper Early Training and its Priceless Value,” 21.

50

Talmage, “A Proper Early Training and its Priceless Value,” 22-23.

31

my own mind, but I would be humble and unassuming.”51 While women’s education could be
rigorous, it was intended to make them “cultivated, not intellectual.”52
At the same time that female students were warned not to show off their intellect, they
were encouraged to do well in school because it advanced family status. Repeatedly, students
were reminded by their families that they had the duty to do well in school because, by fulfilling
the societal ideal of being a refined lady, they brought honour to their families. Noting the
pressure families placed on young women to perform well in college, Mary Kelley records the
letters of numerous parents who wrote to remind their daughters of their duty to enhance their
families’ happiness. Howell Hobbs instructed his daughter, a student at Salem Female Academy,
to conduct herself in such a way at school that when she returned home he could “have the very
exquisite pleasure of having an accomplished and intelligent daughter to introduce into
society.”53 One mother encouraged her daughter Julia to “remember that college is necessary
and will ultimately add to our happiness as well as your own, if you do your duty and improve
your opportunities as we trust you will.” Julia was to “make herself an accomplished woman”
because “[her family’s] happiness depend[ed] a great deal upon [her].”54 Noting that “the
expenses of youth in a course of education are necessarily great, and, in most cases, impose a
material burthen upon parents,” R.W. Bailey wrote to his children that “a dutiful and thoughtful
child will not be inconsiderate on this subject” and accordingly will perform well in school. 55
That female students understood their families’ expectations of them is clear in Rebecca Felton’s
51

Diary of Martha Prescott, 1836, as quoted by Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 66.

52

Herschel V. Johnson, Address, 12-13. As quoted by Fox-Genovese in Within the Plantation Household:
Black and White Women of the Old South, 257.
53

Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 25.

54

Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 26.

55

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 169.

32

proclamation that her greatest achievement in school was “mak[ing] [her] parents very happy
[by] not fail[ing] to look good.”56
Making parents “look good” not only entailed performing well in courses that developed
ladylike behaviour, but keeping the company of students who too displayed refined behaviour
and thereby proved worthy of friendship. In letters to their daughters, parents warned daughters
not to associate with those deemed inferior in this regard because it would not bolster one’s
reputation. In fact, according to parents, being a “lady” entailed distancing oneself from those
deemed less superior--those who were, in one mother’s words, “badly educated.”57 For instance,
when writing to his daughters, Bailey cautioned them to use discretion when selecting whom to
associate with because, even though boarding school was in some sense selective, not all young
women exhibited refined habits and would operate in a sphere of influence and respectability in
the future. Bailey thus advised his daughters that it was their duty to discriminate when forming
friendships and to associate only with those who displayed proficiency in deportment and
conversation.58
Inadvertently, colleges offering female students academic courses and asking them not to
find personal fulfillment in them, and parents encouraging students to excel in their studies, but
not to display their intellect, caused a tension within higher education that enabled college
women to push the boundaries of prescribed womanhood and construct new identities as
students. Instead of being concerned primarily with refinement and using it to please others,

56

Felton, Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth, 71.

57

Lacy to Bessie Lacy, Aug. 23, 1845, Nov. 28 [1845] as quoted in Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak,

58

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 161-166.

110.

33

college women were consumed by an academic culture that afforded them the opportunity to
become learners--and not only learners, but competitive ones.
Encouraged by their parents and teachers to perform well in school, young women not
only worked hard, but became consumed by their studies. Margaret Graham, a student at Georgia
Female College in the 1840s, felt that she had “to sit up and study every night until nine o’clock,
and rise before day in the morning, and study hard all day” 59 in order to receive a good academic
standing. Naomi Elisabeth Layman, a student at Mary Baldwin College in 1860, recorded that
“hav[ing] an examination every month and concert every Friday evening” kept her so busy
studying that she had no time to respond to a friend’s letter.60 A Miss McAhley of Brahamville
College also noted that she “had little free time, but that she really enjoyed what she was
doing.”61
While parents encouraged their daughters to study hard and perfect their
accomplishments simply in order to enhance their current social status, college students
discovered more in their studies than mere refinement; in the midst of obeying parents’
instructions to devote themselves to their studies, young women found personal satisfaction and
independence. Noting the satisfaction she received from her college training, Rebecca Felton
noted that her college experience “was a great and appreciated opportunity” in which she had a
“Royal time” because “she had shared the first honor with a classmate, read a valedictory essay,

59

Margaret Graham to Frances Graham, Nov. 5, 1842, William P. Graham Papers, SHC, Wilson Library,
UNC, as quoted by Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 55.
60

As quoted by Mary Watters, “The History of Mary Baldwin College, 1842-1942,” (PhD diss., Mary
Baldwin College, 1942), 60, Internet Archive, http://www.archive.org/stream/historyofmarybal00watt/historyof
marybal00watt_djvu.txt.
61

Jane H. Pease and William Henry Pease, Ladies, Women and Wenches: Choice and Constraint in
Antebellum Charleston and Boston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 83.

34

and played time and again during the commencement exercises on piano and guitar.” 62 While
attending Edgeworth Female Seminary, Bessie Lacy wrote to her father that she “love[d] to have
a heap to do” because “it ma[de] [her] feel so busy, and so consequential.”63 Similarly, Sarah
Lois Wadley noted that she had “been studying steadily” ever since school commenced and felt
that being in school “seem[ed] natural” and “ma[de] [her] feel happier.”64 Mary Norcott Bryan
recalled that “the most delightful experience, (which had made up for anything bad that had gone
before [in her life],)” took place during her school days, wherein she could gain an education by
listening to “great speeches” and visiting art galleries.65
In the midst of finding personal satisfaction in their studies, female students cultivated a
culture of academic rivalry and formed new identities not only as learned ladies, but as
competitive persons. Instead of fulfilling the ladylike ideal of placing others ahead of
themselves, and believing that “college honors [were] but worth little in themselves,” students
continuously aimed to gain public recognition for their personal academic standing. 66
Highlighting the competitive nature of southern students, Anya Jabour notes how Emma
Shannon, a student from Vicksburg, Mississippi wrote that “only one girl ‘got all nines,’” the
best mark in her class and she had wished it was hers. 67 Similarly, Wesleyan college student
Olin Davis wrote to her brother announcing the news that “[this] past week I have seven [a very
high mark] on all my studies and I hope that I will do the same through the next seven weeks.”
62

Felton, Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth, 71.

63

Bessie Lacy to her father, as quoted by Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 94.

64

Sarah Lois Wadley, Diary, January 25, 1862, SHC, accessed January 1, 2012, http://docsouth.unc.edu/
Imls/wadley/wadley.html.
65

Mary Norcott Bryan, A Grandmother’s Recollections of Dixie (New Bern, NC: Owen G. Dunn Printer,

1912), 43.
66

Davis, “Address Delivered before the Young Ladies of Greensboro Female College, 14 th May 1856,” 15.

67

Emma Shannon as quoted by Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 56.

35

However, she added that “her report was not perfect when compared with one of the other girls
in her class who ‘got 93. . . the highest numbers which any got.’”68 Elizabeth Allston Pringle
noted her rivalry with classmate Sara White, writing that White “kept [her] always at the greatest
strain in arithmetic, history, and diction classes,” 69 and that she therefore “had to work hard if
[she] wanted to keep up”70 with this girl who “had been taught by her father like a boy” and was,
in Pringle’s estimation, “the best girl in the class.”71 Highlighting the satisfaction college
students gained from academic competition, one student admitted that one of the reasons she
loved to study was because she could use it to show off.72
Classmate rivalry over grades climaxed in the contention over class ranks. A student at
Greensboro Female College, Mary Beall, wrote to her brother that “there seems to be a universal
ambition existing among the girls in College to receive first honors at the commencement . . . I
am going to try mighty hard to get the first honor.”73 Louisiana Burge noted that to be awarded
second honour (below her fellow classmate Flossie Stevens) was “more mortifying than
receiving no honour at all” and declined being recognized for the title.74 One student was so

68

Olin Davis as quoted by Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 56.

69

Elizabeth Allston Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 127.

70

Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 126.

71

Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 127.

72

Eliza to Laura Nelson Covert, Apr. 1, 4, 1836, South Carolina Female Collegiate Institute Collection,
South Carolinian Library, USC, as quoted by Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 102.
73

74

Mary Beall as quoted by Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 98.

Louisiana Burge, “Diary of Louisiana Burge, 1861-1862,” microfilm, May 30, 1861, June 30, 1861, July
10, 1861, Burge family papers, 1832-1952, Atlanta, as quoted by Pearl J. Young in “‘Genius uncultivated is like a
meteor of the night’: Motives and Experiences of Methodist Female College Life in the Confederate States of
America” Methodist History 47, no.3 (April 2009): 186.

36

consumed with placing first that she needed to be reminded “not [to] allow [her]self to be [as]
excited at this examination as [she] w[as] at the last.”75
The satisfaction and independence students discovered in academics and scholarly
competition culminated in their establishing clubs wherein they could both exploit learning
opportunities and resources, and display their own intelligence. Beginning in the early nineteenth
century, female students established literary societies, clubs focused on the intellectual
improvement of their members and the making of learned women. Meeting weekly or bi-weekly,
society members not only collected and catalogued books and magazines into society libraries,
but organized student presentations and debates. Typically, meetings would begin with an essay
presentation given by a member and this presentation was then followed by other members’
critiques of the essay. As Mary Kelley notes in her work on these societies, members debated
popular social issues, ranging from topics on the best economic systems to women’s rights. 76
These societies provided students with both the opportunity to expand their learning by
conversing openly with one another and offered a space for women to display their academic
prowess and compete in heated scholarly discussion. In many ways, then, literary societies
encouraged students to further develop their newfound identities as learned women.77
While forming new identities as competitive learners while at college, female students
embraced a culture of exclusion similar to the one parents assured women was appropriate for
“ladies” and thereby reinforced a traditional gender ideal at the same time that they challenged
others. Rather than viewing all female students as scholarly sisters, female students drew lines
75

Louisiana Burge, “Diary of Louisiana Burge, 1861-1862,” as quoted by Young, “‘Genius uncultivated is
like a meteor of the night’,” 186.
76

77

Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 128.

Mary Kelley, “Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum
America” The Journal of American History 83, no. 2 (1996): 403.

37

between those deemed the most intelligent and those deemed less so. That students exercised
exclusion based on academic standing is especially obvious in the way that literary societies
included and excluded individuals based on their academic standing. Two of the most
documented college literary societies, the Sigourney Club at Limestone Springs High school in
South Carolina, and the Sigourney Club at Greensboro Female College in North Carolina,
admitted members and selected presidents and secretaries based on academic ranking.78 Rather
than being open to anyone who wished to read and debate, membership into these literary
societies came by invitation only. One bright student mentioned that she learned of her being
invited to join a club when “one of the scholars handed [her] a note,” a method of invitation that
highlights its formality. 79 Another student expressed hurt and feelings of ostracism when she was
not asked to join.80 Thus, while the literary societies college women founded supposedly were
focused chiefly on advancing intellectual development, the exclusive manner in which they
admitted members demonstrates that not all young women benefitted equally from the academic
life fostered within collegiate culture. In a sense, then, female students bought into the idea that
one of the imperatives of the southern “lady” was to distance oneself from inferiors, only they
did so using academics, rather than refinement, as a measure to do so.
That college women created a hierarchy based on academic ability while at college is not
surprising given that they were encouraged to do so not only by their parents, but by the very
structure of broader southern society. 81 While hierarchy itself was not only a southern

78

Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 128; Kelley, “Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of
Learned Women in Antebellum America,” 401-407.
79

Mary Kelley, “‘A More Glorious Revolution’: Women’s Antebellum Reading Circles and the Pursuit of
Influence” The New England Quarterly 76, no.2 (June 2003): 171.
80

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 84.

81

Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 154.

38

convention, it played an especially important social function in the South because it was a
society built upon the institution of slavery. As Edward Pessen notes, one of the distinguishing
features of the South was its propensity to stratify society so that each person knew that his or
her “proper” place was not only based on class, but also race and gender.82 Ensuring that each
individual maintained his or her race, class, and gender-based position within society was
important in the South because having one individual step out of his or her place could usurp
slavery, and thus the very foundation of southern society. Because a hierarchical structure was so
important to maintaining slavery, southerners did not scorn aristocracy in the same way as
northerners did, but rather maintained and justified a society built upon stratification. That this is
so is evident even in the different goals and curricula offered at northern and southern women’s
colleges. While southern colleges worked to refine young women into ladies, northern colleges
scorned shaping women into “useless” aristocrats and worked only to make women “useful.” 83 In
a society, then, that imbedded such meaning in social positions, proving one’s superiority over
others was imperative to maintaining and/or advancing one’s societal standing.
By modeling southern society in their cultivating a culture of academic hierarchy,
students paradoxically subverted their power at the same time that they established it. While
seeking identities as competitive, learned students challenged southern gender ideals, forming
academic societies that were exclusive reflected the convention that the southern lady distance
herself from those she deemed inferior and unable to advance her position. Thus, the
stratification that accompanied the academic life of the college ultimately subverted any notions
82

Edward Pessen, “How Different from Each Other Were the Antebellum North and South?” The
American Historical Review 85, no. 5 (1980): 1136.
83

See Benjamin Rush, Thoughts upon Female Education (Boston: Samuel Hall, 1787) and Emma Willard,
Mrs. Willard’s Plan for Improving Female Education (Middlebury, VT: S.W. Copeland, 1819).

39

of total and egalitarian female empowerment and reinforced a defining feature of the southern
lady.
As an analysis of student’s recollections of their learning experiences makes clear, the
value of the academic life cultivated at southern women’s colleges cannot be assessed based
solely on the ambitions and purposes of college authorities. For while those in authority may
have intended for women’s education to simply shape young women into refined ladies,
exposure to academic study enabled college women to challenge the limited identities prescribed
to them through their education. Thus, the role of academics in college women’s lives should not
be underestimated.84 At the same time, however, the role of academics in southern women’s
lives should not be assumed to have benefitted all women equally, for while academics played a
powerful role in enabling some students to garner independence and personal satisfaction, this
empowerment also fostered exclusion, and was used to stratify the world of the college. Through
the cultivation of an academic culture, therefore, female students exerted their own agency in
shaping their educations. This academic culture, with all its complexities and ironies, reminds
contemporary readers that, while southern women lived in a patriarchal society, they exerted
agency, and not only in challenging southern power structures, but also in endorsing them.

84

In her assertion that college women cared more for gossip, fashion, and social events than their studies,
Farnham implies that southern women cared little about academic achievement. See Farnham, The Education of the
Southern Belle, 120.

40

CHAPTER TWO
“We Live for Each Other”: Female Friendship at Women’s Colleges
In the same way that the collegiate culture cultivated at women’s colleges enabled
students to both challenge and uphold the gender ideals espoused through their education by
allowing them to take on identities as learned and competitive students, it played a similarly
empowering role in women’s social lives while at college. For while those in authority at
women’s colleges worked to reinforce women’s identities as daughters, wives, and mothers, the
peer culture that developed at colleges, and in particular the friendships that were formed,
challenged the notion that women were defined primarily by their connection to family. At the
same time that the friendships women formed at college challenged the societal convention that
women’s identities were intimately connected to family, however, these friendships nonetheless
also reflected the hierarchical nature of southern society. Thus, while the peer culture that
developed at women’s colleges challenged southern gender ideals and inspired a form of female
empowerment, this power was not devoid of southern hierarchy nor equally distributed to all
female students.
As early nineteenth-century sources reveal, southern society defined the ideal woman not
only as one who was refined and cultivated, but also as one intimately connected to her family.1
According to popular southern advice literature, such as The Lady’s Magazine and Godey’s
Lady’s Magazine, women’s roles included that of nurturer, caretaker, and being the moral center
of the family.2 In order to fulfill her role within the family, the southern woman was expected to

1

2

Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women in the Old South, 61.

Angela Boswell, “Constructing an Ideal Southern Lady,” in Ordinary Women, Extraordinary
Lives: Women in American History, ed. Kriste Lindenmeyer (Lanham, MD: SR Books, 2000), 121.

41

be “pious, pure, domestic, and submissive.”3 Defined by their gendered status, southern females
were raised according to the expressed belief that their identities were linked with their status as
daughters, wives, and mothers; since the family served as the “fulcrum of social order. . . a
young woman was not merely a future lady and wife but a daughter who must continually share
in her family’s reciprocal duties.”4 That women’s identities were defined by their connections to
family is not surprising given the distinct clan-based nature of the South. As a society built on an
agrarian economy, in which most people lived in rural areas and participated in household
production, the South was a region where family, clan, and community were viewed as the “main
source of the individual’s standing and sense of self.”5
Because southern ideology stipulated that women’s identities were connected to the
southern household, it is not surprising that, as transmitters of southern values, women’s colleges
were established not only to shape young women into refined persons, but to do so for a more
ultimate purpose: to prepare them to fulfill their prescribed destines within the domestic realm as
daughters, wives, and mothers. Within the southern context, women’s colleges acted as places
that socialized women so that they would take their place within, and connect their identities to,
the household and thus uphold the established societal structure.
That women’s colleges were established in order to reinforce women’s primary identities
as female members of families is most evident in authorities’ justifications and stated aims for
women’s education. While the formal curricula offered at women’s colleges was rigorous in such

3

Boswell, “Constructing an Ideal Southern Lady,” 121. Additionally, Barbara Welter cites these four
qualities (piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity) as the “four cardinal virtues of True Womanhood” in her
“The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 152.
4

Stowe, “The Not-So-Cloistered Female Academy,” 92.

5

Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women in the Old South, 3.

42

a way that it was comparable to men’s education during the period,6 women were reminded that
their educations served a drastically different purpose than their male counterparts. Looking to
advance women’s higher education in the antebellum period, Daniel Chandler noted that “there
seems to be no reason why the education of women should be less perfect than that of the other
sex,” but qualified his promotion of women’s education by “admit[ting] that the spheres in which
they [men and women] respectively move, and the duties which it is the peculiar province of
each to perform, are essentially different.”7 Similarly justifying the education of women, George
Howe argued that women’s education, “except that some greater portion of it may well be
devoted to those accomplishments which give a finish and perfection to a well educated
woman,” should “substantially be the same as that of men.” However, Howe underlined that
“[women] will of course pursue it with a view to the station [they] [are] to occupy, and give
precedence to those parts which will most avail [them] there.” 8 Thus, a woman was to be
educated, but only “with reference to her sphere of action and her mission.” 9
In contrast to men, the “sphere of action” for which women were educated was not a
public one. In his Daughters in School, R.W. Bailey reminded his daughters of the sphere for
which women’s education prepared them, writing “I would not have you become politicians nor
affect to volunteer grave opinions on political subjects . . . A lady may appear amicable and
modest in manifesting an interest in everything which affects the public weal, but always

6

Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 67.

7

Daniel Chandler, “An Address on Female Education” (Washington, GA: William A. Mercer, 1835), as
printed in The Southern Literary Journal and Monthly Magazine, vol. 1, ed. by Daniel Whitaker (Charleston: J.S.
Burges, 1835), 279.
8

George Howe, The Endowments, Position, and Education of Woman: an Address Delivered before the
Hermans and Sigourney Societies of the Female High School at Limestone Springs, July 23, 1850, 15.
9

Herschel V. Johnson as quoted by Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White
Women in the Old South, 258.

43

awkward and beyond her sex when debating the principles of politics or mingling in party
feuds.”10 Samuel Talmage thought it so important to remind women of the gendered purpose of
their education that he “deeply regret[ted] that the term college had been transferred to female
institutions, as it almost necessarily tend[ed] to serious practical errors.” 11 According to
Talmage, “in carrying out the idea of a college . . . [southerners] were in danger of forgetting that
females are not to be educated to become men; that domestic, and not public life, is their
destined theatre of action.” Indeed, George Howe summarized the goal of women’s education
well in his statement that “it is that she may better succeed . . . in those situations in which
Providence shall place her, that we would have her cultivate her mind: that she may be a better
daughter, sister, mother, wife, and that in all duties which these relations call on her to
perform.”12
Women’s colleges worked to prepare women for the domestic sphere by reminding them
that their education equipped them to be good wives, mothers, and daughters. Since a southern
lady’s identity was tied to her family, one of the most important lessons college could teach her
was how to attract and satisfy an ideal husband. The primary persons whom women were meant
to bring happiness to through a rigorous education were husbands.13 A woman took courses in
English literature, History, Geography, and other fields so that she was “capable of so entering

10

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 235.

11

Talmage, “A Proper Early Training and its Priceless Value: a Discourse Delivered in the Chapel of the
Greensboro Female College, June 23d, 1853”, 6.
12

Howe, The Endowments, Position, and Education of Woman, 15. Similar claims are made by Elias
Marks, Hints upon Female Education (Columbia, SC: Isaac C. Morgan, 1837), 37, Internet Archive, accessed
November 24, 2011, http://www.archive.org/details/hintson femaleedu00mark.
13

See Chapter One: “‘Receiving Second Honor is More Mortifying than Receiving No Honor at All’:
Academic Life at Women’s Colleges,” 10.

44

into her companion’s views as to harmonize with him in feeling and interest.” 14 Encouraging
female students attending Greensboro Female College to use their educations to “cheer, adorn,
and make happy the homes of good men,”15 lecturer George Davis employed an historical
illustration to argue that women’s education suited women to be more companionable wives:
An intelligent chief of the Cherokees some time since remarked, that when they first
settled in their western home, in their efforts for improvement they pursued a mistaken
policy--they educated their boys, and neglected their girls. And when the boys grew to be
men, and could find none but stupid, ignorant, and slatternly women to associate with,
and to marry, their education did not prevent them from becoming lazy, dissipated, and
worthless. But now they have discovered their error--had learned that the only safeguard
against these vices was to give them intelligent, virtuous, and happy homes,--and by
educating their girls, were making them both a reward and a spur to the boys. This is true
wisdom. For it is founded in a knowledge of our nature.16
Davis went on to remind Greensboro students that,
It is not demanded, nor even desired of you that you should become luminaries of
learning in abstract science, whether of nature or mind . . . I hardly know which is less
desirable for a life-companion. She who dwells perpetually in commonplace, never rising
above the household drudgery, never aspiring to a generous sentiment, and always
entertaining her husband or her guests with the price of butter, or with wonderful stories
of the children, the pantry, or the poultry yard--or she who lives continually among the
stars, looking down with lofty disdain upon the essentials of every day comfort and
happiness, scorning all useful things as too mean for her dainty touch, and never
descending lower than Humboldt’s Cosmos or Newton’s Principia. I would have you
shun the one as the plague, and the other as leprosy;--I would have you neither breathing
machines, nor erudite professors, neither stupid blunderers, nor learned pundits; but
intelligent, thinking, useful women . . . ready, as occasion may demand, with equal
excellence to make a salad, or criticise a book--ministering with like benefit to the bodily
comforts, and the intellectual pleasures of those about you--yet never evincing a
consciousness of superiority, never playing Sir Oracle, never showing that you supposed
yourselves born for any other destiny than to be “a help meet for man.”17
Furthermore, in addition to shaping young women into highly desirable marriage
partners, women’s education could prepare women for their predestined roles as mothers. While
14

Gladney, Essays on Female Education, 10.

15

Davis, “Address Delivered before the Young Ladies of Greensboro Female College,” 13.

16

Davis, “Address Delivered before the Young Ladies of Greensboro Female College,” 18-19.

17

Davis, “An Address Delivered before the Young Ladies of Greensboro Female College,” 10-11.

45

the ideology of republican motherhood--the idea that women needed to be educated because they
raised the sons and daughters of the next generation--did not have as powerful a role in the South
as it did in the North, it did play a part in the advancement of southern women’s education.
Though noting that “woman is not like man to be trained for public life,” Samuel Talmage
justified the advancement of women’s education by claiming that woman has “the responsible
work of giving the first impulse to the human character, of touching the springs of life, and
communicating impressions that will never cease to act.”18 Similarly, an address presented to the
citizens of Augusta County, Georgia claimed that woman “should possess a cultivated intellect”
because it is her “who unfolds and cultivates the first buds of intelligence in man.” 19 In order to
“discharge the arduous and responsible duties” of her station, it was believed that women “must
know and intimately the physical, intellectual, and moral nature of the being she educates.” 20
Courses in psychology could help women to manage their children,21 courses in literature could
enable mothers to “give a correct and elevated literary taste to her children,”22 and courses in
religion could enable women to train their children in “the principles of the true philosophy.” 23
Not only was higher education meant to prepare women to serve as “the presiding genius of love
in the home” by teaching her to “assume that influential station that she ought to possess as the
companion of an educated man,”24 but it was also intended to train her so that she could “form

18

Talmage, “A Proper Early Training and its Priceless Value,” 20.

19

As quoted by Mary Watters, “The History of Mary Baldwin College, 1842-1942,” 18.

20

Bailey as quoted by Watters, “The History of Mary Baldwin College, 1842-1942,” 17.

21

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 220.

22

The Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Pupils of the Young Ladies’ Seminary and Collegiate Institute
(Monroe City, MO: 1855), 18-19, as quoted by Barbara Welter in “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” 168.
23

Watters, “The History of Mary Baldwin College, 1842-1942,” 17.

46

the national taste, opinions, principles and morals” of the next generation. 25 That female students
understood these intended goals of their education is clear in reminiscences like New Orleans
citizen Eliza Moore Chinn McHatten Ripley’s. Describing women’s college experiences in the
antebellum period, Ripley noted “the miscellaneous education we girls of seventy years ago in
New Orleans had access to, culminated by fitting us for housewives and mothers, instead of
writers and platform speakers, doctors and lawyers—suffragettes.”26
In addition to reminding women that their educations were intended to prepare them for
their roles within the domestic realm as wives and mothers, those in authority at women’s
colleges worked to reinforce women’s identities as linked to family by using school practices to
strengthen already-existent family ties. In his essay, “The Not-So-Cloistered Female Academy:
Elite Women’s Education and Family Feeling in the Old South,” Steven Stowe notes how
practices in college life were intended to foster familial ties between female students and their
families. Among these practices were stern parenting tactics and close control of students’
behaviour.27 When teaching and disciplining students, instructors used what Stowe calls “family
rhetoric,” employing titles such as “my child” when referring to students. 28 That family rhetoric
was adopted by college authorities is evidenced in the way female colleges advertised
themselves. In a number of school advertisements, the teachers and principals of colleges were
described as surrogate parents. An Athens Female College catalogue noted that “the discipline of
24

The Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Pupils of the Young Ladies’ Seminary and Collegiate Institute,

168.
25

Marli Frances Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-1880
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 62.
26

Eliza Moore Chinn McHatten Ripley, Social Life in New Orleans: Being Recollections of my Girlhood
(New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1912), 10.
27

Stowe, “The Not-So-Cloistered Female Academy,” 94.

28

Stowe, “The Not-So-Cloistered Female Academy,” 92.

47

the School will be mild and parental,”29 and others promised that the number of students taken in
would be limited so that each student could be looked after in a parental fashion.30 A
Montgomery seminary assured that its “pupils will always be under the immediate supervision of
the Principal or his Lady and will be regarded as members of the family.” 31 A circular issued by
Harmony Female College insisted that “pupils live not as boarders, but as daughters” as in “a
private family.” 32 These promises made by individual colleges assured parents like R.W. Bailey,
who demanded that the government of the colleges his daughters attended be “parental,” 33 that
female students would not forget their connections to family and learn lessons in insubordination
while at college.34
Serving as surrogate parents, college authorities outlined strict codes of conduct and daily
schedules for students to adhere to. For example, one school outlined its rules stating that “no
boarding pupil is permitted [to] spend a night away from Madame Tongo’s house, nor will any
young lady be permitted to go out in the evening or attend places of public amusement with
friends or visitors, unless she holds a written request to do so, signed by a Parent or Guardian.”35
Such rules guarding against young women leaving college premises were not uncommon.
29

Athens Female College, Second Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Pupils of Athens Female College
at Athens, Tennessee (July 5, 1860), 14.
30

“Advertisement for Mme. Demings’ Boarding School,” Charleston City Gazette 12687 (January 12,
1820), 4, as quoted in Erin Ludwick, “Charleston Girl’s Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth Century” (Honors
Thesis, University of North Carolina, 2007), 7.
31

Catalogue of Pupils at Hamner Hall, a Seminary for Young Ladies, Montgomery, Ala, 5.

32

Harmony Female College, Circular of Harmony Female College, Sumter Mineral Springs, South
Carolina, for 1859, 8-9.
33

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 156.

34

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 157.

35

“Advertisement for Mme. Rosalie Acelie Guillou Tongo’s Boarding School 1855” South Carolina
Historical Society, Charleston, as quoted in Ludwick, “Charleston Girl’s Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth
Century,” 7.

48

Catalogues issued by Athens Female College, Greenville Women’s College, and Mary Baldwin
College all outlined strict stipulations regarding women’s comings and goings from campus.36
Expressing frustration with all of the rules she endured while at college, Naomi Elisabeth
Layman, a student at Mary Baldwin College in the late antebellum period, wrote to a friend, “Mr.
Tinsley is very strict with us indeed. I declare they have so many rules that I am almost afraid to
turn around for fear of breaking some of them . . . I would just like to see some girl here go
outside without Miss Miller with her.”37
In addition to stern parenting tactics, college authorities reinforced young women’s
identities as tied to family by “formally structuring a woman’s obligation to her parents” by
forcing her to write letters home.38 Living at a time when letter-writing served as a primary form
of communication and means of showing affection, female students’ written correspondence
with parents was viewed as affirming their filial duty. As Stowe helpfully notes, “the overriding
theme in parents’ letters was the bond of family love and its proof in writing, which tied
generations of daughters ever more firmly to family and home. There is comparatively little in
parents’ letters to suggest that daughters would ever love or owe more to anyone else.”39
Confirming this, one father wrote to his daughter saying that he had received her “sweet
affectionate letter” and that he valued and looked forward to her “ever welcome letters as proof
of affection.”40 Similarly, Stevens wrote to his granddaughter Primrose that “I shall always be
36

Athens Female College, Second Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Pupils of Athens Female College
at Athens, Tennessee (July 5, 1860), 15; Greenville Woman’s College, Catalogue of the Trustees, Faculty, and
Students of the Greenville Baptist Female College (Greenville, SC: Greenville Baptist Female College, 1857), 13,
accessed November 10, 2011, http://www.archive.org/details/catalogueoftrust00gree; Watters, “The History of Mary
Baldwin College, 1842-1942,” 34.
37

Naomi Elisabeth Layman as quoted by Watters, “The History of Mary Baldwin College, 1842-1962,” 61.

38

Stowe, “The Not-So-Cloistered Female Academy,” 94.

39

Stowe, “The Not-So-Cloistered Female Academy,” 96.

49

happy in receiving a letter from you and of course will rejoice at hearing of your welfare and
improvement.”41
While the administrators of women’s colleges intended to reinforce female students’
identities as tied to family, the student culture cultivated at female colleges, and in particular the
culture of friendship that developed at colleges, challenged the idea that women were defined
primarily by their link to family. Not only did female students rarely refer to their teachers and
principals as “father” or “mother,” they acknowledged that the primary relationships in their
lives while at college were those with their peers. By immersing students in young, female
communities wherein students were directed to spend quality time with desk mates, meal mates,
roommates, and walking partners, southern colleges inadvertently provided a space and time in
which young women could replace family connections with peer relationships and, in doing so,
redefine their identities. In the words of Barbara Solomon, “being young together created bonds
that removed college girls from adults” and inspired them to “care more for the approval of
classmates” than anything else. 42 As Stowe’s study of southern college students makes clear,
female students’ letters of correspondence and diary entries “revealed that the most important
things they [female students] were learning concerned life within the sisterhood apart from both
childhood and future home.”43 Rather than expressing their filial duty to their parents in their
letters, female students filled their letters with news on their newfound female friendships.
40

Stowe, “The Not-So-Cloistered Female Academy,” 96.

41

Stephens, Letter to Mary Ann Primrose, November 7, 1841, SHC.

42

Barbara Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986),
98. In addition to Barbara Solomon’s In the Company of Educated Women and Steven Stowe’s “The Not-SoCloistered Female Academy,” Anya Jabour argues that young college women prized relationships with both friends
and teachers over connections to family in her “‘College Girls’: The Female Academy and Female Identity in the
Old South” in “Lives Full of Struggle and Triumph”: Southern Women, Their Institutions, and Their Communities,
ed. Bruce L. Clayton and John A. Salmond (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003), 74-92.
43

Stowe, “The Not-So-Cloistered Female Academy,” 96.

50

Students’ concern with friendship was so intense that some family members wrote to their
daughters, sisters, and nieces pleading with them to concentrate less on friendship and more on
preparing themselves for their future roles as wives and mothers. Writing to his daughter Mary
who was attending Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia, Dr. Sanders warned “you must
not let your love for your friend induce you to talk too much and neglect your studies.” 44
Despite the fact that female friendships were of utmost importance to young women
while attending college, an analysis of the “sisterhoods” formed at college reveals that female
bonding was not altogether inclusive; no one sisterhood emerged based on the reality that women
shared something in common simply because of their gendered status. Rather, female students
formed exclusive relationships and defined their status within student life according to these
relationships. That students revelled in exclusive relationships is illustrated by the number, and
seriousness attributed to, the “intimate” and “romantic” friendships that developed at college.
Immersed in the early nineteenth-century’s “female world of love and ritual,”45 while at college
young women sought the affections of those of their own sex.46 According to Anya Jabour,
“romantic friendships were an important aspect of school life in the Old South.” 47 Jabour notes
how Lucy Catherine Moore Capehard, a student of North Carolina’s St. Mary’s School in the
1850s, viewed it as custom “for schoolgirls to have sweethearts among their own sex.” “[Her]
sweetheart was Ellen Brent Pearson,” whom she was “supremely happy” just to “get a smile or

44

Dr. Sanders to Mary Sanders, March 22, 1862. As recorded by Young in “‘Genius uncultivated is like a
meteor of the night’,”186.
45

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in
Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1, no. 1 (1975): 1-30.
46

Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 72.

47

Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 71.

51

glance from.”48 Like Capehard, other students also noted their affections for their “sweethearts,”
documenting their interactions with their “darlings,” “loves,” and “adored,” 49 and recording the
notes and gifts of candy, flowers, and jewellery they received from their partners.50 Through
students’ recollections like these, it becomes clear that in the midst of being separated from their
families and plantations, young women sought intimate friendships with their peers, in particular
their roommates. Living as a student at Greensboro Female College in the 1850s, Mary Beall
expressed her love and devotion towards her roommates by describing them as “three of the most
amiable and good girls [she] kn[e]w.”51 Similarly, Ella Gertrude Thomas noted her attachment to
her roommates Susie Snider and Huss Hill, writing, “Oh, I love the girls!” 52 and Priscilla Larkin
exclaimed her deep love for her friend Ella whose leaving “left a vacancy in [Larkin’s] social
circle that could not be replaced” and made Larkin “feel lost--specially at night when [she] had
no one to clasp [her] arms around.”53
While many female students found love and support in intimate and romantic friendships
at college, the exclusive nature of these friendships meant that not every student shared equally
in the joys of such sisterhood. Not only did students reveal the exclusivity of their friendships in
their communicating in secret languages 54 and participating in rivalries over sweethearts,55 they

48

Lucy Catherine Moore Capehard as quoted in Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 71.

49

Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 155-56; Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 74.

50

Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 71; Thomas, The Secret Eye, 85.

51

Mary Beall to Brother, 29 November 1849, Harper-Beall Family Papers, 1830-1914, microfilm, SHC,
Wilson Library, UNC.
52

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 83.

53

Miss Priscilla Larkin, The Civil War Diary of a Southern Belle, 13, Internet Archive, accessed January 2,
2012, http://www.archive.org/details/PriscillaLarkinTheCivilWarDiaryOfASouthernBelle.
54

Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 74.

52

made clear that they were selective in choosing friends. Underlining the selective manner in
which she chose friends, Elizabeth Allston Pringle, a student at Madame Tongo’s academy in
South Carolina, noted that she was “greatly surprised when [she] found [her]self devoted to her
[classmate Ruth Nesbitt] because she “cared for so few” despite the fact that she “constantly had
girls devoted to [her] whose advances [she] barely endured.” 56 Sarah Lois Wadley likewise made
note of the fact that “there [were] few whom [she] love[d].” 57
The exclusive manner in which young women formed intimate friendships meant that not
all college students found it easy to make friends. Documenting her college experience
throughout the 1850s, Susan McDowall frequently noted her feelings of loneliness in the absence
of finding intimate friendships and, consequently, peer acceptance. Noting that “the girls here
seem to think, that if you love more than one girl, you are fickle or you do not love anyone,”
McDowall eagerly sought intimate friendships with fellow college students. 58 However, while
McDowall worked diligently to find “some fond friend to whom [she] could confide [her]
sorrows and troubles,”59 her unpopularity made this journey a very difficult one. When held up
in her room for days because of illness, not even McDowall’s roommates attended to her.60 As
Jabour notes, McDowall was obviously insecure about her social status, as is evident in her wish
that she “could for one moment take a peep into the hearts of many, and see how [she] [was]

55

Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 73.

56

Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 183.

57

Wadley, Diary, 31 August 1862.

58

Susan McDowall as quoted by Jabour in Scarlett’s Sisters, 72.

59

McDowall as quoted by Jabour in Scarlett’s Sisters, 72.

60

Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 147.

53

liked.”61 Indeed, the types of friendships that some female students benefitted so deeply from
proved, because of their exclusive nature, to be quite oppressive for others. Young women being
“quite particular in their selection of their closest friends, distinguishing between mere
classmates and ‘intimate friends’”62 created a culture wherein it was “through practices of
inclusion and exclusion [that] young women constructed their position in the social world of the
school.”63
A number of factors helped to construct a student’s social position within the world of the
college and aided her in establishing intimate friends, but most prominently an individual’s
physical appearance and academic prowess contributed to her social standing. A survey of
students’ diaries makes clear that physical appearance was highly valued among female students
and certainly played a role in determining a young woman’s popularity. In describing fellow
classmate Bell Fernandez, Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas noted that she “c[ould] not refrain
from expressing [her]self with reference to [Fernandez’s] wonderful beauty” and that she had
correspondingly “taken quite a fancy to her [Fernandez].” 64 Similarly implying that physical
appearance played a role in her highly selective choosing of friends, Elizabeth Allston Pringle
described her new friend Sara White as a “lovely curly-haired, blue-eyed child that looked like
an angel and a kitten combined . . . the prettiest and the tiniest” girl in the class. 65 Furthermore,
Pringle noted that she and her fellow classmates ranked who was the most beautiful among

61

Susan McDowall quoted by Jabour in Scarlett’s Sisters, 72.

62

Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 72.

63

Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 148.

64

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 85.

65

Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 127.

54

them.66 At times working in combination with physical appearance, academic ability also played
a role in the selection of friends and the construction of social hierarchies. In addition to noting
that her “dear friend” Sara White was pretty, Pringle describes White as “the best girl in the
class.”67 Likewise, she mentions how her fellow classmates at Madame Tongo’s Academy
called her sister “not only the most beautiful but the best girl in school.” 68
In addition to building intimate, selective friendships with their peers, female students
constructed their social standing by creating and participating in what served as the epitome of
exclusive sisterhood--college sororities. Founded in the 1850s, the first college sororities grew
out of literary and debate clubs and served as what Christie Anne Farnham terms “quasi-student
governments.”69 College sororities, even though initially advertising themselves as chiefly
philanthropic societies, chose members based on individuals’ social standing within the college.
The first sorority to have come into existence in the United States--Wesleyan Female College’s
Adelphean Society (Alpha Delta Pi) in 1851--promoted itself as a society that “shall have as its
object the mental, moral, social, and domestic improvement of its members.” 70 With its motto
being “we live for each other,”71 the society gives off the impression that it was devoted
primarily to friendship and sisterhood; however, the Adelphean society was certainly not
inclusive in its selection of members. The founders of the Adelphean society, including Eugenia
Tucker Fitzgerald, Ella Pierce Turner, Bettie Williams, Mary Evans, and Octavia Andrew, were
66

Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 129.

67

Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 127.

68

Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 135.

69

Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 148-149.

70

Eugenia Tucker Fitzgerald, Diary Entry May 15, 1851, accessed August 1, 2011, http://www.alpha.delta

71

Fitzgerald, Diary Entry, May 15, 1851.

pi.org.

55

all women who came from families intimately connected to the college. For example, Pierce
Turner’s father, Dr. George Foster Pierce, served as the first president of Wesleyan Female
College, Evans’ father served on the Wesleyan Female College Board of Trustees for forty years,
and Andrew’s father, Bishop James Andrew, was the ranking member on the original Board of
Trustees that started Wesleyan. 72 Furthermore, that sororities like the Adelphean Society were
groups that were selective in choosing their members is evident in the writings of students who
were excluded from taking part in them. Writing shortly after the Adelphean Society was created
at Wesleyan, Ella Gertrude Thomas initially noted her disappointment and frustration with not
being invited to join.73 When later slipped “a unanimous note,” which “solicit[ed] that [Thomas]
join them,” however, Thomas “returned a note respectfully declining” because “to have joined
them [she] should have been thrown into too close communion with the girl [she] most dislike[d]
in college Leab Goodall.”74 Goodall was a girl for whom Thomas “felt all those feelings of
hatred dislike and contempt” and “struggle[d] to speak to.”75 Not to be left out or outdone,
however, Thomas decided to use her own elite status within the college to create her own
sorority. Deciding it was too much effort, however, Thomas quickly abandoned the idea a few
days later.
Further confirming the reality that the female friendships formed at college were built
upon a hierarchal structure is the fact that sororities rivalled one another to vie for top position in
collegiate culture. When the Philomathean Society (Phi Mu), the second sorority to develop at
Wesleyan Female College in the 1850s, emerged, it came in direct competition with the
72

“Alpha, Delta, Pi Founders,” accessed August 15, 2011, http://www.alphadeltapi.org.

73

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 84.

74

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 85.

75

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 86.

56

Adelphean Society. Students of both sororities worked to have the girls in their own respective
societies earn top honours and the privileges of being chosen to make presentations at special
events, including at final examinations and graduation ceremonies. Writing from Wesleyan in
1861, Lou Burge, while disappointed to have not received the honour herself, celebrated a Miss
Cater’s receiving the honour of being the class salutatorian because “she was also a
Philomathean.”76 Additionally highlighting the fact that sororities viewed themselves as in
competition with one another is Lou’s description of Philomathean contentedness over
Adelphean distress: “I must not forget to put down that the Adelphean candles burnt the
windows and greatly injured their new carpet; whereas the P’s were glad and the A’s very
angry.”77 Thus, in addition to female students rivalling for the attention of particular individual
females in order to confirm their social standing within student life, sororities also rivalled one
another for top position in the college.
Female students’ cultivation of a culture of social rivalry and hierarchy at college is
understandable given the hierarchal nature of southern society. Commenting on the origins of
sororities and hierarchal friendship in the South, Farnham writes: “it is not surprising that the
first sorority would begin in the slave South, where hierarchy was an integral part of the social
fabric and distancing oneself from social inferiors was an imperative of the lady of chivalry.”78
As a slave society, the South depended upon a hierarchal structure that sought to maintain elite
white male power. Of course, at the same time that this hierarchal structure empowered this
demographic, it oppressed others to varying degrees.

76

Lou Burge as quoted by Young, “‘Genius Uncultivated is like a Meteor in the Night’,” 188.

77

Burge as quoted by Young in “‘Genius uncultivated is like a meteor of the night’,”188.

78

Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 154.

57

Analyzing the social life that was cultivated at southern women’s colleges, and in
particular the types of friendships that developed there, reveals not only the ways in which
female friendships proved empowering for elite southern women, but also the ways in which
they were oppressive. Even though student life was an arena wherein females themselves
dictated their own rules and social codes, and thus served as a space wherein young women
could challenge the identities prescribed to them by southern society, at times students still chose
to reflect the same values as southern society--in this instance, social hierarchy. In a sense, the
activity surrounding female friendship at women’s colleges was ironic, for at the same time that
college students privileged female friends over their family members and thus challenged
southern society’s definition of womanhood, they upheld a hierarchal structure like the one that
worked to reinforce their subordinate status as women in the first place. Thus, even though
women’s colleges provided southern women a means of control, women used this control to
form a social world that, even without patriarchal males, proved itself to be a microcosm of
southern society.
That women created their own social worlds wherein they both challenged and upheld
southern social conventions challenges interpretations of women’s education that portray
women’s colleges as simply oppressive places that worked to reinforce gender ideals and thus
provided women little opportunity for transformation.79 When taking into account women’s
social life while at college, it becomes clear that women exerted agency throughout their college
experience. That this agency took at least two forms reveals the complex nature of southern
women’s identities. The agency that women exerted through collegiate social life reveals two
characteristics about these southern women. First, college women’s privileging of female
79

Lynn Gordon, “From Seminary to University: An Overview of Women’s Higher Education,
1870-1920,” 474; McMillen, “Education and Religion,” 100.

58

friendship over familial bonds suggests that women, whether consciously or not, in some way
must have felt oppressed by southern social conventions and worked in subtle ways to transform
them. Even though strict gender ideals like the ones espoused through women’s education were
meant to reinforce white women’s elite status, women’s behaviour (acting contrary to ideals)
suggests that, while strict gender ideals separated them from “uncivilized” black slaves, these
ideals, in practice, were unfulfilling.80 Second, at the same time that women may have
collectively experienced a form of gender-based oppression, their forming of female friendships
in a way that modeled southern society’s hierarchism suggests that southern women, while
perhaps at times feeling oppressed by their gendered status, did not reject southern social
systems altogether. In fact, the exclusive ways in which female students formed friendships
suggests that, at least at times, they privileged a certain type of class superiority over gender
bonds.81 This has consequences for interpretations of southern women’s history, for it forces
interpretations which view southern women as participating in “common bonds of womanhood”
--bonds that were based on gender identities alone--to be reassessed. Rather than affirming that
southern women acknowledged themselves as victims of a common plight, 82 an analysis of
collegiate social life reveals that, even in a place where women held so much in common,

80

See Jacqueline Jones’ Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (New York: Basic Books, 1985) for a description
of how white women’s privilege was secured through strict constructions of white womanhood and how blacks were
denied these strict gender ideals and even gender distinctions because whites used de-gendering as a way to
dehumanize.
81

While all southern women who attended college in the antebellum period were considered of elite status,
college women made further distinctions between social classes in their cultivation of collegiate culture. Thus, while
perhaps not different in economic and social class more broadly, there remained social distinctions that were defined
by collegiate culture.
82

A school of interpretation tends to view all southern women as victims of oppression. See, in particular,
Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 5051; Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Women’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books,
1982), 116; Patricia A. Stringer and Irene Thompson, Stepping off the Pedestal: Academic Women in the South
(New York: the Modern Language Association of America, 1982), 2.

59

including being of a similar race, class, and age, one common sisterhood did not exist. Rather,
young women formed intimate relationships and groups that “confirmed their superiority as it
drew a boundary between itself and those below.”83 Even in a setting where women gained
enough independence and power to redefine their identities, this same power prevented them
from forming one sisterhood. Thus, college proved itself to be what Helen Horowitz calls a “real
society of women”: a place where there was still a “pecking order, exclusion as well as
inclusion,” and power and passion.84

83

84

Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 154.

Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century
Beginnings to the 1930s, xviii.

60

CHAPTER THREE:
“College Has Been the Means of My Conversion”:
Religious Culture at Women’s Colleges
In the midst of scholarly debates over the value of southern women’s education, religion
is often overlooked as a shaping force. The few scholarly analyses that do include the role of
religion in women’s higher education assume, like wider interpretations of the history of
southern women and religion, that religion was simply an oppressive force in college women’s
lives.1 This interpretation may be substantiated by examinations of institutional records, which
highlight the role of evangelicalism in shaping educational ideals, but, as is the case when
studying the academic and social cultures that evolved at women’s colleges, an examination of
women’s recollections of the religious life on campus presents a more complex story. For while
evangelical ideals were often propagated by college authorities to remind women of their roles as
pious and submissive persons, this very same evangelicalism that granted young women
authority as pious individuals enabled them to challenge the notion that they were passive
creatures who were dependent on male authority and allowed them to explore new identities as
independent women. At the same time that women’s religious behaviour collectively enabled
young women to develop new identities as independent women and challenge southern gender
ideals, it also engendered a tension among students that resulted in their upholding of a
hierarchal structure like that existent in wider southern society. Thus, rather than simply
redefining southern womanhood according to a collective female consciousness, young women’s
religious behaviour while at college demonstrates how female students exercised selective
identity in a way that reinforced southern gender constructs at the same time that it challenged
them.
1

Few scholars say this directly, but their analyses imply it. See, for example, McMillen, Southern Women:
Black and White in the Old South, 94; Palmieri, “From Republican Motherhood to Race Suicide: Arguments on the
Higher Education of Women in the United States, 1820-1920,” 49-64.

61

As one of “the cultural engines of the South,”2 evangelicalism played a major role in
shaping southern gender ideals. Described “as one of the movements that most dramatically
affected southern religion,”3 the Second Great Awakening, a spiritual revival which took place
approximately between 1790 and 1835, played an influential role in the shaping of antebellum
women’s identities, giving rise to what Barbara Welter has termed the “Cult of True
Womanhood.”4 The evangelical fervour that accompanied the Second Great Awakening shaped
woman’s identity in at least two ways. First, women’s active participation in evangelical
revivalism spurred the idea that women were by nature a pious sex. Women were heavily
involved in revivalism, going out to hear preachers, and then returning home to convert husbands
and children.5 Furthermore, the Second Great Awakening “attracted far more women than men”
and women began to dominate elements of Church life.6 Women “constituted the largest increase
in church membership” during this period, outnumbering men sixty to forty. 7 Women’s
involvement in the Second Great Awakening, then, reaffirmed the idea that, as guardians of the
pure and moral home, women were more naturally disposed towards religion. In her poem
“Women’s Progress,” Louisa McCord described southerners’ belief in the “superior devotional

2

Donald G. Matthews, “Introduction” in Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others in
History and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 3.
3

Edward L. Queen, Stephen R Prothero and Gardiner H Shattuck, Encyclopedia of American Religious
History 3rd ed. (New York: Proseworks, 2009), 941.
4

Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860”: 151-74.

5

Rosemary Skinner Keller, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Marie Cantlon, “Protestant Women’s Colleges
in the United States” in The Encyclopaedia of Women and Religion in North America, vol. 1 (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 2006), xxxiv.
6

Tina Stewart Brakebill and Celestia Rice Colby, “Circumstances are Destiny”: an Antebellum Woman’s
Struggle to Define Sphere (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006), 10.
7

Victoria Boynton and Jo Malin, ed., Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography: K-Z (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2005), 8.

62

feeling” of women,8 writing, “God hath made A woman-nature holier than the man’s/Purer of
impulse, and of gentler mould.”9 Similarly, in a sermon delivered to his Greenwood, South
Carolina congregation, Brother Lewis M. Ayer proclaimed that women had “keener instincts,”
than men and held “intuitive perceptions of moral truth.” According to Ayer, this meant that
women would thus “yield the wand of [moral] power” over their more degenerate male
counterparts.10 Embracing a similar line of thought, a writer for the Southern Quarterly Review
described woman as an “angel of earth” whose moral virtue “exerted such a forcible influence
over men” that she was marked with the mission of morally regenerating the world. 11
Marked with the mission of regenerating the world because of their superior moral
qualities, women bore a heavy responsibility, especially when considering the influence of the
Second Great Awakening in cultivating new ideas concerning Christian spirituality. As Curtis
Johnson outlines, “the importance of the Second Great Awakening went beyond rising church
membership. Old ideas fell into disfavour, and new ones took their place.” 12 Most importantly,
Americans became “enthralled by the notion of choice.”13 Johnson notes that it is not surprising
that “[during the Awakening] predestination (salvation dependent on God’s predetermined
decision to send a person to heaven or hell) lost ground, even among Calvinists, as the Methodist

8

Dew, “Dissertation on the Characteristic Differences between the Sexes, and on the Position and
Influence of Woman in Society, No. 3,” 672.
9

Louisa Cheves McCord, “Women’s Progress” Southern Literary Magazine, as quoted in John Hollitz,
Thinking through the Past, vol. I (Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 2009), 263.
10

Lewis M. Ayer as quoted by Candace Bailey, Music and the Southern Belle: from Accomplished Lady to
Confederate Composer (Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 2010), 14.
11

As quoted by Ronald Lora and William Henry Longton, The Conservative Press in Eighteenth-and
Nineteenth-Century America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), 169.
12

Curtis D. Johnson, “‘Sectarian Nation’: Religious Diversity in Antebellum America,” OAH Magazine of
History 22, no. 1 (January 2008), 15.
13

Johnson, “‘Sectarian Nation’: Religious Diversity in Antebellum America,” 15.

63

and Arminian doctrine of free will (salvation dependent on one’s choice to accept Jesus as
Saviour) carried the day.” 14 With the Awakening’s new emphasis on personal choice came the
notion that salvation was insecure and therefore “an urgency existed among the stalwart to ‘get
religion.’”15 Women, with their “superior devotional feelings,” bore this responsibility of leading
individuals to salvation.16
Second, in addition to reinforcing the idea that women were naturally pious individuals
who bore the responsibility of morally regenerating society, the evangelicalism which
accompanied the Second Great Awakening suggested that women were dependent creatures. At
the same time that southern evangelicalism granted women power by labelling them moral
superiors, then, it also, somewhat paradoxically, reinforced the notion that women were by
nature meant to be subordinate to men. In fact, it was women’s very moral superiority and
proclivity towards spiritual devotion that explained her secondary position. According to
nineteenth-century writers, the same quality that enabled woman to be dependent on God made
her dependent on man as well. In his famous “Dissertation on the Characteristic Differences
between the Sexes,” Thomas Dew linked woman’s dependence on God with her natural
weakness and passivity, writing that, unlike man, who is an active creature, woman “throws her
arms into the arms of the divinity and awaits the result . . . she is carried forward by powers that
are not hers, by energies that she is unable to control.”17 Similarly, in her 1828 Letters on Female

14

Johnson, “‘Sectarian Nation’: Religious Diversity in Antebellum America,” 15.

15

Jean E. Friedman, The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South,
1830-1900 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 35.
16

Scott Stephan further outlines woman’s role as redeemer of the southern family in his work Redeeming
the Southern Family: Evangelical Women and Domestic Devotion in the Antebellum South (Athens, GA: University
of Georgia Press, 2008).
17

Dew, “Dissertation on the Characteristic Differences between the Sexes, and on the Position and
Influence of Woman in Society, no. 3,” 690.

64

Character, Virginia Cary wrote that it is “because of their very physical inferiority and
vulnerability that women are superior to men in religiosity.” 18 Because the same weakness that
reminded women of their need for God’s protection placed them in need of man’s protection as
well, their position in relation to men was a subordinate one.
Women’s divinely-ordained subordination took on special meaning in the South because
of its nature as a slave society. As Marli Frances Weiner notes, the presence of slaves gave “a
uniquely southern twist” to the argument for women’s subordination.19 Constructing woman’s
identity as weak and dependent supported the idea of master and servant, an idea upon which
southern society rested. According to the existing ideology, all women were like black slaves in
that they were inherently weak and in need of protection from white men. In his Sociology for
the South or the Failure of Free Society, George Fitzhugh argued that women--like children and
slaves--had one right, that of protection.20 This protection came at a cost, however: “the
obligation to obey.”21 This mandatory obedience affirmed that woman’s position was viewed as
parallel with that of a slave’s, with “man” being equivalent to both “lord and master.” 22 Being in
a similar position to slaves, women’s challenge of male authority was akin to challenging the
authority of masters, who “were often the same people.”23 Because of the constructed connection

18

Virginia Cary as quoted by Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to be Counted: White Women & Politics in
Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 14. Emphasis mine.
19

Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-1880, 71.

20

George Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South or the Failure of Free Society (Richmond, VA: A. Morris,
1854), 213.
21

Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 214.

22

Fitzhugh, Sociology for the South, 214.

23

Laura F. Edwards, Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1997), 16.

65

between women and slaves, therefore, it was imperative for white women to accept their “Godgiven” position in southern society, for upon it rested the very foundation of slavery. 24
Because it was imperative for women to fulfill their prescribed roles as pious and
dependent individuals, it is not surprising that society sought ways to reinforce these ideals and
that the woman’s college emerged as one of the ways to do so. That women’s colleges worked to
reinforce women’s identities as pious individuals is evident in a number of ways. First, the stated
aims of institutions reveal that one of the main purposes of women’s education was to cultivate
women’s piety. The Board of Trustees at Mary Baldwin College announced in their annual
address that the college’s “aim [was] first to prepare each child to live in time with a wise
reference to eternity.” 25 A circular released for Harmony Female College similarly declared that
“the religion of Jesus Christ is the best part of all education, the ornament of all ornaments” and
therefore would be at the forefront of women’s education,26 and the Board of Elizabeth Academy
in Washington, Mississippi justified raising support for its college by arguing that women’s
virtue was best guaranteed by education.27 Second, working to fulfill these stated aims, the
curriculum and practices followed at women’s colleges reveals that these institutions intended to
remind women of their identities as purveyors of piety. The Bible was to be “the first text-book”
of the woman’s college,28 the “exercises of each day [were] commenced by reading the Bible and
prayer,”29 and students were “required to attend Divine Services on the Sabbath.”30 Not only

24

Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-1880, 71.

25

As quoted by Watters, “The History of Mary Baldwin College, 1842-1942,” 23.

26

Harmony Female College, Circular of Harmony Female College, Sumter Mineral Springs, South
Carolina, for 1859, 6.
27

Clinton, “Equally Their Due: The Education of the Planter Daughter in the Early Republic,” 48.

28

As quoted by Watters, “The History of Mary Baldwin college, 1842-1942” 22.

66

were students required to take part in explicitly religious coursework and practices, but they were
reminded that every aspect of their education was grounded in religion. As Mary Watters points
out in her examination of Mary Baldwin College, women’s study of various subjects was
justified on religious grounds: geology “because it reveals the glories of God’s creation,”
etymology because it “form[s] the soul for its immortal destiny,” 31 and astronomy because it
cultivated admiration for God’s works and gave “rise to a new field of devotion,” that was
“above the reach of vulgar minds.”32 Finally, that college was meant to cultivate piety in female
students is clear in parents’ letters to their college-attending daughters. Writing to his daughter
Lou who was a student at Wesleyan college in the 1850s, Dr. Sanders reminded her that “religion
is the most essential, all-important quality of education” and thus that she needed “above all” to
“know the Lord Jesus Christ as [her] Saviour,” for “this is the highest knowledge, far more
precious than rubies or gold.”33 Similarly, R.W. Bailey reminded his daughters that they were
“being educated for eternity,” and thus, that while in college, they needed to continually ask
themselves “What bearing and influence is this to have on my eternal interests?” 34 Emerging as a
means to prepare young women for their prescribed roles as the redeemers of southern society,
therefore, college, with its structured prayer meetings, mandatory Sabbath-observance, and
religion-infused classes, offered encouragement in this endeavour.
29

Athens Female College, Second Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Pupils of Athens Female College
at Athens, Tennessee (July 5, 1860), 14-15.
30

Athens Female College, Second Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Pupils of Athens Female College
at Athens, Tennessee (July 5, 1860), 14-15; Greenville Woman’s College, Catalogue of the Trustees, Faculty, and
Students of the Greenville Baptist Female College, 13; Watters, “The History of Mary Baldwin College, 18421942,” 22.
31

Watters, “The History of Mary Baldwin College, 1842-1942,” 22.

32

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 224.

33

Sanders, July 15, 1862, as quoted by Young in “‘Genius uncultivated is like a meteor of the night’:
Motives and Experiences of Methodist Female College Life in the Confederate States of America,” 11.

67

Proponents of women’s education made clear that the cultivation of women’s piety
through education was not only meant to ensure the salvation of individual women, but rather to
redeem the entire society. While education was intended to prepare women strictly for the home,
southern proponents of female education argued that educated women’s influence could extend
beyond the domestic sphere and into society through women’s influence on men. One popular
proponent of women’s education, R.W. Bailey, suggested that one of the “true reasons” women
were to be educated was because they exercised the power to convert family members into
Christian believers and thereby transform society. To illustrate his point, Bailey quoted John
Randolph, who famously asserted “I should have been an infidel had it not been for the influence
exerted on men by my mother, as she taught me to kneel at her side, and fold my little hands and
say, ‘Our Father who art in heaven,’”35 According to Bailey, it was through witnessing women’s
piety that husbands were led to “regard [women’s] heart[s] as the hallowed depositor[ies] of all
that is pure” and, consequently, to look to women’s “sense of propriety” to decide what was right
for society.36 Furthermore, proponents of female education argued that educated women in
particular were in a special position to transform society because of their ability to converse with
men on an intellectual level. As Ronald Lora and William Henry Longton point out in their
analysis of the Southern Ladies’ Book, a magazine established in conjunction with the founding
of Georgia Female College in the 1830s, proponents of women’s education such as George
Foster Pierce and Philip Coleman Pendleton believed that women could fulfill their duty of
morally regenerating society by leading men up from “gross sensuality” to “the world of the

34

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 11.

35

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 207.

36

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 207.

68

mind.”37 They could do this, the editors of the Southern Ladies’ Book suggested, by getting an
education and “bring[ing] [their] ‘magic power to the aid of Literature.’”38 By focusing men’s
minds on virtue, women would inadvertently impel men to “produce an authentic southern
literature” that would transform society. 39
In addition to working to shape young women into pious individuals who were prepared
to transform society morally through converting husbands, women’s colleges aimed to reinforce
women’s assumedly ordained identities as dependent beings. As mentioned in Chapter Two,
women’s colleges employed strict codes of conduct, outlining when and with whom students
could leave campus, what they were allowed to buy, and with whom they were able to visit in
campus parlours.40 What is significant is that it was considered essential for female students to
obey the rules set by college authorities not only because this kept order, but because doing so
reinforced women’s subordinate position within society. In his Letters to Daughters at School,
Bailey wrote to his daughters saying that he “require[d] in [their] teachers not only the ability to
teach, but [the] authority to govern,”41 because “the youth who does not regard [her] teacher . . .
with the subjection rendered a protector, is not prepared to profit suitably by his instructions” and
will “receive lessons of insubordination”42 that will cause the pupil to disregard other authority
after leaving college--namely, male patriarchs.43

37

Lora and Longton, The Conservative Press in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century America, 169.

38

Lora and Longton, The Conservative Press in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century America, 169.

39

Lora and Longton, The Conservative Press in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century America, 169.

40

“Chapter Two: ‘We Live for Each Other’: Female Friendship at Women’s Colleges,” 9.

41

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 155.

42

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 156.

43

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 157.

69

Like their counterparts in wider southern society, college women often lived up to their
prescribed roles as spiritual beings. Taught that their identities were linked to regenerating the
world morally, female students’ behaviour suggests that they believed that it was not only their
duty to prepare for taking on their roles as redeemers of the home, but also to offer spiritual
guidance to one another while at college. That this was the case is most obvious in students’
obsession with spiritual revivals and preoccupation with ensuring their classmates’ personal
salvation. The diary of Ella Gertrude Thomas, a student at Wesleyan Female College in the late
1840s and early 1850s, does a particularly thorough job of describing the culture of piety young
women cultivated while at college. Having herself experienced a spiritual conversion during her
first few weeks at college,44 Thomas demonstrates the general interest college women had in
evangelicalism in her chronicling of the “glorious revivals” that took place weekly at Wesleyan,
revivals that took place both through formal prayer meetings and more informal student
gatherings.45
In formal prayer meetings, students expressed their concern that their peers grow
spiritually and/or “obtain religion.” Thomas notes the frequency and intensity of formal meetings
in her journal, recording the number of those converted at each. On 2 February1849, Thomas
writes, “today we had a glorious revival. Sallie Tucker, Victoria Holt, Amy Sparks, Joe Freeman,
Lou Warrington, [and] Lou Warner have been converted.46 Just four days later, Thomas records
another prayer meeting, this time noting that two more of her peers “became converted.”47
Again, on another occasion, Thomas chronicles a “blessed conversion of souls to God,” an event
44

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 82.

45

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 83-92.

46

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 83-92.

47

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 83.

70

wherein “some [students] found a Saviour for the first time [and] others were reclaimed sheep
which had strayed from the fold of the ‘Good Shepperd.’”48 This event was followed by another
“glorious meeting,” wherein eleven more “obtained religion.”49 In all, Thomas notes that more
than twenty-two female students were converted through prayer meetings during her short time
at Wesleyan.50
In addition to expressing concern for peers’ spiritual lives through formal prayer
meetings, students worked to inspire religious zeal in their fellow classmates by holding informal
gatherings in their rooms and engaging one another in religious conversations. At times, the
revivalism that was sparked at formal prayer meetings concluded in students gathering in dorm
rooms to continue experiencing “manifestation[s] of God” late into the night. 51 After a Sunday
night prayer meeting wherein two girls “became converted,” Thomas “set up with Puss Tinsley
all night.”52 On other occasions students met in one another’s rooms to witness conversions.
Thomas records how she was called to Ria Easterling’s room to witness Easterling being
“happy”; Thomas “went in to see and remained hearing the girls sing until eleven.”53 The next
day, Thomas spent the afternoon in Bettie William’s room with “a great many girls” who “were
seeking religion.”54 A few hours later, she “went down to Daughter Solomon’s room to see Bell
Fernandez, [who] was perfectly happy lying on the bed and shouting the praises of God.” 55 That

48

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 86.

49

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 87.

50

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 92.

51

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 83.

52

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 83.

53

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 87.

54

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 87.

71

evening, Thomas joined other students in celebrating classmate Sue Evan’s “obtain[ing]
religion.”56
That many students grasped onto their prescribed identities as pious regenerators is
especially evident in their concern for their peers who did not show signs of conversion or
spiritual growth even when urged to at student gatherings. Thomas pays particular attention in
her diary to students whom she deems in need of spiritual conversion and whose salvation she is
“anxious” about.57 Repeatedly throughout her college years Thomas makes mention of Joe
Freeman, a girl whom Thomas “dearly love[s]” and “take[s] a very great interest in,” but
considers unresponsive to evangelical Christianity.58 Describing one particularly exciting
evening gathering in Daughter Solomon’s room, Thomas notes that “there appeared to be but
little feeling on [Joe’s] side.”59 Joe “stood apparently unheeding [their friend] Ella’s prayers to
kneel,” and only knelt when Ella declared that she “would give up her search for religion if Joe
would not go on with her.”60 Astonished by Joe’s “invincib[ility]” on this particular evening,
Thomas takes the responsibility for Joe’s salvation upon herself. A little less than a month after
the meeting in Daughter Solomon’s room, Thomas pleads with Joe “to go and be prayed for” at
church, but Joe would, ultimately, “not be persuaded.”61 While Joe’s spiritual state is of primary

55

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 87.

56

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 88.

57

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 87.

58

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 87. It is peculiar that Thomas cites Joe Freeman as one of the girls who was
converted on 2 February1849, but then outlines Freeman’s unresponsiveness to Christianity throughout the rest of
her journal. Perhaps Thomas believed that Freeman’s conversion was not total or genuine, that she had not
experienced a second blessing, or that she had lapsed in her faith.
59

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 88.

60

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 88.

61

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 92.

72

importance to Thomas, Joe is not the only one Thomas shows concern for in her diary. After
“talk[ing] with Mary Tucker on the subject of religion,” over dinner one evening, Thomas writes,
“How interested I feel for her. How anxious I am with reference to her spiritual welfare.” 62
While the detailed attention Thomas gives to the religious activities at Wesleyan is
certainly remarkable, the religious culture Thomas describes developing at Wesleyan was not
uncommon for women’s colleges generally. Rather, the type of religious culture outlined in
Thomas’ diary, a culture which was preoccupied with female students’ spiritual growth and/or
conversion, was a common element of the southern woman’s college. Noting the development of
a similar religious culture at the school she was attending in the 1850s, Mary Bailey informed
her father that “a revival of religion [has] commenced in [our] school [and] many young ladies
are anxiously inquiring what they shall do to be saved.” 63 According to Mary, “several [of her
peers] ha[d] already obtained a hope of pardon,” and she “humbly place[d] her own name in that
class.”64 In her journal, Susan Nye Hutchison, a teacher at a Raleigh woman’s college, noted that
that a “Mrs. Smelt and Mrs. Moore called to see [her],” and that one of them read “a most
interesting letter” written by Mr. Davis from Athens [Female College] “descriptive of the revival
now going on in the college.”65
By concentrating on spirituality while at school, young women fulfilled the expectation
that their identities be linked to piety and moral regeneration. At the same time they reinforced
the Protestant ideal of the Christian woman, they also, somewhat paradoxically, challenged the

62

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 87.

63

Mary Bailey’s letters as described by her father, Bailey, Daughters at School Instructed in a Series of

Letters, 39.
64

65

Bailey, Daughters at School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 39.

Susan Nye Hutchison, Journal entry for Nov. 10 1826, SHC, accessed February 10, 2012, http://www.lib
.unc.edu/mss/inv/h/Hutchison_Susan_Davis_Nye.html.

73

ideal, for in their very upholding of the image of the pious woman female students exercised an
independence that southern evangelicalism did not intend to grant them. Rather than simply
adhering to the idea that they be passive and submissive, young women used the authority
granted them in religion to be the leaders of their own lives while at college.
In the midst of fulfilling the expectation that they be pious individuals, female students
challenged strict rules outlined by colleges. In reading through Thomas’s journal it becomes
clear that having a focus on peers’ spiritual conditions provided students the opportunity to
create their own rules and schedules. Numerous entries in Thomas’s journal describe how a
preoccupation with spirituality became an excuse for neglecting homework and skipping class.
Staying up to “hear the girls sing until eleven” during one particularly exciting evening of
“glorious revival” hindered Thomas from reading over her lesson. 66 On another occasion she
“ask[ed] Mr. Stone to excuse her from recitation” so that she could go down to Daughter
Solomon’s room to check on Bell Fernandez, who, she reports, “was perfectly happy lying on the
bed shouting the praises of God.”67 At times attention to religious matters concluded in Thomas
both neglecting her homework and thereafter skipping class. Too busy talking to her peers to
prepare for her Astronomy class, Thomas “stayed away from recitation and from 11 to 12 was in
Fannie Floyd’s room talking to her.”68 Again, a few weeks later, Thomas notes that she “did not
attend Dr. Ellison’s recitation in Astronomy or Mr. Stone’s recitation in Natural Philosophy.” 69
While using religious reasons at times seemed to work at excusing Thomas from classes,
eventually her lack of attention to college schedules and rules dissatisfied college authorities. On
66

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 87.

67

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 87.

68

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 84.

69

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 88.

74

one Wednesday evening Thomas “received the harshest reproof [she] ever did receive” from Mr.
Stone, a teacher whose classes Thomas had been repeatedly skipping. 70
In addition to using their identities as religious persons to neglect homework and skip
classes, female students set their own rules and schedules by staying up late and being noisy.
Detailing the events of Sue Evans’s evening conversion, Thomas writes, “all [the girls] were
shouting and praying and making a good deal of noise when someone said Mr. Myers was
coming [down the hallway].” Displeased with the girls’ behaviour, Mr. Myers “requested [them]
to come to [their] rooms” and he did this in such a manner that “all [the young women] stopped
shouting immediately and left the room.”71 Rather than paying strict attention to the rules
outlined for them, rules which according to parents were intended to remind them of authorities
in their lives and thereby prepare them to be submissive later in life,72 students used religion as a
way to challenge college rules and exercise authority in their own lives.
While female students collectively reshaped female identity by embracing roles as
spiritual individuals, there existed a tension within the religious culture students developed that
suggests that college women did not view themselves as partaking in a conscious, united female
effort to thwart southern gender ideals. Rather, female students’ maintaining of a hierarchal
structure even within religious culture suggests that they employed a method of selective identity
when defining themselves. That a hierarchal structure based on religious assessment existed at
women’s colleges is evident in the very paternal attitude young women adopted in the process of
working to convert others. Not only did young women like Thomas attempt to take on an
70

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 92. Thomas does not explicitly state that the reason she received a “harsh
reproof” from Mr. Stone was because of her skipping his classes, but given that Thomas repeatedly mentions
neglecting homework from and skipping this class, it is inferred.
71

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 88.

72

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 156-157.

75

instructive role in their unconverted friends’ lives, but they associated unresponsiveness to
Christianity with coldness,73 a characteristic that was deemed unbecoming for young women and
was equated, at least by Thomas, with ugliness.74 By measuring womanhood according to
religious behaviour,75 young women reinforced their own individual womanhood while calling
into question others’ sense of womanhood. And since the extent to which a young woman
fulfilled particular gender ideals was a measure of woman’s status, affirming one’s own
womanhood (in this case through displaying pious behaviour) drew lines of superiority and
inferiority among female students.
By drawing lines between superiority and inferiority based on religious devotion, female
students built hierarchal structures like those encouraged by wider southern society. Relying on
an intensely hierarchal structure to sustain society, southerners not only stratified society
according to economic class and race, but classified individuals in every respect--including
according to religious standards. In fact, as is evident in parents’ advice to their college-attending
daughters, students were expected to draw lines between themselves and their peers using
religion as a guide. Parents repeatedly reminded their daughters that choosing their friends
needed to be a thoughtful and strategic process, one wherein attention to “commonalities,”
(meaning, a type of class), was essential. One of the ways in which students could measure if a
fellow student was worth befriending was by assessing her religious character.76 Writing to his
college-attending daughters, R.W. Bailey made it clear that they should be selective in building

73

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 88.

74

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 85.

75

Virginia Ingraham Burr, ed. The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Thomas, 1848-1889 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 25.
76

As mentioned in “Chapter One,” another way of measuring the value of a friend was by paying attention
to her refinement, and, consequently her elite status. See “Chapter One,” 32.

76

friendships, “always prefer[ing] those for [their] intimate companionship who [gave] evidence
that they [were] influenced by religious principle.”77 According to Bailey, there were not only
important distinctions to be made between those of higher and lower economic class, but
between those who were deemed more or less religious. After warning his daughters that “the
boarding school furnishes [not only] many advantages,” but also “concomitant evils” that should
be “carefully avoided,” Bailey suggests that, while boarding school is reserved for a select group,
“the selection is by no means in strict and single reference to points, which render the selection
always best suited to your companionship.” 78 Bailey advises his daughters to use religious
behaviour to gauge the worth of a peer’s companionship, writing,
You may find, even in young ladies of parentage highly respectable…a disregard for
religion, and even sometimes infidel sentiments. The allowed and allowable habits of the
different classes of society are sometimes found assembled together in the same boarding
school, and without reflection and a proper discrimination, you may greatly err by
confounding things that should be separated.79
By making clear that religious behaviour, serving in the South as a marker of class, was a
measurement of worth, parents like Bailey encouraged young women to draw lines between
themselves and their peers, and, in doing so, to exercise a condescension that contributed to the
building of a hierarchy based on religion.
Examining the religious culture that developed at women’s colleges highlights two
points: that southern evangelicalism was full of ironies and, second, that it was amidst these
ironies that college women found the space to exert agency in their lives. The first irony existent
in southern evangelicalism is that while common interpretations of the Bible suggested that
women were by nature dependent creatures whose priority it was to obey male patriarchs, the
77

Bailey, Daughters at School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 167.

78

Bailey, Daughters at School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 161.

79

Bailey, Daughters at School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 162.

77

very status evangelicalism granted to women as pious individuals challenged the notion that
women were helpless creatures who should take on only subordinate roles within society. For in
simply using the religious authority granted them, southern women simultaneously revealed their
ability to be independent, authoritative figures. This was certainly the case at the southern
woman’s college, where young women fulfilled their identities as pious individuals at the same
time that they challenged their supposedly dependent nature. The second irony inherent in
southern evangelicalism is that at the same time that evangelicalism encouraged young women to
maintain identities as spiritual beings, it also stipulated that they remain passive and submissive-a combination which, considering the very “active, noisy, physical, and enthusiastic” nature of
southern evangelicalism, proved impossible to accomplish.80 In female students’ very embrace of
their identities as pious individuals, therefore, they encountered a religion which was itself
inconsistent with nineteenth-century ideals for women.81 It was in the midst of these tensions
inherent in southern evangelical ideals, therefore, that women shaped their lives and identities.
The ways in which female students shaped their lives through their religious behaviour
reveal that, unlike many scholarly narratives suggest, women were not simply victims of
southern religion.82 Instead, female students’ behaviour suggests that women both challenged
and maintained Protestant gender ideals. By concentrating on the religious conditions of their
fellow peers, women embraced their prescribed roles as pious individuals who were concentrated
on morally regenerating society. In the midst of embracing this role, however, young women
80

Anna M. Lawrence, “The Fires of Evangelicalism in the Cauldron of the Early Republic: Race, Class,
and Gender in the Second Great Awakening” in Early Republic: People and Perspectives, ed. Andrew K. Frank
(Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2009), 163.
81

82

Lawrence, “The Fires of Evangelicalism in the Cauldron of the Early Republic,” 163.

Stephan outlines the tendency existent in scholarship to study only what “religion did to southern
women” in his work Redeeming the Southern Family: Evangelical Women and Domestic Devotion in the
Antebellum South, 14.

78

collectively challenged their identities as passive and dependent beings. Even while redefining
female identity, however, they did not embrace a conscious feminist agenda, but rather
maintained hierarchies amongst themselves that reveal that they did not fully reject southern
social systems. Instead, young women exercised selective identities, both challenging and
fulfilling gender ideals in order to live as they wished. Recognizing that southern college women
both challenged and contributed to southern gender ideals through their cultivation of a religious
culture draws attention to their “often deeply ambivalent roles as social actors”83 and underlines
the problem with viewing religion as a monolithic force in southern women’s lives.

83

George Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1991), 271.

79

CHAPTER FOUR:
“Of What Use is All My Learning, the Result of My College Education?” 1:
Southern Women’s Lives After College
An analysis that seeks to measure the value of southern women’s education benefits not
only from an analysis of what women did while at college, but what they did after graduation.
Assessing the usefulness of women’s education by paying attention to how women used and
viewed their education after leaving college offers a different perspective on the value of
women’s education than an examination consisting solely of observing educational purposes and
curriculum. For while examinations which focus on curriculum and purposes typically conclude
that women’s education, being concentrated on preparing women for their subordinate status
within the home, initiated no social change, 2 a look at educated women’s actual lives challenges
this assumption. For in the same way that female students created their own cultures and selected
identities for themselves while at college, they continued to structure their own identities after
college. An analysis of women’s diaries and letters of correspondence reveals that women
continued to challenge the identities prescribed to them by their education through maintaining
female friendships and extending beyond their “sphere” after college. At the same time, however,
women did not advocate the formation of an inclusive sisterhood, as is evident in their continued
upholding of southern hierarchal structures.
That scholars often come to the conclusion that southern women’s education was useless
and thereby oppressive makes sense not only if one examines the curriculum and practices
followed at college, but also if one takes students and parents’ perceptions of leaving college as

1

2

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 423.

See, for example, Gordon, “From Seminary to University: An Overview of Women’s Higher Education,
1870-1920,” 474; McMillen, “Education and Religion,” 100.

80

representing reality. Both parents and students asserted that leaving college marked a new phase
in life--one which was void of certain pleasantries offered at college. Considering that parents
and college authorities viewed women’s education as a means to a particular end--preparing
daughters for their roles as wives and mothers--once a young woman spent enough time at
college to make a desirable marital match, her education was considered complete. And once her
education was deemed complete, a young woman’s time of being a carefree schoolgirl ended and
she was meant to take on a more serious position as a young lady--one who was too preoccupied
with fulfilling the duties of a wife and mother to take part in the same types of activities engaged
in while at college. Parents constantly warned their daughters that college was only a transitory
time and thus that they needed to make the most of it, preparing themselves to fulfill its ultimate
goals. Acknowledging the idea that women’s education was only suited for a particular purpose
and that pleasantries like intellectual enrichment would not last in the midst of women’s daily
duties, one father reminded his college-attending daughter that “now [was] the time for [her]
improvement” because “as [she] advance[d] in life tho’ [her] inclination may lead to reading,
[her] situation may prevent [her] doing so.”3 Similarly reminding students that their school days
were coming to a close and that they needed to prepare for a different type of life--a more serious
domestic life--Principal George Davis instructed members of a graduating class to “join in the
song and the dance. But in such a sort that when the lights are faded, and the garlands dead, you
can, without a sigh, remember that this is but the holiday apartment, and seek your homes in the
quiet little parlor, where the wife and mother dwell.”4

3

As quoted by Clinton, “Equally Their Due: The Education of the Planter Daughter in the Early Republic,”

4

Davis, “Address Delivered before the Young Ladies of Greensboro Female College, 14 th May 1856,” 16.

57.

81

As Anya Jabour’s study of young women’s keepsake volumes makes clear, young
women paid heed to parents’ and authorities’ warnings that their blissful college days would
soon be over and replaced with more serious ones.5 That students realized and were burdened by
the idea that a new phase of life was upon them is clear in the sadness they expressed concerning
leaving college. Having experienced their “school days [as] [the] happiest” days of their lives, 6
young women viewed graduation as marking the sorrowful separation of friends and the
beginning of a new and difficult phase of their lives.7 Jabour notes that female students not only
linked their separation from college with “loneliness, sorrow, disease, and death,”8 but that “their
forecasts for the future were invariably gloomy” because of the harsh realities awaiting them in
“sad womanhood.”9
Female students were apprehensive about leaving college and taking on roles of wives
and mothers and this is understandable given the practical realities of southern women’s lives.
Despite the myth that southern belles enjoyed lives of luxury, the pains of marriage and
motherhood remained acute even for women of high class. Rather than living in “a South of
magnolias, mansions, and courtly gentlemen,”10 elite educated women lived in a society that
glorified woman’s role to the extent that it became burdensome. As “naturally” pious and
submissive persons, southern women were taught that maintaining a successful marriage was

5

Anya Jabour, “Albums of Affection: Female Friendship and Coming of Age in Antebellum Virginia,” The
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 107, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 125-59.
6

Elizabeth Nelson, Carrington Family Papers, March 15, 1831, as quoted in Jabour’s Scarlett’s Sisters, 76.

7

Jabour, “Albums of Affection: Female Friendship and Coming of Age in Antebellum Virginia,” 135.

8

Jabour, “Albums of Affection: Female Friendship and Coming of Age in Antebellum Virginia,”134.

9

Jabour, “Album of Affection: Female Friendship and Coming of Age in Antebellum Virginia,” 137.

10

McMillen, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, 12.

82

their responsibility, even if victims of a double standard of marital fidelity. 11 Furthermore, the
“positive attention heaped on motherhood left little reason [for southerners] to limit family size,”
even though childbirth proved trying for women’s physical health, and resulted in high death
rates--twice that of women in the Northeast.12 In addition to the burdens southern ideals of
marriage and motherhood heaped on women, the idea that women were created to occupy the
domestic sphere meant that the majority of women were destined to “spen[d] their lives in
relative isolation.”13
Though female students contemplated the harsh realities they would encounter after
college, not all students passively accepted the idea that the educations they received and the
relationships they formed at college were over. Rather, some students expressed frustration over
the idea that their education was over and questioned its supposed purposes. In her semiautobiographical novel Lily, Susan Petigru King spoke for many women when she expressed her
frustration at the idea that “the remnants of women’s schooling would vanish” as soon as a
young woman left college. Through a fictional character, King bitingly critiques the limited
goals of women’s education, proclaiming that it “might [have been] a great deal better had all the
money spent on these accomplishments [to have been] put in the Savings bank” than to spend it
on something so limiting, and therefore in her opinion, so useless.14 Similarly critiquing the idea
that education should be concerned solely with preparing women for the home, one southern
student mused “it seems too singular . . . to talk of going to school for society.” 15 Instead of

11

McMillen, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, 31-32; 110.

12

McMIllen, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, 59, 69.

13

McMillen, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, 6-7.

14

Susan Pettigru King Bowen, Lily (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1855), 77.

83

simply assuming their somewhat burdensome roles as refined and pious wives and mothers,
therefore, college women questioned how they could put their educations to use, wondering
“How will all this end? To what end am I destined?”16
Taken together, the expressed purposes of women’s education, along with students’
frustrations with these seemingly limited purposes, leads many scholars to conclude that
women’s education did little to transform southern women’s actual lives. Noting that education
“exposed [women] to new forms and varieties of knowledge,” Lynn Gordon suggests that
“[women] were nonetheless confined to the same domestic duties as their uneducated mothers
and grandmothers.”17 Similarly assuming that education worked to consign women to the
household and played only a very minor role in changing women’s lives, Sally McMillen writes
that, while schooling could “open women’s eyes and encourage unconscious challenges that
could lead women to question, explore, and see beyond the limits of their circumscribed world,
only a few southern women embraced such challenges enough to alter their behaviour or
expectations.”18 According to McMillen, “the musings of young women who questioned the
system must not have been too prolonged or deep, for southern girls were well trained to obey
and anticipate a life similar to that of their mothers.”19 While scholars may be correct in asserting
that “southern ladies were not trained to explore new avenues of experience, but had preordained
roles as wives and mothers in the community of gentility,” 20 interpretations which attempt to

15

Campbell as quoted by Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in
America’s Republic, 103.
16

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 84.

17

Gordon, “From Seminary to University: An Overview of Women’s Higher Education, 1870-1920,” 474.

18

McMillen, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, 100.

19

McMillen, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, 100.

84

measure the transformative value of women’s education based solely on the intentions of college
authorities do not account for women’s responses to their education. For in addition to some
students’ explicit frustrations with the limited goals of female education, students’ post-college
behaviours reveal that women used their college education to redefine southern womanhood and
transform their worlds.
First, female students used their college experience to challenge the idea that their
identities were wrapped up in their being female family members and they did this by
maintaining friendships after college. While female students were instructed to prize husbands
above all else and to build female friendships for the mere sake of making connections that
would prove advantageous for their future families,21 after college women continued in their
schoolgirl behaviour of privileging female friendship over family connections, and, in doing so,
inadvertently challenged the very assumption that marriage was women’s destiny. Having taken
part in what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg terms the “female world of love and ritual” while at
college,22 educated women did not suddenly terminate the friendships they developed with their
peers after leaving college. Instead, women remained fixated on their friendships, both
continuing to converse with their peers and, perhaps more importantly, to romanticize these
friendships. In former Wesleyan student Ella Gertrude Thomas’ diary it is clear that Thomas not
only remains in frequent contact with her friends, but that she idealizes her friendships. One
example of this idealization occurs in an entry dated 17 May 1852, wherein Thomas reports that
she has written a story using her college friends as the story’s main characters, noting in

20

Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Women’s World in the Old South, 137. Emphasis mine.

21

Bailey, Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters, 166.

22

Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in NineteenthCentury America”: 1-30.

85

particular their romantic and heroic natures.23 Furthermore, former students like Thomas
glorified their schoolgirl friendships to such an extent that they grieved when hearing news of
their peers’ upcoming marriages because, as Anya Jabour points out, young women viewed
marriage as marking the breakup of friendships. Receiving a wedding invitation from Mat
Oliver, a “dear” friend who “was intimately connected with all [her] school life,” 24 Thomas notes
that she “wept bitterly,” at the “sad reflection” that her friend was now married.25
Since marriage was viewed by many former students as breaking up deep
companionships formed at college, some young women not only grieved over their friends’
marriages, but decided that they would rather maintain their friendships than fulfill the societal
expectation that they marry. Examining the life of former Edgeworth students Bessie Lacy and
Maggie Morgan, Steven Stowe notes that these two, having found companionship in female
friendship, wanted nothing more than a future in a “snug little room” with “a great big mahogany
bedstead, where [they] would sleep like they always [did].” 26 Similarly, cousins Laura and
Louisa Wirt “agreed that domestic occupations were disagreeable,” and “made a solemn promise
to each other to remain single. They would live in what they called ‘Old Maid’s Hall’ and ‘live
and die in single blessedness.’”27 Viewing the duties of a wife and mother to be too burdensome,

23

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 105.

24

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 83.

25

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 106.

26

Steven Stowe, “‘The Thing Not Its Vision’: A Woman's Courtship and Her Sphere in the Southern
Planter Class,” Feminist Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 116.
27

Anya Jabour, “‘It Will Never Do for Me to Be Married’: The Life of Laura Wirt Randall, 1803-1833,”
Journal of the Early Republic 17, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 196.

86

Sarah Lois Wadley too dreamed of a life of “single blessedness,” and after college dedicated
herself to her own reading and teaching rather than to finding an eligible suitor.28
Though most educated southern women were unable to fulfill the goal of “living in single
blessedness,” they did, nonetheless, continue to prize female friendship and, in doing so, shaped
southern marriage patterns. Having experienced deep friendship with their college peers, young
women sought true affection in marriage and thereby bolstered nineteenth-century appeals for
companionate marriage. For example, while Bessie Lacy was unable to fulfill her dream of living
her life as an “old maid,” Steven Stowe’s study of Lacy’s correspondence with her fiancé
Thomas Webber Dewey reveals that Lacy, having experienced intimacy with her friend Maggie
Morgan, expected the same intimacy to be a part of her courtship and marriage. Stowe writes
“through her strong friendship with Maggie, Bessie learned to expect a kind of intimacy from a
well-loved person, an intimacy which would become an emotional standard for her later
relationships.”29
That college played a role in inspiring women’s appeals for companionate marriage is
perhaps further evidenced in educated women’s choosing to marry later than average. As
Michael O’Brien points out, while the median age for marriage among southern women was
nineteen, a number of educated women married in their late twenties or even their early thirties.30
This fact is significant given the observed pattern that individuals tend to marry later when
having the freedom to choose a partner.31 Rather than basing marital choices simply on suitors’

28

Wadley, Diary, August 8, 1859-May 15, 1865.

29

Stowe, “The Thing Not Its Vision,” 116.

30

Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860, vol. 1
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 264.
31

Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage (New York: Penguin Books,
2005), 145.

87

wealth and family status, former college students drew on their college experiences of friendship
to seek relationships of mutual affection. By taking part not only in reassessing singlehood,
therefore, but also in redefining nineteenth-century marital relationships, these women not only
dreamed of, but inaugurated “a future destiny wherein their identities were not linked primarily
with husbands.”32
By redefining southern womanhood through reassessing singleness and bolstering ideals
for companionate marriage, educated women not only attempted to transform their own worlds,
but also shaped nineteenth-century society at large.33 This recognition not only challenges the
assumption that women passively accepted the gender constructs their educations meant to
reinforce, but highlights the importance of a “bottom-up” approach to American history. Most
interpretations of American history attribute changes in ideas concerning gender and marriage
patterns ultimately to overarching causes like politics, economics and watershed events. For
example, in her work Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, Stephanie Coontz
suggests that appeals for companionate marriage were inspired by Enlightenment ideals34 and in
her Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations 1780-1840, Lee
Virginia Chambers-Schiller suggests that appeals for companionate marriage emerged ultimately
because nineteenth-century economics altered demographics.35 While certainly helpful in
explaining overarching causes for changes in marital ideals, these explanations do not altogether
explain changes in the South, a society where Enlightenment ideals like those described by
32

Jabour, “‘It Will Never Do for Me to Be Married’: The Life of Laura Wirt Randall, 1803-1833,” 195.

33

It is interesting to note that educated southern women’s reassessment of singleness anticipates a later
trend among educated women to choose to remain single. See Coontz, Marriage, A History, 207, on collegeattending women’s choices in the late nineteenth century.
34

35

Coontz, Marriage, A History, 5.

Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations
1780-1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984).

88

Coontz were interpreted in a way that continued to reinforce patriarchy and hierarchy 36 and
where a capitalist system like the one Chambers-Schiller identifies as an instigator of changing
patterns in the Northeast was not yet in place. Because they lack the explanatory power to fully
understand changes that were occurring within marriage patterns in the South, existing scholarly
interpretations of American marriage patterns should consider the importance of education for,
as Patricia Palmieri invites scholars to consider, education, among other things, has the power to
“affect changes in marriage philosophy.” 37 When examining the lives of educated southern
women, it becomes clear that women themselves, and not just overarching forces such as politics
and economics, were agents of societal change.
Second, in the midst of maintaining female friendships, college women continued to
challenge the identities prescribed to them in their educations after leaving college by
perpetuating both a real and an “imagined” intellectual community. 38 Instead of assuming that
their days of study were over because of the duties brought on by wifedom and motherhood,
former students continued to engage in intellectual activities. Contrary to what scholars such as
Michael O’Brien assume,39 southern college women both founded and engaged in literary
societies. Perhaps the most established female literary society in the antebellum South, the
Sigourney Club, founded in 1848 and located at Limestone Springs Female High in South
Carolina, was a group made up of both current college students and alumnae. Committed to what

36

See, for example, the South’s negotiating of Enlightenment and revolutionary ideals in Fitzhugh,
Sociology for the South or the Failure of Free Society.
37

Patricia A. Palmieri, “Review of Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations
of 1740-1820,” American Quarterly 37, no. 4 (Autumn 1985): 603.
38

Kelley describes “imagined intellectual communities” in her Learning to Stand and Speak: Women,
Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic, 104. I borrow the term from her.
39

O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860, 260.

89

Barbara Ryan and Amy Thomas call “the same objective of all literary societies--the making of
the learned woman,”40 members of the Sigourney club worked to redefine women’s identity by
engaging in intellectual discussions often reserved for men. As Mary Kelley points out in her
work on antebellum literary societies, members of the Sigourney club engaged in discussions
concerning the “public sphere,” including debating matters of national and political economy. 41
In doing so, these literary societies “provided occasions for grafting onto the conventional model
of womanhood a powerful female intellect.”42
Furthermore, in addition to maintaining a real learning community like that which young
women established while in college, college graduates continued to challenge the idea that their
identities were defined solely by their connection to family by engaging in an “imagined”
intellectual community. 43 Because of the rural nature of the South, not all women had the
privilege of joining literary societies after leaving college. However, as an examination of
women’s diaries and letters makes clear, this does not mean that these women disengaged from
intellectual activity. Rather, women living in rural settings continued to educate themselves by
creating an imagined intellectual community. The diary of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas
highlights that, after attending college, women continued to engage in academic pursuits through
both their reading and their writing about it. Throughout her diary, Thomas repeatedly reminds
her imagined reader that she is attempting to build upon and continually “improve” 44 her college

40

Barbara Ryan and Amy Thomas, Reading Acts: US Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800-1950
(Memphis: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 70.
41

Kelley, “‘A More Glorious Revolution’: Women’s Antebellum Reading Circles and the Pursuit of
Influence,” 173.
42

Ryan and Thomas, Reading Acts: US Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800-1950, 70.

43

Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 104.

44

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 278.

90

education through reading “solid” texts.45 Among those texts she deemed worthy of serious study
included political speeches, historical biographies, travel diaries, and religious and philosophical
works.46 Similarly highlighting the importance of continued academic study in her life after
college, Sarah Lois Wadley constantly made note of her reading and writing, marking out so
many books that she wanted to read that she was forced to contend “sometimes I attempt to do so
many things that they are all neglected.”47 By creating both real and imagined intellectual
communities, former college students challenged the idea that women’s academic study was
useful only, or even primarily, for its ability to help women attract eligible suitors and to keep
their husbands content. Rather, women prized intellectual activity both as a way to enter male
domains and as a means to personal fulfillment. By maintaining intellectual pursuits after
college, former students challenged the assertion made by college authorities that women were
only destined to be “cultivated,” and not “learned.”48 Furthermore, acknowledging that college
graduates maintained rich intellectual communities despite authorities’ assumptions that doing so
was not integral to female identity challenges contemporary scholars’ assumption that “Most
females accepted the fact that their plantation environment afforded few opportunities for
intellectual enrichment after marriage.”49 Rather than realizing and accepting that “their
intellectual development would most likely wane with marriage, decline with housekeeping,

45

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 155.

46

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 155. Among the many works Thomas cites in her journal are Greek and Roman
epics, numerous works by Shakespeare, including King Lear and The Tempest, poems by Henry Hart Milman, such
as Fazio or the Italian Wife, travel narratives by James Bayard Taylor, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth, and Maria Jane McIntosh’s Charms and Counter Charms. Additionally, Thomas mentions
reading speeches by contemporary politicians, including Thomas Jefferson.
47

Wadley, Diary entry, Friday, June 5, 1863.

48

Herschel V. Johnson, Address, 12-13, as quoted by Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household:
Black and White Women of the Old South, 257.
49

Clinton, “Equally Their Due: The Education of the Planter Daughter in the Early Republic,” 58.

91

dwindle at motherhood, and at no time result in any measure of social recognition” as though this
was simply “a fact of life and a product of culture,”50 young women transcended the limits of
their education’s goals and used what they learned to experience fulfilling lives.
Third, in addition to redefining female identity by maintaining female friendships and a
real and imagined intellectual community, college women challenged the identities their
educations prescribed to them after college by using education to gain positions that extended
beyond their prescribed “sphere.” While southern conventions suggested that “no southern
woman of means ever proposed to work at anything outside of the home,”51 numerous women
put their educations to use after college by opening up schools and/or becoming school teachers.
One school alone produced alumnae who played central roles in the founding of at least eight
institutions of learning.52 Countless women used their college educations to organize institutions
for women’s education. After attending a Methodist college in Madison, Georgia, Rebecca
Latimer Felton used her education to open a school on her own land in order to make money:
“Obliged to earn the bread [they] ate . . . [her] husband and [she] decided to open a school at
Cartersville and do something for the young people who had been almost without school
facilities.”53 Felton noted the role her education played in enabling her to find fulfillment outside
of the domestic sphere in her biography, writing “How I enjoyed that work would take a volume
to tell and my diligence in my own school days was a prime factor for success in this strenuous
time.”54 Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas not only challenged gender constructs by working

50

Clinton, “Equally Their Due: The Education of the Planter Daughter in the Early Republic,” 60.

51

Felton, Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth, 62-63.

52

Mary Claire Engstrom, The Lives of Burwell Students (Hillsborough, NC: the Historic Hillsborough
Commission, 2007), 20.
53

Felton, Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth, 73.

92

outside of the home and earning an income, but directly critiqued the state of female education in
the South, writing “I am inclined to think that we are wrong so far as the education of our women
is concerned. It is apt to be too superficial and our young girls leave school too soon.” 55 Sarah H.
Douglas and Mary Julia Baldwin, graduates of Mary Baldwin College, similarly advocated
women’s education and organized schools in Waynesboro and Staunton, Virginia in the 1840s
and 1850s.56
While not opening new schools, some college graduates stepped out of the domestic
sphere in order to pursue employment in teaching. After her husband fell into heavy debt in the
1850s and 1860s, Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas worked as a school teacher and became the
breadwinner in her family. Highlighting the importance her Wesleyan College education played
in sustaining her very survival, Thomas wrote “The enemy [Union soldiers] can take all else-Thank God they cannot deprive me of my education.”57 Bessie Lacy, Willie Lea, Sarah Lois
Wadley, and Elizabeth Allston Pringle likewise were among the many young women who used
their college educations to gain work as teachers.58 These women not only found financial
security in teaching, but a sense of personal satisfaction. Noting the satisfaction she found in
teaching, Elizabeth Allston Pringle remarked “I find I can teach! And I love it!” 59 and remarked
that she was enthralled by the fact that a Mr. H. had made a comment about “we music teachers”

54

Felton, Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth, 73.

55

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 198.

56

Watters, “The History of Mary Baldwin College, 1842-1942,” 43.

57

Watters, “The History of Mary Baldwin College, 1842-1942,” 244.

58

Beadie and Tolley, Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United
States, 1727-1925, 130.
59

Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 309.

93

to her.60 Also noting that teaching made her feel important and consequential, Sarah Lois Wadley
confessed, “I am constantly occupied, occupation is life to me.”61 By using their education to
enter into and gain satisfaction within the public sphere, college graduates transcended the
intended goals of their engendered education and continued to explore broader definitions of
southern womanhood after leaving college.
Finally, women continued to redefine female identity after leaving college by engaging in
religious activities just as they did while at college. In the nineteenth century southern women
extended beyond the “sphere” of the home by engaging in evangelical reform movements. As the
most elite members of society, educated women played a major role in the organization of such
voluntary societies, using the status granted them not only by religion, but also by their social
class and educational background to advocate for societal change. One of the most prominent
societies educated women organized was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).
Engaging with reform literature proliferating in the northeast, college women not only joined but
headed the WCTU. Rebecca Latimer Felton and Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas were among the
many educated women who served as presidents, vice presidents, and secretaries of the WCTU
and thereby took on public roles.62 Using the writing and communication skills learned at
college, along with the sense of confidence and independence it granted them, these women not
only gained public roles, but, in advocating temperance reform, they challenged southern
society’s double standard concerning men’s and women’s purity. 63 By challenging men’s

60

Pringle, Chronicles of Chicora Wood, 311.

61

Wadley, Diary entry for Friday June 5, 1863.

62

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 18, 450; Joan Marie Johnson, Southern Women at the Seven Sister Colleges:
Feminist Values and Social Activism, 1875-1915, 144.
63

Nell Irvin Painter, “Introduction: the Journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas: An Educated Woman in
the Eras of Slavery, War, and Reconstruction” in The Secret Eye, 35.

94

behaviour, these women of the WCTU, as Cynthia Kierner points out, “subverted the patriarchal
ideal” and did so through a culturally legitimated medium--women’s benevolence.64 Rather than
subjecting themselves to authorities’ demands not to use their education to extend their influence
beyond the household and thereby “soil [their] garments with matters that d[id] not pertain to
[their] position in society,” 65 women made use of religious activities in a way that “gave [them]
outlets for relatively autonomous public activism at a time when few acknowledged their desire
or capacity to contribute to public life.”66
At the same time that college graduates used their education to redefine southern
womanhood and to advocate societal change, they behaved as they did at college and maintained
hierarchal structures that prevented them from embracing all women. Paradoxically this
undermined their very challenge to existing gender constructs. Even though educated women’s
words and behaviour suggest that they believed in an alternative and wider definition of
womanhood, their participation in marital, educational and evangelical reform reveals that these
women did not establish a “sisterhood” based on the premise that all women were bound
together simply based on their gendered status. Rather, many educated women, distancing
themselves from their northeastern abolitionist counterparts, openly admitted that they were not
“women’s rights women”67 and worked to reinforce class and race hierarchies in at least three
interrelated ways. First, while making appeals for companionate marriage, educated women did
not advocate equality in marriage to the extent that companionate marriage was envisioned as
64

Cynthia A. Kierner, Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700-1835 (New York:
Cornell University Press, 1998), 216.
65

James A. Long in an address delivered before the 1858 graduating class of Edgeworth Female Seminary,
as quoted by in Victoria E. Bynum in Unruly Women: the Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 56.
66

Kierner, Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700-1835, 203.

67

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 160.

95

leading to interracial marriage.68 Rather, the equal status women appealed for between men and
women in companionate marriage was limited to granting equal status between whites of similar
class. Since companionate marriage was understood as only existing between those of equal
position, interracial marriage was excluded based on the assumption that black and mulatto
women could not offer white men the same caliber of affection as white women could.69 In the
midst of their appeals for companionate marriage, therefore, educated white women may have
redefined white womanhood, but simply reinforced ideas concerning women of colour, ideas
which maintained white supremacy.
Second, educated women maintained racial hierarchies and thereby resisted sisterhood
among all women in their limited appeals for women’s education. At the same time that educated
white women critiqued existing educational opportunities for females and advocated for
women’s education to be less limited in purpose and equal with men’s, their goals for education
were limited to the education of white women. In fact, many educated women argued that
educating coloured women (and men) would endanger society by threatening white supremacy.
According to Wesleyan Female College graduate Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, educating
young white women, even those of lower social class, was important because education
prevented white women from marrying black men,70 but educating women of colour would
simply “intensify their already innate tropical, passionate nature” and thereby further provoke
their demoralizing effect on white men.71 Consequently, while educated women established

68

That interracial marriage was viewed as degrading and as a threat to southern society is clear in
Thomas’s The Secret Eye, 42, 50, 320-21.
69

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 42, 50, 320-321.

70

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 50.

71

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 42, 50.

96

institutions for white women’s education all over the South in the antebellum period, the formal
education of coloured women did not gain momentum until years after the Civil War. 72
Third, and finally, educated women maintained social hierarchies and revealed their antisisterhood sentiments by reinforcing black women’s inferior status in their evangelical reform
efforts. While college-educated women like Rebecca Latimer Felton and Ella Gertrude Thomas,
leaders of the WCTU, argued that temperance would benefit white and black women alike, 73
their appeals for societal change rarely led to abolitionist claims. Rather, even in their plans for
moral reforms, educated women contributed to an intellectual tradition that advocated that
women (and men) of colour were in need of paternal care. Representative of educated women’s
justifications for slavery, Thomas suggested, “the negro as a race is better off with us as he has
been than if he were free, but I am by no means so sure that we would not gain by his having his
freedom given him.”74 Justifying slavery in this way, female reformers envisioned slavery as a
benevolent system, and, by showing compassion on those of “inferior” status, they “legitimized
[the] continuing dominance” of the white, educated elite.75
Not only did educated white women’s marital, educational, and evangelical reform
efforts often lack concern for less enfranchised women among them, therefore, they actually
sustained pejorative images of women of colour. Thus, college women used their education to
create images that disempowered women who were considered ‘other’ at the same time as using
it to empower themselves. Ultimately, then, college enabled educated women to challenge
particular understandings of white womanhood while still maintaining their regionalism and
72

Ana A. Martinez Aleman and Kristen A. Renn, Women in Higher Education: An Encyclopedia (Santa
Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc), 266.
73

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 450.

74

Thomas, The Secret Eye, 47.

75

Kierner, Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700-1835, 213.

97

elitism--identities which were foundational to their existence within southern slave society.
Ironically, however, by perpetuating particular constructions of black womanhood, college
women were inadvertently reinforcing their own position as persons in need of protection from
white men--a position which inscribed their status as dependent wives and mothers, a status that
their post-college behaviours challenged.
Instead of suggesting that southern women’s education did little in the way of
transforming educated women’s lives, women’s recollections of their post- college experiences
imply that their education was immensely powerful despite its limited goals. By inspiring women
to re-envision singleness and marriage, giving them the desire to learn and the ability to teach,
and providing the means to organize evangelical reform efforts, college enabled southern women
to redefine their own identities. Unfortunately, this redefinition was limited. While college
allowed elite women the opportunity to redefine their own identities as females, it did not enable
these women to see past race boundaries to redefine all women. In more than one way, then,
educated women’s behaviour reveals that “education is power.” 76

76

Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 1.

98

CONCLUSION
A historical analysis that takes into account women’s recollections of their college
experiences proves rewarding because it challenges the typical scholarly narrative that suggests
that, because women’s education was engendered, it was ultimately an oppressive force. An
examination of student’s perspectives of college highlights how women discovered and used
power in the midst of their engendered educations. College women not only challenged southern
gender constructs and formed new identities as women, but simultaneously employed
hierarchical systems that, at times, reinforced more conventional gender ideals and ultimately
undermined any type of sisterhood or collective redefinition of women. Recognizing that college
women exerted agency in these ways not only presents a more complicated and complete picture
of southern women’s education, but also sheds light on wider issues in both southern women’s
history and women’s history more generally. Such an examination thereby also points to new
directions in historical scholarship.
First, an examination of southern women’s education from the perspective of students’
diaries and letters contributes to wider debates within southern women’s history because it
suggests that southern gender ideals, as espoused through the woman’s college, were oppressive
despite the fact that they were meant to act as “a marker of difference that distinguished,
hierarchically, the dominant class from the ‘barbarian’ cultures.” 1 Though scholars are correct in
pointing out that the gender ideals that colleges worked to inculcate were meant to reinforce
educated women’s elite status, the gap that existed between the gender ideals espoused through
southern women’s education and the actual behaviours of female students highlights the fact that

1

Laura Lee Downs (describing Jacqueline Jones’ work), Writing Gender History (New York: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2010), 67. For more information on how gender ideals reinforced white hegemonic power, see Jacqueline
Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present.

99

southern gender ideals were too restrictive. Female students’ challenging of the feminine ideals
that were advocated through their educations through their cultivation of academic, social, and
religious cultures reveals that being positioned as ladies on pedestals was ultimately unfulfilling.
Second, in addition to suggesting that southern gender ideals were oppressive for women,
an analysis of students’ recollections of their college experiences sheds light on broader debates
in southern women’s history by suggesting that women, in response to oppressive gender ideals,
promoted alternative definitions of southern womanhood. In contrast to a scholarly tradition that
suggests that women did not promote alternative views of womanhood because doing so
inadvertently challenged their elite status as white ladies,2 a look at female students’ lives
implies that, even if not always overtly, college women’s behaviours redefined what it meant to
be southern women. In contrast to the southern “lady,” a college woman was academic, defined
by extra-familial relationships, and independent. Thus, contrary to a particular school of thought
that assumes that, because gender ideals secured their elite positions, women simply accepted
restrictive gender ideals and their subordinate status within society, an examination of collegiate
culture reveals that women desired, and worked for, “privilege” without its “price.” 3
Third, an examination of college women’s recollections provides insight into wider
discussions in southern women’s history by revealing that women, while in some senses
oppressed by power structures, were, like many scholars suggest, nonetheless actually complicit
in generating such systems.4 At the same time that college women challenged restrictive gender

2

Farnham, The Education of the Southern Belle, 120; Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household
Black and White Women in the Old South, 30, 47, 192-193; McMillen, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old
South, 10.
3

Scholars employ the phrase “Privilege and its Price” (coined by Laura Edwards) to describe the
relationship between gender, race, and class. While women were granted racial and class privilege, it came with a
price--narrow gender ideals and, ultimately, subordination to men. See Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here
Anymore Southern Women in the Civil War Era, 15-16.

100

ideals and promoted alternative views of southern womanhood, they also upheld wider societal
ideals and, paradoxically, reinforced the very gender ideals their more deviant actions
undermined. Because gender ideologies were so tied to class and race ideologies, 5 college
women’s upholding of hierarchical structures in their relationships with one another and with
others after leaving college undermined the type of collective redefining of southern womanhood
that their other behaviours assumed. Because “female solidarity did not come naturally to women
of the planter class,”6 educated women did not advance an inclusive female agenda, but
continually drew lines of inclusion and exclusion that proved rewarding for some and oppressive
for others. At times, the lines of exclusion that female students drew even reinforced more
traditional gender ideals. Thus, even in the midst of redefining white southern womanhood,
women were complicit in generating the same power systems that their more deviant actions
worked to undermine.
That college women acted as agents in seemingly contradictory ways (both challenging
gender constructs and at times reinforcing them) highlights the complexity of southern women’s
identities and reveals that the categories of “victim” and “agent” that are so often employed by
women’s history are too neat when describing actual historical characters. A serious examination
of college women’s lives reveals the intersectionality of various facets of identity and the
ambiguity that accompanies this. Characterizing educated southern women as either passive
southern belles or raging feminists is unfair, for, as George Rable points out, “to view southern
women as either seething with discontent or mindlessly mouthing the truisms of their society is
4

See, for example, Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 82; Fox-Genovese, Within the
Plantation Household, 192-193; McMillen, Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, 8.
5

For a particularly well-developed analysis of the connections between gender, race, and class, see
Jacqueline Jones’ Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow.
6

Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, 27.

101

to ignore their painful and often deeply ambivalent roles as social actors – actors who might
occasionally criticize but who could also bolster their society’s basic and often unspoken
assumptions.”7 While categorization is helpful and necessary to the historian’s task, an analysis
of southern college women’s lives reminds contemporary observers to grant past characters the
same complexity we do contemporary persons.
Finally, that college women were agents in multiple ways dispels the myth often
subsumed within women’s history that the emergence of feminism was a revolutionary event in
the sense that it completely transformed women’s lives from those of subordination to those of
liberty.8 Southern women were working out, and at times redefining, what it meant to be
“women” outside of a formalized women’s movement. This suggests that it is a misnomer to
think that the feminist movements of the twentieth century were watershed events in the sense
that they completely changed women’s lives, for even while suspicious of “women’s rights
women,” many southern college women acted in ways not only very similar to their northern
feminist counterparts,9 but also in ways that even today are understood as “feminist”: they
redefined womanhood in very particular, oftentimes narrow, ways, but redefined it for the sake

7

Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism, 271.

8

That the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminist movements are assumed to be watershed
events in women’s history is implied in the very way women’s history has been focused on the study of northern
women, who are assumed to be “real” social actors because of the region’s link with feminism. For more on the
tendency within women’s history to privilege northern women’s experiences, see McMillen, Southern Women:
Black and White in the Old South, 2. Additionally, some scholars suggest that it was not until the 1930s that,
because of the popularity of a formalized woman’s movement, southern women were able “to shake loose from the
tyranny of a single monolithic image of woman and were free to struggle to be themselves.” See, for example, Anne
Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: from Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press,
1970), 231.
9

For example, in her work In the Company of Educated Women, Barbara Solomon comes to many of the
same conclusions regarding the ideals of women’s education and college students’ behaviours as this thesis does.
Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, xix.

102

of empowerment nonetheless.10 This realization underlines the idea that women of all times and
places, like all people, exert control over their own lives in myriad ways.
While only a modest contribution to southern women’s history, an examination of
women’s responses to their college education yields conclusions, then, that inspire new
directions in historical scholarship. Rather than assuming that those people in official positions
of power, such as those at educational institutions, as well as the corresponding records they left,
actually held and hold all authority, this study of students’ perspectives reveals that power is
rarely one-dimensional, and therefore that historical examinations should not be either.
Furthermore, this analysis of students’ recollections of their college experiences reveals that,
even while perhaps offering a challenge to those in official positions of authority, those who hold
power outside of official positions do not necessarily exercise agency in ways that lack selfinterest and are totally ‘other’ from that which they challenge--this realization reminds historians
of the need to be suspicious of totalizing categories if making past persons visible is to remain
central to the historical enterprise.

10

Robert Dale Parker defines contemporary feminism most basically as being concerned with “taking
women seriously.” While feminism itself can take on multiple meanings depending on context, it is this most basic,
contemporary understanding of feminism that I am relying on here. Robert Dale Parker, “Feminism” in How to
Interpret Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 136.

103

BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. Archives
Stephens, Marcus Cicero. Letter to Mary Ann Primrose, November 7, 1841. #3402-z. SHC.
The Wilson Library. University of North Carolina.
II. Primary Sources
Athens Female College. Second Annual Catalogue of the Officers and Pupils of Athens Female
College at Athens, Tennessee (July 5, 1860). Internet Archive. Accessed November 19,
2011. http://www.archive.org/details/secondannualcata1860athe.
Bailey, Rufus W. Daughters in School Instructed in a Series of Letters. Philadelphia:
Presbyterian Board of Education, 1857.
Bowen, Susan Pettigru King. Lily. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1855.
Bryan, Mary Norcott. A Grandmother’s Recollections of Dixie. New Bern, NC: Owen G. Dunn
Printer, 1912.
Buck, Lucy Rebecca. Shadows of My Heart: the Civil War Diaries of Lucy Rebecca Buck.
Edited by Elizabeth Roberts Baer. Atlanta, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997.
Burge, Lou. Louisiana Burge: the Diary of A Confederate College Girl. Edited by Richard
Barksdale Harwell. Atlanta, GA: Harwell, 1952.
Burwell, Letitia M. A Girl’s Life in Virginia Before the War. New York: Frederick A. Stokes
Company, 1895. http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/burwell/burwell.html#ill5.
Catalogue of Pupils at Hamner Hall, a Seminary for Young Ladies, Montgomery, Ala.
Montgomery: Barrett Wimbish & Co. 1861. Accessed August 1, 2011.
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollection/bookscatalogueofpupil01hamn#info.
Chandler, Daniel. “An Address on Female Education.” Washington, GA: William A. Mercer,
1835. In The Southern Literary Journal and Monthly Magazine, vol. 1, edited by Daniel
Whitaker. Charleston: J.S. Burges, 1835.
Davis, George. “Address Delivered before the Young Ladies of Greensboro Female College, 14 th
May 1856.” Internet Archive. Accessed November 9, 2011. http://www.archive.org/detail
s/addressdelivere00davi.goog.
Dew, Thomas. “Dissertation on the Characteristic Differences of the Sexes, No. 3.” In Southern
Literary Messenger (August 1835). Accessed February 1, 2012. http://quod.lib.umich
.edu.

104

Farmville Female College. The Next Term of this Institution Will Commence Thursday,
October 1st, 1863. Accessed August 1, 2011. http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/farmville
/Farmville.html.
Felton, Rebecca Latimer. Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth. Atlanta: Index
Printing Company, 1911.
Fitzgerald, Eugenia Tucker. Diary Entry, May 15, 1851. Accessed August 1, 2011.
http://www.alphadeltapi.org.
Fitzhugh, George. Sociology for the South. Richmond, VA: A. Morris Publisher, 1854.
Gladney, Richard S. Essays on Female Education. Columbia, SC: Times and Gazette Office,
1832.
Greenville Baptist Female College. Catalogue of the Trustees, Faculty, and Students of the
Greenville Baptist Female College, Greenville, SC., 1857. Internet Archive. Accessed
November 20, 2011. http://www. archive.org/details/catalogueoftrust00gree.
Harmony Female College. Circular of Harmony Female College, Sumter Mineral Springs,
South Carolina, for 1859. Internet Archive. Accessed November 20, 2011. http://
www.archive.org/stream/circularof harmon00pres#page/n17/mode/2up.
Harper-Beall Family Papers. 1830-1914. Microfilm. SHC. Wilson Library. University of North
Carolina.
Howe, George. The Endowments, Position, and Education of Woman: an Address Delivered
before the Hermans and Sigourney Societies of the Female High School at Limestone
Springs, July 23, 1850. Columbia, SC: C. Morgan, 1850.
Hutchison, Susan Nye. Journal. SHC. Accessed February 10, 2012. http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss
/inv/h/Hutchison_Susan_Nye.html.
Kearney, Belle. A Slaveholder’s Daughter. SHC. Accessed August 30, 2011. http://docsouth.unc
/fpn/Kearney/menu.html.
Larkin, Priscilla. The Civil War Diary of a Southern Belle. Internet Archive. Accessed January 2,
2012. http://www.archive.org/details/Priscilla_Larkin.TheCivilWarDiaryOfASouthern
Belle.
Marks, Elias. Hints Upon Female Education. Internet Archive. Accessed November 10, 2011.
http://www.archive.org/details/hintsonfemaleedu00mark.
McCord, Louisa Cheves. “Women’s Progress.” In John Hollitz, Thinking through the Past, Vol.
I. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 2009.

105

Pringle, Elizabeth W. Allston. Chronicles of Chicora Wood. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1922.
Ripley, Eliza Moore Chinn McHatten. Social Life in New Orleans: Being Recollections of my
Girlhood. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1912.
Rush, Benjamin. Thoughts upon Female Education. Boston: Samuel Hall, 1787.
Smith, B.M. “Address on the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Augusta Female Seminary.” In
his The Exclusive Claims of Prelacy, Stated and Refuted. Staunton, VA, 1844.
Smith, Sydney. The Works of the Rev. Sydney Smith. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1845.
Talmage, Samuel. “A Proper Early Training and its Priceless Value: a Discourse Delivered in the
Chapel of the Greensboro Female College, June 23, 1853.” Internet Archive. Accessed
December 1, 2011. http://www .archive.org/details/properearlytrain00talm.
Thomas, Ella Gertrude. The Secret Eye: The Journal of Ella Gertrude Thomas, 1848-1889.
Edited by Virginia Ingraham Burr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
Wadley, Sarah Lois. Diary. SHC. Accessed January 1, 2012. http://docsouth.unc.edu/imls
/wadley/wadley.html.
Whitaker, Daniel. The Southern Literary Journal and Monthly Magazine, vol. 1. Charleston: J.S.
Burges, 1835.
Willard, Emma. Mrs. Willard’s Plan for Improving Female Education. Middlebury, VT: S.W.
Copeland, 1819.
III. Secondary Sources
Aleman, Ana M. Martinez and Kristen A. Renn. Women in Higher Education: An Encyclopedia.
Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2002.
Almendinger, David. “Mount Holyoke Students Encounter the Need for Life Planning, 18371850.” History of Education Quarterly 19, no.1 (Spring 1979): 27-43.
Bailey, Candace. Music and the Southern Belle: from Accomplished Lady to Confederate
Composer. Carbondale, IL: SIU Press, 2010.
Bainbridge, Judith. “‘A Nursery of Knowledge’: The Greenville female Academy, 1819-1854.”
The South Carolina Historical Magazine 99, no. 1 (January 1998): 6-33.

106

Bartlett, Irving H. and C. Glenn Cambor. “The History and Psychodynamics of Southern
Womanhood.” Women’s Studies 2 (January 1974): 9-24.

Beadie, Nancy and Kimberley Tolley. Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent
Academies in the United States, 1727-1925. New York: Routledge Falmer, 2002.
Beadie, Nancy. “Internal Improvement: The Structure and Culture of Academy Expansion in
New York State in the Antebellum Era, 1820-1860.” In Chartered Schools: Two Hundred
Years of Independent Academies in the United States. Ed. Nancy Beadie and Kimberley
Tolley. New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2002: 89-115.
Blandin, Isabel M. History of Higher Education of Women in the South Prior to 1860. New
York: Neale, 1909.
Bleser, Carol. Ed. In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South,
1830 – 1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Boas, Louis Schutz. Women’s Education Begins: the Rise of Women’s Colleges. Norton, MA:
Wheaton College Press, 1935.
Boswell, Angela. “Constructing an Ideal Southern Lady.” In Ordinary Women, Extraordinary
Lives: Women in American History. Edited by Kriste Lindenmeyer. Lanham, MD: SR
Books, 2000.
Boynton, Victoria and Jo Malin. Ed. Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography: K-Z. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Press, 2005.
Brakebill, Tina Stewart and Celestia Rice Colby. “Circumstances are Destiny”: an Antebellum
Woman’s Struggle to Define Sphere. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006.
Brickley Templeton, Lynn. Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy: 1792-1833. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1985.
Brubacher, John Seiler and Willis Rudy. Higher Education in Transition: a History of American
Colleges and Universities. 5th ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2004.
Bynum, Victoria E. Unruly Women: the Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
Chambers-Schiller, Lee Virginia. Liberty, A Better Husband: Single Women in America: The
Generations 1780-1840. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.

107

Clark, Thomas D. The Southern Country Editor. Charleston: University of South Carolina Press,
1991.
Clinton, Catherine. “Equally Their Due: The Education of the Planter Daughter in the
Early Republic.” Journal of the Early Republic 2 (1982): 49-62.
________. The Plantation Mistress: Women’s World in the Old South. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1982.
Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Penguin
Books, 2005.
Davis, Richard Beale. Intellectual Life in the Colonial South 1585-1763. Knoxville: University
of Tennessee, 1978.
________. Literature and Society in Early Virginia, 1608-1840. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1973.
Dowd, Jacquelyn Hall. “Partial Truths.” Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 902-911.
Downs, Laura Lee. Writing Gender History. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010.
Edwards, Laura F. Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil
War Era. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
________. “Southern History as U.S. History.” Journal of Southern History 75, no. 3
(August 2009): 535-563.
Eisenmann, Linda. “Creating a Framework for Interpreting US Women’s Educational History:
Lessons from Historical Lexicography.” History of Education 30, no. 5 (Sep 2001): 453470.
________. Ed. Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education in the United States. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1998.
Engstrom, Mary Claire. The Lives of Burwell Students. Hillsborough, NC: Historic
Hillsborough Commission, 2007.
Farnham, Christie Anne. The Education of the Southern Belle. New York, NY: New York
University Press, 1994.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women in
the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Friedman, Jean E. The Enclosed Garden: Women and Community in the Evangelical South,

108

1830-1900. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.
Genovese, Eugene. “The Slave South: an Interpretation.” In The Political Economy of Slavery:
Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1989.
________. “‘Our Family White and Black’: Family and Household in the Southern
Slaveholder’s Worldview.” In In Joy and In Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in
the Victorian South, 1830 – 1900. Ed. Carol Blesser. New York: Oxford University Press,
1991.
Godbold, Albea. The Church College of the Old South. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1962.
Goodsell, Willystine, ed. Pioneers of Women’s Education in the United States: Emma Willard,
Catherine Beecher, Mary Lyon. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1931.
Gordon, Lynn D. “Education and the Professions.” In A Companion to American Women’s
History. Edited by Nancy A. Hewitt. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2002: 227249.
________. “From Seminary to University: An Overview of Women’s Higher Education,
1870-1920.” In Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era. New Haven: Yale
University, 1990: 473-495.
Hatch, Nathan O., and John H. Wigger. Methodism and the Shaping of American Culture. Edited
by Nathan O. Hatch and John H. Wigger. Nashville, TN: Kingswood Books, 2001.
Hill, Sam, Charles H. Lippy, and Charles Reagan Wilson. Encyclopedia of Religion in the South.
Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2005.
Hodes, Martha. White Women and Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997.
Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. Alma Mater: Design and Experience in Women’s Colleges from
Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
________. Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the
Present. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1987.
Jabour, Anya. “Albums of Affection: Female Friendship and Coming of Age in Antebellum
Virginia.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 107, no. 2 (Spring 1999):
125-159.

109

________. “‘College Girls’: The Female Academy and Female Identity in the Old South.” In
“Lives Full of Struggle and Triumph”: Southern Women, Their Institutions, and Their
Communities, edited by Bruce L. Clayton and John A. Salmond. Gainesville, FL:
University Press of Florida, 2003: 74-92.
________. “‘Grown Girls, Highly Cultivated’: Female Education in an Antebellum Southern
Family.” The Journal of Southern History 64, no.1 (1998): 23-64.
________. “‘It Will Never Do for Me to Be Married’: The Life of Laura Wirt Randall, 18031833.” Journal of the Early Republic17, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 193-236.
________. Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South. Chapel Hill, NC: University of
North Carolina Press, 2007.
Jahoda, Gustav. Images of Savages. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Jansson, David. “The Haunting of the South: American Geopolitical Identity and the Burden of
Southern History.” Geopolitics 12, no. 3 (2007): 400-425.
Johnson, Curtis D. “‘Sectarian Nation’: Religious Diversity in Antebellum America.” OAH
Magazine of History 22 no. 1 (January 2008): 14-18.
Johnson, Joan Marie. Southern Women at the Seven Sister Colleges. Atlanta: University of
Georgia Press, 2010.
Jones, Jacqueline. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow Black Women, Work and the Family from
Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1985.
Keller, Rosemary Skinner, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marie Cantlon, “Protestant Women’s
Colleges in the United States” in The Encyclopaedia of Women and Religion in North
America Vol, 2. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Kelley, Mary. “‘A More Glorious Revolution’: Women’s Antebellum Reading Circles and the
Pursuit of Influence.” The New England Quarterly 76 no. 2 (June 2003): 163-196.
________. Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s
Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
________. “Reading Women/Women Reading: The Making of Learned Women in Antebellum
America.” The Journal of American History 83, no. 2 (1996): 401-424.
Kerber, Linda. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

110

Kerrison, Catherine. Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American
South. New York: Cornell University Press, 2006.
Kierner, Cynthia A. Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700-1835.
New York: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Korfker, Anna Marie. “Behind Closed Doors: Southern Upper-Class Notions of Womanhood in
the Plantation Mistress’s Intimate Sphere.” MA Thesis, Utrecht University, 2011.
Lawrence, Anna M. “The Fires of Evangelicalism in the Cauldron of the Early Republic: Race,
Class, and Gender in the Second Great Awakening.” In Early Republic: People and
Perspectives, ed. by Andrew K. Frank. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2009.
Lora, Ronald and William Henry Longton. The Conservative Press in Eighteenth-and
Nineteenth-Century America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Ludwick, Erin. “Charleston Girl’s Boarding Schools in the Nineteenth Century.” Master’s
Thesis, University of North Carolina, 2008. http://toto.unca.edu/srpapers/historysr/
History2008ludwick_erin.pdf (accessed April 18, 2012).
Lutz, Alma. Emma Willard: Pioneer Educator of American Women. Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1964.
Matthews, Donald G. “Introduction” in Religion in the American South: Protestants and Others
in History and Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
May, Henry Farnham. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press,
1976.
McMillen, Sally G. Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, 2nd ed. Arlington
Heights, IL: Harlan Davison, 2002.
Miller, Perry. New England Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939.
________. Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. Feminism Without Borders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003.
Nash, Anne Strudwick. Ladies in the Making at the Select Boarding Day School of the Misses
Nash and Miss Kollock: 1859-1890. Hillsborough, NC: Durham, 1964.
Nash, Margaret. “‘Cultivating the Powers of Human Beings’: Gendered Perspectives on
Curricula and Pedagogy in Academies of the New Republic. History of Education
Quarterly 41, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 239-250.

111

O’Brien, Michael. Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860,
vol. 1. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Palmieri, Patricia A. “From Republican Motherhood to Race Suicide: Arguments on the Higher
Education of Women in the United States, 1820-1920” in Educating Men and Women
Together: Coeducation in a Changing World, edited by Carol Lasser. Urbana, IL:
University of Illinois Press/Oberlin College, 1987: 49-64.
________. “Review of Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations
of 1740-1820.” American Quarterly 37, no. 4 (Autumn 1985): 509-606.
Parker, Robert Dale. “Feminism.” In How to Interpret Literature. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2008.
Pease, Jane H. and William Henry Pease, Ladies, Women and Wenches: Choice and Constraint
in Antebellum Charleston and Boston. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1990.
Pessen, Edward. “How Different from Each Other Were the Antebellum North and South?” The
American Historical Review 85, no. 5 (1980): 1130-1148.
Queen, Edward L., Stephen R Prothero and Gardiner H Shattuck. Encyclopedia of American
Religious History. 3rd ed. New York: Proseworks, 2009.
Rable, George. Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism. Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Rees, Frances. “A History of Wesleyan Female College from 1836 to 1874.” PhD diss., Emory
University, 1935 as quoted by Pearl Young, “Genius Uncultivated is Like a Meteor of the
Night,” 2008.
Roberts, Giselle. The Confederate Belle. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
________. “The Confederate Belle: the Belle Ideal, Patriotic Womanhood, and Wartime Reality
in Louisiana and Mississippi, 1861.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana
Historical Association 43, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 189-214.
Ryan, Barbara and Amy Thomas Reading Acts: US Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 18001950. Memphis: University of Tennessee Press, 2002.
Schwager, Sally. “Educating Women in America.” Signs 12, no. 2 (Winter 1987):
333-372.
Scott, Anne Firor. Making the Invisible Woman Visible. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1984.

112

________. “The Ever Widening Circle: The Diffusion of Feminist Values from the Troy Female
Seminary 1822-1872.” History of Education Quarterly 19, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 3-25.
________. The Southern Lady: from Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930. Chicago: the
University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Selles, Johanna. Methodists and Women’s Education in Ontario, 1836-1925. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1996.
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in
Nineteenth-Century America.” Signs 1, no. 1 (1975): 1-30.

Solomon, Barbara Miller. In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher
Education in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986.
Stephan, Scott. Redeeming the Southern Family: Evangelical Women and Domestic Devotion in
the Antebellum South. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008.
Stowe, Steven. “The Not-So-Cloistered Female Academy: Elite Women’s Education and Family
Feeling in the Old South.” In The Web of Southern Social Relations, ed. Walter J. Fraser
et al. Atlanta, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985.
________. “‘The Thing Not Its Vision’: A Woman's Courtship and Her Sphere in the Southern
Planter Class.” Feminist Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 113-130.
Stringer, Patricia A. and Irene Thompson. Stepping off the Pedestal: Academic Women in the
South. New York: the Modern Language Association of America, 1982.
Uroff, Catherine. Emma Willard: a Study of Female Education in the Nineteenth Century.
Gambier, OH: Kenyon College, 1987.
Varon, Elizabeth R. We Mean to be Counted: White Women & Politics in Antebellum Virginia.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Walbert, Kathryn. “‘Endeavor to Improve Yourself’: The Education of White Women in the
Antebellum South,” in Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent
Academies in the United States. Ed. Nancy Beadie and Kimberley Tolley. New York:
RoutledgeFalmer, 2002.
Ward McCain, Eleanor. Catherine Beecher: her Educational Views and Activities. Akron: Ohio
State University, 1925.

113

Watters, Mary. “The History of Mary Baldwin College, 1842-1942.” PhD diss., Mary Baldwin
College, 1942.
Weiner, Marli Frances. Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830-1880.
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997.
Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860” American Quarterly 18 (Summer
1966): 152-174.
Woodman, Harold D. Slavery and the Southern Economy. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
World, 1966.
Woody, Thomas. A History of Women’s Education in the United States. New York: the Science
Press, 1929.
Young, Pearl J. “‘Genius uncultivated is like a meteor of the night’: Motives and Experiences of
Methodist Female College Life in the Confederate States of America.” Methodist History
47, no. 3 (April 2009): 179-191.