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

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 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.