The Education of the Southern Belle

Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South

Christie Anne Farnham

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9780814728000
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The American South before the Civil War was the site of an unprecedented social experiment in women's education. The South offered women an education explicitly designed to be equivalent to that of men, while maintaining and nurturing the gender conventions epitomized by the ideal of the Southern belle. This groundbreaking work provides us with an intimate picture of the entire social experience of antebellum women's colleges and seminaries in the South, analyzing the impact of these colleges upon the cultural construction of femininity among white Southern women, and their legacy for higher education.

Christie Farnham investigates the contradiction involved in using a male-defined curricula to educate females, and explores how educators denied these incongruities. She also examines the impact of slavery on faculty and students. The emotional life of students is revealed through correspondence, journals, and scrapbooks, highlighting the role of sororities and romantic friendships among female pupils. Farnham ends with an analysis of how the end of the Civil War resulted in a failure to keep up with the advances that had been achieved in women's education.

The most comprehensive history of this brief and unique period of reform to date, The Education of the Southern Belle is must reading for anyone interested in women's studies, Southern history, the history of American education, and female friendship.

PART ONE

Academic Life

CHAPTER 1

What’s in a Name?
Antebellum Female Colleges

Girls can learn, and they deserve to be taught. Adopt enlightened plans of instruction—grant sufficient time—afford the necessary facilities, and though there will be no struggle for supremacy, there will be advancement corresponding in grade, and equivalent in effort to anything ever realized from the most generous arrangement for the “Lords of Creation.”

—Bishop George Foster Pierce¹

“THE project is novel; it stands out on the map of the world’s history alone—isolated—a magnificent example of public spirit and Catholic feeling—of devotion to literature, and of zeal for Female Education,” wrote George F. Pierce,² the first president of Georgia Female College, who would go on to become a Methodist bishop and president of what is now Emory University in Atlanta. Not in England, not in France, not in Italy—indeed, nowhere in Europe or the rest of the world had such efforts been made to establish a college for women that had its own professors holding advanced degrees who were unaffiliated with any men’s institution. It is, perhaps, reasonable to imagine such a development occurring in the North, where advances in women’s education had been taking place since the mid-eighteenth century. But the first self-conscious effort to erect an institution at the collegiate level—whose stated goal was to provide an education for women identical to that available at the highest levels for men and to use the term college in doing so—took place in 1839 in Macon, Georgia, a small town that still exhibited frontier characteristics, a Southern town committed to slavery secured by a conservative view of white womanhood. It is indeed paradoxical that the first public effort to establish a college for women took place at a crossroads of the rural South.

Higher education in the form of efforts to provide women with studies that had some equivalence to men’s coursework had been developing for more than a decade and would continue to do so, as some female seminaries and the collegiate institutes that followed in the 1850s added courses designed to be similar to those offered to freshmen and sophomores at men’s colleges. Primarily boarding schools, these institutions often included preparatory (i.e., elementary), academy (i.e., secondary), and collegiate (i.e., junior college) departments or, more commonly, preparatory (i.e., secondary) and collegiate (i.e., junior college) divisions. However, the use of the term college indicated at least the goal of providing more than junior college work. Such institutions, which spread across the country in the 1850s but were found predominantly in the South, commonly offered four-year programs, terminating in the awarding of degrees in the liberal arts, as authorized by acts of state legislatures.

Georgia Female College, known today as Wesleyan College, and the antebellum female colleges, both North and South, have been dismissed by scholars. Considered colleges in name only, they are seen merely as experiments doomed to failure until after the Civil War when Vassar (1865), Wellesley and Smith (1875), and Bryn Mawr (1884) were founded. These later colleges and women’s education in the northeast have been extensively studied, but the antebellum female colleges have been largely neglected by contemporary scholars. Current assessments of these schools reflect not only a northeastern bias, but also a reliance on the research of scholars publishing in the early part of this century whose measure of a college was based primarily on comparisons with the classics taught at the best men’s colleges of that period.³

Another reason the efforts of the South to institute female colleges have been overlooked is the widely recognized inability of Southern institutions to meet the increasingly high standards for college training in the early years of the twentieth century. The Civil War had left the region both backward looking and economically ill equipped to compete in the area of higher education. Beginning in 1886—87 ^tne U.S. Bureau of Education’s reports divided women’s colleges into “Division A,” which were “organized and conducted in strict accordance with the plan of the arts college,” and “Division B,” which included seminaries and collegiate institutes. No Southern college appeared in “Division A” until the report of 1890—91, when the Woman’s College of Baltimore (Goucher) was added. Of the no institutions named in “Division B” in 1907, 68 percent were located in the South.⁴ The fact that Southern colleges were slow to recover from the impact of the Civil War and, to some extent, have continued to suffer from regional disparities in economic development have made it reasonable to assume that Southern institutions have always lagged behind those in the rest of the nation. Such an assumption, however, overlooks the South’s pioneering efforts to give women the right to an education equal to that of men.

In 1819 when Emma Willard proposed that a school be established by New York State that would prepare women to teach as well as be homemakers, she reassured legislators and the general public that she was not proposing a female college, for that would have been an “obvious absurdity.” Instead, her school would “be as different from those appropriate to the other sex, as the female character and duties are from the male.” Although the legislature turned down her request, her views became widely influential through the publication of her proposal as “An Address to the Public.”⁵

Public opinion on the “absurdity” of a college education for women was widespread nationally. An effective means of perpetuating this view was by trivializing the idea. The Raleigh Register lampooned the subject with a mock advertisement for a “Refined Female College” in June 1831. Headed by “Madame Walk-in-the-Water,” it offered courses in “scolding and fretting,” “balling and gadding in the streets,” “talking idly, and dressing ridiculously,” “spinning street yarn (very fine),” “backbiting your friends,” “lacing yourself into the shape of an hourglass,” and “how to keep from work when you return home.” The “French & Italian Department” offered “wearing wigs and false curls,” “wearing 2 tuck and 10 side combs,” “wearing out 10 pair of shoes per year taking evening promenades,” “behaving like a monkey in a china shop,” and “running your father into debt every year for finery, cologne water, pomatum and hard soap, dancing and frolicking.” Such a parody indicates, however, that the idea of colleges for women was gaining attention. The 1834 Boston Transcript reprinted a spoof about a “Young Ladies College” in Kentucky, which had originally appeared in the New York Transcript, demonstrating that the South was already more interested than the North in such institutions. The article suggested that more suitable degrees for women than those bestowed in the liberal arts would be “Mistress of Pudding Making, Mistress of the Scrubbing Brush, Mistress of Common Sense.” Honorary degrees would include R. W. (“Respectable Wife”) and M. W. R. F. (”Mother of a Well-Regulated Family”). Even Braxton Craven, president of Normal College (now Duke University), was capable of ridiculing schools for young women, insisting that “smiles are graded by the angle, blushes are colored to suit the emotion pretended, lisping is taught with as much system as French, salutation in so many steps, forward-march, and adieu is to show a ring, a pretty hand, and bend whalebone.”⁶

The question of higher education for women was debated in periodicals of the time and much of the opposition was based on the superficial nature of its mastery, not on the subjects to be studied. The highly respected DeBow’s Review, while commending specific efforts, like the Comatz Female Institute in New Orleans and the importance of female education generally, objected to the shallowness of much that passed for female education. In addition to this oft-repeated charge was the fear expressed about sending daughters away to school. Daniel Hundley, author of what is considered to be the nation’s first sociological treatise, insisted that “whatever may be said in praise of Public, or Free, or High, or Select schools, or any other kind of school, we maintain there is one greater. … THE FAMILY.” He rhapsodized on the resulting product, a woman “simple and unaffected in thy manners, pure in speech as thou art in soul, and ever blessed with an inborn grace and gentleness of spirit lovely to look at.”⁷

Such conservative voices competed against those questioning not whether but how. For forty years the most popular magazine among Southern women was Godey’s Lady’s Book, a strong proponent of higher education for women. The South also had its own female-edited periodical, the Southern Rose, which supported women’s higher education; it was begun in Charleston by a transplanted Northerner, Caroline Howard Gilman. Next to Godey’s, periodicals edited by Methodist clergy were most popular. The Methodist Quarterly Review carried frequent articles debating women’s education in the 1850s, as did the Southern Ladies’ Companion, edited from 1847 to 1854 by Rev. H. M. Henkle, Methodist clergyman in Nashville. The rapid spread of numerous high grade seminaries and colleges for women, however, demonstrates better than the arguments of their proponents that women’s higher education had won the day. As Rev. A. J. Battle proclaimed in his 1857 commencement sermon at the Judson Female Institute: “It is no longer a question, whether woman should be educated. It is no longer doubted that she is endowed with an intellect, capable of indefinite expansion and improvement.”⁸

The North, however, remained wary of female colleges long after they became prevalent in the South. Writing in the 1930s on the place of Wheaton College in the history of women’s higher education, Louise Schutz Boas explained that “even where these [Southern] schools compared favorably with the masculine colleges in their vicinity, the North found their standards lower than its own.” Her sentiments of sectional superiority, which reflected widely held opinion, are revealed in her statement that “since the North did not give degrees to women, it was a matter of jest that the South did.”⁹

The South’s special interest in building female colleges was the result of incremental additions to the curricula and subtle shifts in rationales, which are examined in more detail in the next chapter. Suffice it to say at this point that by the second quarter of the nineteenth century many Southern schools were in a position to raise their level of offerings by the addition of a few college-level courses. In so doing they would refashion Willard’s disclaimer by insisting that certain college courses were, indeed, appropriate for women, because the subject matter would prove useful to the lives they were expected to lead following graduation. The 1855 catalogue of Alabama’s prestigious Judson Female Institute in Marion, modeled on Lyon’s Mount Holyoke and headed by Rev. Milo P. Jewett—who would later become instrumental in the founding of Vassar—explained that the curriculum “is, substantially, a College course, substantially, for it is not pretended that our Course of Study is identical with that pursued in our Colleges and Universities.” Indeed, to do so would be “undesirable,” because of the intellectual and physical differences between the sexes. For this reason Judson substituted Latin or French and English literature, belles lettres, aesthetics, music, hygiene, the science of domestic economy, and so on, for Greek and higher mathematics.¹⁰

This understanding of gender differences reflected a major shift in American perceptions of the female intellect. The nearly universal view of the colonial period that women’s brains were inferior to men’s underwent a dramatic shift during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, decentered by the republican view of motherhood.¹¹ There were some who feared for the success of the new republic because the immensity of its area and population prevented the firsthand knowledge of character that formed the basis of the ancient republics; their anxieties were eased by the concept of republican motherhood, which based its argument on the widely held belief that women were the first teachers of children, molding their character. As a consequence, mothers were presumed to play a crucial role in the development of that civic virtue on which the viability of the new nation depended. Proponents of this position argued that, because mothers were the first teachers of future citizens and national leaders, they needed an education to equip themselves for the task. This view appeared persuasive, given that education was held to be for the purpose of character building rather than vocational training.

Reinforcing republican motherhood by the second quarter of the nineteenth century was the ideology of separate spheres, also known as the cult of domesticity and cult of true womanhood.¹² The deepening sexual asymmetry of American life resulting from changes in the marketplace led to a reordering of the values found in the social construction of gender. One consequence was to focus on the bipolar split between public and private, between the world and the household, which was made more palatable to women by an emphasis on the enhancement of their authority in the home and their moral influence over men.

In addition, the commitment to equality growing out of the ferment of the revolutionary years continued to gain in strength, as becomes increasingly clear by Andrew Jackson’s presidency; yet, its impact on the ideology of separate spheres has received scant attention. Central to the image of “the queen of the home” was the projection of some notion of equivalence with that of the male sphere. Patriarchy was eroded by the removal of the husband from the home during the workday, leaving his wife in charge. Thus, women and men had different realms in which to rule. Although separate spheres is a limiting ideology, it embraced within its rhetorical construction an increase in female autonomy, which provided the basis for strategies to renegotiate the boundaries that prevailed between the sexes. With the existence of separate spheres ideology, the commitment to egalitarianism flowing from the liberal ideology of the American Revolution could find expression in the notion of “equality of difference.” By the 1850s the idea that men and women were equal in intellectual gifts but that those gifts found different expression was widely held. Dr. Elias Marks, principal of a collegiate institute in South Carolina, exemplified this opinion in his 1851 Hints on Female Education when he denied “that there exists any difference between the sexes, as it regards the sum of intellect,” while insisting that “the intellectual character of woman is unquestionably peculiar, and is intended by the Author of nature to fit her for that station in society, which she is destined to fill.”¹³

As more and more of the most ambitious seminaries and institutes began to offer some classes on the college level, a few began to raise the argument to its logical conclusion by espousing equal opportunity with men. Virginia’s Richmond Female Institute insisted in 1856 that “the fairer sex ought to enjoy advantages for liberal culture equal in grade to that afforded the other, assuming a position analogous to that which our noble state university does with regard to young men.” It is not surprising, then, that a few courageous individuals would attempt to put this egalitarian argument into practice. The Circular of Georgia Female College, 1842–43 proclaimed that “the object of the founders of the College was to give our daughters as good a disciplinary education as was offered by the best colleges for our sons.” A 1856 catalogue of the Holston Conference Female College in Asheville, North Carolina, informed parents that their’s was not a high class finishing school; rather, their goal was “elevating the standard of Female Education, to furnish to females advantages for mental discipline and the acquisition of knowledge, not inferior to those enjoyed by the other sex in the best American Colleges.” Indeed, by the 1850s the egalitarian project had become widespread, as a look at name changes of Georgia institutions demonstrates: LaGrange Collegiate Seminary became Southern and Western Female College in 1852, Forsyth Female Collegiate Institute became Monroe Female College in 1856, Madison Collegiate Institute became Georgia Female College in 1850, and LaGrange Female Institute became LaGrange Female College in 1851. This phenomenon was not restricted to the South. The 1855 charter of Elmira Female College in New York required that no degree be conferred without a course of study equivalent to that pursued “in the state’s other [men’s] colleges.” ¹⁴

Wesleyan Female College in Cincinnati was one of the earliest Northern female colleges, but it offered only a three-year course of study in 1842—43, although it did require some Latin and Greek for admission. It was an outgrowth of Catharine Beecher’s work, who unlike other pioneering women educators, encouraged female colleges. Her efforts, however, did not focus on elevating the curriculum so much as ensuring the permanence of institutions by means of endowments, offering teacher training, and organizing the faculty on a coequal rather than hierarchical plan. Indeed, she felt that the better schools “too closely copied” the curricula of male colleges and failed to educate women in “feminine employments” and “domestic habits.” Mary Lyon’s Mount Holyoke remained a three-year institution until 1861, lacking Greek and the upper levels of Latin and mathematics, and did not become a college until 1881. Emma Willard’s institution at Troy still exists as the Emma Willard School.¹⁵

In addition to Wesleyan in Cincinnati, numerous other female colleges dotted the North. Also in Ohio were Oxford (1852) and Ohio Wesleyan (1853). Illinois Conference Female College (1851) and Davenport Ladies College (1855) were located in the Midwest. Further east were Elmira Female College (1855; formerly Auburn Female University, 1852), Ingham University (1857) ^m New York, at least th...