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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 February 2017
Elizabeth Hamilton, author of the popular Letters on Education (1801), was a strong advocate of advanced education for females. When someone suggested to her that a “triumph of reason over the passions” might be unattractive in a woman, she retorted, “I beg your pardon; I thought we were speaking of the best method of cultivating the powers of human beings. … In this I can make no distinction of sex” [italics in original]. Most writers on education in the early republic agreed with Hamilton. The majority of educators believed that males and females were both rational human beings who needed to acquire mental discipline and who were interested in learning about the world around them. Both the curricula and the pedagogical methods proposed by educational theorists in the new republic reflected these beliefs.
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8 Brickley, Lynne Templeton makes a similar point, stating that the term ornamental “has yet to be analyzed properly.” She suggests that theorists dichotomized male education into academic and useful, and that classics were considered academic (or ornamental); except for those few going on to college to study for the professions, classics had no real utility and therefore were considered ornamental. Useful subjects for men included bookkeeping, surveying, mensuration, and shorthand. See Lynne Templeton Brickley, “Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Female Academy, 1792–1833” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1985), 154–156.Google Scholar
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