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Not Only Ours But Others: The Quaker Teaching Daughters of the Mid-Atlantic, 1790–1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Joan M. Jensen
Joan M. Jensen*
Affiliation:
History Department, New Mexico State University
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Extract

In their search for the ideological origins of the women's rights movement, historians have already defined rather clearly two distinct ideas. The first Linda Kerber has labeled “the ideology of the Republican mother,” a cluster of attitudes popular in the years after the American Revolution that emphasized the importance of mothers being educated in order to educate their children. These ideas were argued persuasively by both male and female writers in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, most eloquently by Judith Sargeant Murray, the New England essayist who stressed the need for female education in the 1790s. By the 1820s, a second ideology was taking form, one that I would like to label “the ideology of the teaching daughters,” in which writers argued the benefits of employing women as teachers.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , Spring 1984 , pp. 3 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

Research for this paper was completed under a Fellowship at the Regional Economic History Research Center, Eleutherian Mills-Hagley Foundation, Greenville-Wilmington, DE., during 1980–81.

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28. Rachel Painter to Minshall Painter, 3-15-1823, Ibid. Google Scholar

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30. There are no comparable statistics for New Castle County, Delaware, but scattered indications of women's lower employment and wage rates are in Federal Writer's Project, University of Delaware, Special Collections, Newark, Delaware, Vol. 2, especially pp. 278–285. Employment statistics for Delaware county are in Minshall Painter, “Statistics of the Populations of Middletown Township and Delaware County,” Painter Papers, Tyler Arboretum, Lima, Pennsylvania. District schools employed six times as many males as females and paid them one-third more in 1850. Opposition to schooling of Afro-Americans included using the courts to invalidate an endowment for a black college in Wilmington. The Delaware Gazette and Watchman noted the decision with approval on Dec. 12, 1834, 2:1. Indenture records, Hall of Records, Dover, Delaware, reflect the growing opposition to black literacy. Livesay, Harold C., “Delaware Negroes, 1865–1915,” Delaware History, 13 (1968); 89, erroneously states that all blacks were illiterate. This was not true for blacks in New Castle County. Some public schools in Pittsburgh did not admit girls to them. Widows and daughters of widows were hired at lower salaries than males. By 1847, Pittsburgh schools were beginning to hire single daughters of the middle-class. Renner, Marguerite, “Who Will Teach? Changing Job Opportunity and Roles for Women in the Evolution of the Pittsburgh Public Schools, 1830–1900,” (PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1981), pp. 103–106, 145.Google Scholar

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32. Biographical information in Alsop, Gulielma F., “Ann Preston,” Ibid, v. 3, pp. 96–97 and Judson, Eliza E., Address in Memory of Ann Preston, M.D. (1873), FHLSC.Google Scholar

33. Ann Preston to Hannah Darlington during 1837 to 1854 describe her activities. Quotes from letters of 1-9-1851 and 2-9-1850, CCHS.Google Scholar