Abstract
In antebellum America, hundreds of seminaries welcomed young, middle-class and elite white women. Only a handful of these seminaries opened their doors to African American women. While historians have examined the social forces that shaped women’s education, the dimensions of racial exclusion in the female seminary movement have been underexplored. This chapter weaves the activism of African American leaders and students into the rich historiography on women’s education. These activists and students decried racial exclusion in education in various speeches, letters, and diaries. From their writings, what emerges is a continuous meditation on racial prejudice as injurious, sinful, and cruel. These meditations take on deeper meaning within the context of the female seminary movement: in their denunciation of prejudice, African American activists questioned the function of the female seminary as well as the alleged piety and character of the students who attended and the parents who sent them there. Given its exclusionary practices, the female seminary, they argued, actually reared and reproduced unkind, unfeeling, inhumane, and ultimately anti-democratic white women. Many of these activists did not wish to stop the female seminary movement, but rather wished to open up educational opportunities for African American women and to foster new ways of thinking about learning, intellect, and humanity across the boundaries of race and gender.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
“Seward Female Seminary,” New York Evangelist, January 4, 1849.
- 2.
Frederick Douglass, “To H.G. Warner, Esq., Editor of the Rochester Courier,” North Star, September 22, 1848.
- 3.
Linda Perkins, “The Impact of the ‘Cult of True Womanhood’ on the Education of Black Women,” Journal of Social Issues 39.3 (1983): 17–28.
- 4.
Margaret A. Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, 1780–1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 99.
- 5.
Jeanne Boydston, “Civilizing Selves: Public Structures and Private Lives in Mary Kelley’s Learning to Stand and Speak,” Journal of the Early Republic 28.1 (Spring 2008), 57.
- 6.
This finding parallels Hilary Moss’ argument that one of the pillars of common school reform in antebellum America was indeed race. For more, see Hilary Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
- 7.
Benjamin Rush, Thoughts upon Female Education, Accommodated to the Present State of Society, Manners, and Government, in the United States of America… (Philadelphia: Printed by Prichard & Hall, 1787), 25.
- 8.
For an interesting essay on Benjamin Rush and the Young Ladies’ Academy, see Margaret A. Nash, “Rethinking Republican Motherhood: Benjamin Rush and the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia,” Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer 1997): 171–191.
- 9.
Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 11.
- 10.
Leonard Sweet, “The Female Seminary Movement and Woman’s Mission in Antebellum America,” Church History 54.1 (March 1985), 43.
- 11.
Almira H. Lincoln Phelps, Essay on Female Education and Prospectus of the Rahway Institute (Rahway, N.J.: Guest, 1839), 4. Emphasis in original.
- 12.
Many of these seminaries and academies were modeled after Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, founded in 1821, and Zilpah Grant’s Ipswich Female Seminary, founded in 1828. Other seminaries included Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary, which was established in 1832, and Mary Lyon’s Mount Holyoke Seminary, founded in 1837. For an interesting analysis of the early history of seminaries in the United States, see Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley, eds., Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727–1925 (New York: Routledge/Falmer, 2002).
- 13.
Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, 1780–1840, 101.
- 14.
Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 97.
- 15.
“Albany Female Seminary in Division Street,” American Masonic Register, August 5, 1843. I thank Jessica Linker for this insight and source.
- 16.
Catalogue of the Officers and Students of Bradford Academy, Bradford, Massachusetts, October 1839 (Haverhill, M.A.: E.H. Safford, 1839), 9.
- 17.
William Russell, The Education of Females, An Address, Held at the Close of the Autumn Term of Abbott Female Academy… (Andover: Printed by Allen, Morrill & Wardwell, 1843), 22–23.
- 18.
Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 7.
- 19.
I call these spaces predominantly white and female because I have found catalogues that indicate that a few female seminaries enrolled non-white students or white male students. For instance, a female student by the name of Dee-wau-dau-a-gek-heh from Buffalo Creek Reservation appears among the list of students in the 1852 Sharon Female Seminary circular. See Circular of the School, and a Description of Apparatus & Astronomical Instruments, with a Catalogue of Pupils (Philadelphia: T.E. Chapman, 1852).
- 20.
Nancy Beadie, “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 et al. (New York: Routledge/Falmer, 2002), 107.
- 21.
Mary Eckert to Solomon Eckert, 19 December 1837, Box 1, Folder 10, Eckert-Black Family Collection 1792–1866, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.
- 22.
“For the Freedom’s Journal,” Freedom’s Journal, August 10, 1827.
- 23.
Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak, 54.
- 24.
Literary historian Elizabeth McHenry notes that there were more African American female literary societies than male societies in the antebellum North, but that male literary societies boasted larger memberships. See, Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), Chapter 1.
- 25.
“Of the Ladies Literary Society of the City of New York,” Colored American, September 23, 1837.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Roland, “To the Societies of Colored Females for Mutual Improvement,” Liberator, March 8, 1834.
- 28.
William Lloyd Garrison to Sarah Mapps Douglass, 5 March 1832, Anti-Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library.
- 29.
Nancy Beadie, “Female Students and Denominational Affiliation: Sources of Success and Variation among Nineteenth-Century Academies,” American Journal of Education 107.2 (February 1999), 78.
- 30.
Martha Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 33–35.
- 31.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 53.
- 32.
“Extract,” Colored American, November 11, 1837.
- 33.
James Oliver Horton, “Freedom’s Yoke: Gender Conventions among Antebellum Free Blacks,” Feminist Studies, 12.1 (1986), 62.
- 34.
“Male and Female Seminary,” Colored American, April 3, 1841. Emphasis in original.
- 35.
“From Our New-England Correspondent,” New York Evangelist, July 8, 1837.
- 36.
“Proceedings of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women…,” Pennsylvania Freeman, July 8, 1837. Angelina Grimké also put forward a motion denouncing racial prejudice as one of the “chief pillars of American slavery.”
- 37.
Prudence Crandall, “Letter from Miss Crandall [May 7, 1833],” Liberator, May 25, 1833.
- 38.
“High School for Young Colored Ladies and Misses [Advertisement],” Liberator, March 2, 1833.
- 39.
“From the Canterbury School,” Religious Intelligencer, June 15, 1833.
- 40.
Ibid.
- 41.
The Public Statute Laws of the State of Connecticut… (Hartford, C.T., John B. Eldredge, 1835), 321–322.
- 42.
“On the Condition of the Free People of Color,” Colored American, March 14, 1840.
- 43.
Abolitionist Hosea Easton used the de jure/de facto framework in A Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the United States; and the Prejudice Exercised Towards Them: With a Sermon on the Duty of the Church to Them (Boston: Printed and Published by Isaac Knapp).
- 44.
Matthew Lassiter, “De Jure/De Facto Segregation: The Long Shadow of a National Myth,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew Lassiter et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 39.
- 45.
Daniel A. Payne and Samuel Nickless, “To the Public,” Philadelphia Ledger, August 9, 1842.
- 46.
“The Philadelphia Riots,” Liberator, August 19, 1842.
- 47.
Lucy B. Williams and Samuel J. May to Lucretia Motte [sic], 25 June 1834, Reel 31, Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society Correspondence, Pennsylvania Abolition Society Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Lucy B. Williams, of Brooklyn, Connecticut, was likely related to Herbert Williams, a white lawyer and member of the Brooklyn Congregational Church, where May served as minister.
- 48.
For an analysis of the curriculum at normal schools in antebellum Massachusetts, see Kelly Kolodny’s excellent chapter in this volume.
- 49.
First Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society…[1834] (New York: Dorr & Butterfield, 1834), 48. Emphasis mine.
- 50.
Sarah Louisa [Forten], “The Grave of the Slave,” The Philanthropist, March 11, 1836. Sarah Louisa’s poem was originally published in the Liberator on January 22, 1831.
- 51.
N, “School for Young Ladies,” Liberator, October 15, 1841. Emphasis in original.
- 52.
It appears that Mary Miles Bibb held these classes at 8 Southac Street, which was also the address of Lewis Hayden, a leading African American abolitionist in Boston.
- 53.
Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick, Sarah’s Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and How Their Struggle for Equality Changed America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 70.
- 54.
Frederick Douglass, “To H.G. Warner, Esq., Editor of the Rochester Courier,” North Star, September 22, 1848.
- 55.
“Fifth Annual Meeting of the Western N.Y. Anti-Slavery Society,” North Star, December 29, 1848.
- 56.
“Correspondence. Frederick Douglass and Prejudice Against Color,” The British Friend 10.6 (October 1848), 272.
- 57.
Minutes and Address of the State Convention of the Colored Citizens of Ohio…(Oberlin: J.M. Fitch’s Power Press, 1849), 19.
- 58.
“Capacity of the Blacks,” Juvenile Reformer & Sabbath School Instructor, June 17, 1835.
- 59.
“Prejudice Yielding to Faces,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, June 1831. Emphasis in original.
- 60.
“Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society,” North Star, December 8, 1848.
- 61.
Literary historian Jacqueline Bacon reminds readers that we must remain skeptical about the gender of editorialists whose writings appeared in African American and antislavery newspapers. In this letter, a New England correspondent writes about African Americans and women, so I deduce that this correspondent, at the very least, adopted a persona of that of a white male, which is how I refer to this correspondent.
- 62.
“From Our New-England Correspondent,” New York Evangelist, July 8, 1837.
- 63.
Ibid.
- 64.
Kelley, Learning To Stand and Speak, 117.
- 65.
Nelly Wildwood was the nom du plume of Mary Elizabeth Mears, a fairly prolific white woman writer from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. For more about Mears, see Publius V. Lawson, Mary Elizabeth Mears: “Nelly Wildwood” (Madison: The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1916). It appears that Lawson may have disregarded Mears’ large body of antislavery fiction in his book.
- 66.
“An Original Story. Helen Wilson; Or, The Prejudice of Color,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, May 11, 1855.
- 67.
Ibid.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Baumgartner, K. (2018). “Cruel and Wicked Prejudice:” Racial Exclusion and the Female Seminary Movement in the Antebellum North. In: Nash, M.A. (eds) Women’s Higher Education in the United States. Historical Studies in Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59084-8_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59084-8_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-59083-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-59084-8
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)