"I will get domesticated after a while": Gendered ...

"I will get domesticated after a while": Gendered Narratives of Origin and Identity at the Western Female Seminary Brenda R. Weber

Feminist Formations, Volume 24, Issue 1, Spring 2012, pp. 172-196 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/ff.2012.0004

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v024/24.1.weber.html

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“I will get domesticated after a while”: Gendered Narratives of Origin and Identity at the Western Female Seminary Brenda R. Weber

The article examines the founding documents of the Western Female Seminary, housed at Western College at Miami University of Ohio, putting these materials in the context of a larger nineteenth-century discourse culture on American narratives about identity, class, whiteness, and gender. Focusing specifically on Western’s role as the educator of wives for home missionaries and its particular location in the Midwest, the article argues that Western’s public materials relied on, and in the process helped to create, a complicated gendered logic, in that its public relations campaign and institutional governance documents and operating strategies made appeals to both masculine and feminine idioms. As demonstrated through the discourses housed in the Western College archive, the Western Female Seminary offers one piece of evidence in a much larger schema for seeing the temporal, contextual, and spatial specificity of the workings of gender in relation to the education of women. Keywords: Americanness / home missionaries / nineteenth-century women’s history / Western College for Women / Western Female Seminary / whiteness / women’s colleges Founded in 1853, the Western Female Seminary in Oxford, Ohio, predates six of the Seven Sisters—all but Mount Holyoke, which was founded in 1837. The college still exists today, although in quite different form.1 Western has long called itself the “Western Mount Holyoke,” as evidenced in our present moment on its website, which claims Mount Holyoke as “Western’s mother school” (see ©2012 Feminist Formations, Vol. 24 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 172–196

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). Mount Holyoke, in turn, deemed the Western Female Seminary a “western daughter” (Stow 1887, 332), and Old Miami, a 1909 history of Miami University, also located in Oxford, by Alfred Horatio Upham named Western the “virgin daughter of Mount Holyoke, forever consecrated to the maternal ideals and practices” (163). These claims for kinship serve to naturalize the “obvious” mother/daughter valences undergirding the Western/Mount Holyoke relationship, but ties to Mother Holyoke carried much more ambivalent valences at Western’s nineteenth-century beginning. Indeed, the characterization of the particular relationship between Western and Mount Holyoke often was divided on the lines of sex and gender. Western’s nineteenth-century founders, all of them male, primarily worked to distance themselves from any sense of debt or obligation to Holyoke, even as Western’s female administrators and teachers emphasized the bonds of similitude and inheritance between the two schools. Historical accounts of Western’s founding are thus tempered by discursive tensions between the more conventionally masculine tropes of autonomy, promulgated by founder Daniel Tenney and his male board of directors, and the more conventionally feminine filial piety built into Western’s archival history through its female administrators, teachers, and students. Whether through uncertainty or stratagem, it is not wholly unusual for an institution to promulgate differing accounts of its history. I will argue, however, that Western’s mixed signals about its founding and inspiration discursively constructed this academy for women as an institution with a blended identity mapped across an expansive gender register. I will contend that such a broad possibility for what gender might mean was critical to the particular place—the very space Western occupied between city and frontier—that gave the institution cachet. In focusing on the Western Female Seminary, I do not mean to indicate that Western was singular in its blended gender signature; indeed, Oberlin, Antioch, and other Midwestern colleges and academies could well contribute to this picture, supplying finer details on how connotations of gender could be used in service of institution-building. In this article, however, I focus on the Western Female Seminary as an important and often overlooked case study that evidences the degree to which nineteenth-century gender paradigms had purchase and influence within a larger ideological order. I therefore examine the gendered discourses that were instrumental in establishing the Western Female Seminary’s institutional identity, suggesting that a careful analysis of the school’s founding and institutional rhetoric indicates a discursive culture that gave rise to multiple, and often competing, modes of “doing gender.” Importantly, my understanding of gender not only exists in a complicated symbiosis with sexed identity, but it is also meant to be intersectional, meaning that gender gains its resonance through a series of tacit and overt negotiations instantiated through multiple identity locations like class, ethnicity, and race. As indicated by the evidence provided by archival

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records, I seek to examine how the particularities of place in many ways fostered a blurring of a dichotomous view of gender predicated on sex difference. This discursive rendering of gender, in turn, hinged on codes of whiteness and class privilege that are central to the ideological structuring of nineteenth-century American identity. A Question of Influence: Our Own Place or a Western Holyoke? The exact inspiration for Western’s founding rests on three differing creation narratives. The first made use of Mount Holyoke’s founder Mary Lyon, an ardent proponent for intellectually rigorous and Christian-centered education for women. Lyon was often promoted in Western’s internal histories as having set the template for the school’s curriculum and structure. The second creation myth credited the famous Beecher family, which had relocated from Hartford to Cincinnati in 1832, with influencing the school’s mission and organization. Western’s Presbyterian minister-founder Daniel Tenney was a friend, colleague, and admirer of Lyman Beecher.2 A third story of creation hinges on speculation. Differing historical accounts suggest that Tenney’s wife, Mary Parker Tenney, might have been a student of Lyon and a graduate of Mount Holyoke, thus presupposing a “natural” conduit between the schools. An undated, unpublished manuscript in the Western archives by Sarah Isabella Howe, who was a 1965 Western graduate, titled “The First One Hundred Years” contends that Derry Female Seminary in New Hampshire (more commonly called the Adams Female Seminary) served as the antecedent to Western, since Mary Tenney graduated from the Derry academy in 1840. These three different and, in some respects, contradictory stories of origin make evident that what is at stake for twenty-first-century scholars is not what actually or accurately occurred (for instance, did Mary graduate from Derry or Mount Holyoke?), but what sort of story gained currency in the telling and retelling of Western’s origin. While these three possible stories of origin circulated in the 1850s, it is telling that at present only the first story, that of Mount Holyoke’s influence, has survived in any meaningful way, its veracity strengthened through a century and a half of in-house histories, newspaper features, informal histories, and history journals (see Crisci n.d.; Drakeman 1988; “Go Where No One Else Will Go” 1988; McFeely 1987; Platt 1999; “Schools and Colleges of Many Types” 1937). It is not my intent to deem one of Western’s foundation stories as being more valid or historically accurate compared to the others; rather, in this article I attend to the gendered implications at work during Western’s founding in the story of creation that has earned the largest cultural cachet over the years: the one concerning the fabled relationship between Western and Mount Holyoke. While the archive can offer information, I do not look to it for facts but for texts, or more pointedly, for the ways in which narratives shape our understanding of both gender and history. Unlike the present-day discourse that


does not question the debt that Western owed to Mount Holyoke, archival materials attest that Daniel Tenney was committed to making Western’s educational product distinct, autonomous, and not indebted to Mount Holyoke. He noted a plethora of schools in the East that inadequately prepared women for their stations in life, and he cited this abundance of purposeless education as a key rationale for a women’s college in the West that would make a decided difference. “The East is crowded with ‘seminaries’ and ‘colleges’ and institutions for the education of young ladies,” Tenney wrote in a handwritten booklet in 1865, but he complained that Eastern women sought education for all the wrong reasons. Eastern schools, he argued, were filled with disinterested students who matriculated either because their parents wished it or because a certain school was fashionable: “The result has been that it is exceedingly difficult to find thoroughly educated, practical young ladies for the domestic and public stations to which in the providence of God many of them come to be called.” Western needed to exist, he insisted, because the Ohio Valley created a particular demand for a specific kind of education. In this case, the demand called for an institution “dedicated first of all to the Redeemer where it shall be known to the publics’ [sic] that the first great lesson to be learned is at the Savior’s feet”; the consequence of such pious learning would be manifest in its female graduates (letter, 1855). Although Tenney depended heavily on the model of disciplinary regulation and intellectual rigor at Mount Holyoke and other colleges and, in fact, appealed to the former to “foster this western daughter, assist in making her a counterpart of the mother institution, and select the first corps of teachers from their ranks,” soon after Western’s founding he downplayed Mount Holyoke’s significance and his reliance on the model it provided (Stow 1887, 332). In his 1855 report to the Executive Committee, Tenney spoke of Holyoke in rather veiled terms: “but one institution of the kind has ever been established in the U.S. and this in a remote section of the country. And although that seminary has for eighteen years been the glory of N.E., still it was but little known in the field in which we were called to operate.” Tenney stressed here the singularity of the endeavor he led, downplaying his debt to other people and institutions and thus emphasizing his own role as trailblazer rather than disciple. His comments acknowledged little of the high reputation and stature attached to Mount Holyoke, and in no way did he indicate his own or Western’s reliance on a prototype provided by Lyon or other respected academies for women, such as Emma Willard’s Troy Female Seminary, Zilpah Grant’s Ipswich Female Seminary, and Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary. In so minimizing Holyoke specifically and other colleges for women more broadly, Tenney also distanced himself and his school from a matrix of (female) origination, in effect creating in Western a myth of autogenesis that reinforced male creation over female procreation, an issue of some concern during the nineteenth century (see Weber 2006).


While Tenney made speeches distancing himself and Western from any obligation to Eastern models, Western’s teachers and administrators reinforced the filial connection between it and Mount Holyoke. Western’s first principal, Helen Peabody, who was a Mount Holyoke graduate, unflinchingly followed the model of Holyoke’s discipline and intellectual rigor. To further bind the connection, both faculty members and students deemed themselves “dutiful daughters” and compiled elaborate institutional journals that were annually copied and sent to Mount Holyoke (seminary journals [transcribed], 1855–71). These informal histories, which are in the form of long, newsy diary entries, are telling for their appearance as much as for their contents. The rushed or confused writing evident in other materials in the archive is absent; the journals are neatly written in a uniform and beautiful penmanship. No words are crossed out; none are misspelled. Each booklet is written in the same hand, suggesting that they had been pre-composed and then copied out into the homage epistles sent yearly to Mount Holyoke. Although the actual authors of the diaries may have changed from entry to entry, the contents make repeated use of familial and feminized metaphors, for example, positioning Western as an “absent child from the mothers and sisters” (journal, 11 October 1855) or asking that the Holyoke recipients “write to us as you do the younger sisters at home” (journal, 20 December 1856). The contents of a time capsule deposited in the cornerstone of the school in 1860 further attest to familial ties. Included were a copy of the life of Mary Lyon and catalogs from Mount Holyoke, Lake Erie, Miami University, Oxford Institute, and Oxford Female College, symbolically linking the schools in a domestic unit, unified by proximity and, one presumes, consanguinity. Western’s written materials and daily practices make visible a complex logic of gender. Western’s all-male founders celebrated (masculine-coded) singularity, while the seminary’s all-female personnel articulated their (feminine-coded) kinship status in an extended familial unit. Such complex and contested gendered investments played out in multiple arenas. Public pronouncements, for instance, described Western as distinct, extraordinary, and like no other place in the country, even as internal histories underscored the school’s faithfulness, fidelity, and similarity to its “Mother, Mount Holyoke.” Public materials used masculine-inflected tropes of individualism and conquest to promise that Western’s unparalleled advantages would lead to students’ success, whereas within the domestic domain, faculty and staff members encouraged students to consider themselves part of a larger sorority of women and engaged in a unifying goal of education, sisterhood, and salvation. Teachers thus stressed the filial bonds between Western and Holyoke, underscoring gendered investments in docile, other-oriented femininity, as best evidenced through a set of rules that included demerits for “speaking above a whisper,” “sitting or lying on the [bed]spread,” or “taking company to rooms” (Rules, 1855–56). The founders, on the other hand, articulated more


traditionally masculine values, emphasizing Western’s unique identity, which, in turn, implied a version of male-centered identity expressed through independence, autonomy, and control. Through this discursive and, by all indications, unconscious conflict, Western’s male founders and its female administrators and teachers staged a constant doing and redoing of gender, hashed out through the coded language of autonomy and interdependence. As such, Western as an institution became associated with two seemingly incompatible objectives: manly self-determination and womanly sisterhood, thereby seeming to reify the notion of the West’s (womanly) affective interdependence with the East, even as it underscored the possibility of its own (manly) autonomy. Gender Fluidity in Nineteenth-Century America The gendered metaphors of masculine self-sufficiency and feminine dependency fully reinforced larger tropes experienced by the burgeoning nation in the mid-nineteenth century. Roderick Nash (1967) notes, for instance, that the nineteenth-century rise of industrialization and increase in urban population created fewer opportunities for men to express their masculinity in confrontation with nature. The “Adamic hero,” as Carolyn Merchant (2004) has termed him, was thus compelled to turn his attention even more forcefully to symbolic nature, to women’s bodies and behaviors that stood metonymically for “nature itself” (117). As she observes: “The story of American settlement is filled with metaphors that cast nature as a female object to be improved by men. Images of Eve as virgin land to be exploited, as fallen nature to be redeemed through reclamation, and as fruitful garden to be harvested are deeply encoded in American history, art, and literature” (ibid.). Merchant charts a shift in the woman-as-nature metaphor that took place during the mid-nineteenth century, where “romantics and transcendentalists constructed an alternative to the mainstream story, personifying nature as a powerful female to be revered, rather than a virgin land to be plowed and improved” (118). While the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir wrote verses arguing for the sublimity of feminized nature, thus perhaps also lending credibility to the notion of an empowered (if disembodied) womanhood, more conventional and, one might argue, conservative rhetoric depicted women as untamed and in need of cultivation. Not specifically stated by Daniel Tenney, but fully a part of the Western mandate as indicated by the archives, was the fact that Ohio constituted a staging ground for the missionary work being done in the Western frontier. A significant element of Western’s market for students was the home missionary, who relied on affordable institutions able to educate daughters and perhaps prepare them to become missionary wives; as Upham (1909) put it in rather racist terms in his history of Miami University, Western women were trained to become “helpmeets for intended careers among the Fuzzy-wuzzies” (167). By


necessity, the wife of a home missionary had to possess qualities of thrift and vision; she, as did many other wives and mothers in the nineteenth century, had to be hardworking and independent at the same time that she was reflective and willing to play a nurturing role within a larger domestic order. Western’s educational design perfectly fit this code of nondecorative femininity, offering female students what might be considered to be the masculine qualities of industriousness, even while it trained them in the more conventionally feminine attributes of domesticity. It is important to note that scholars who work in the history of women’s education and nineteenth-century gender studies have effectively demonstrated that gender during that time was as fluid, polysemous, and performative as in the present. Thus the very categories of feminine and masculine and the attendant notion of a sexualized divide between public and private spheres served as convenient fictions that have no absolute meaning except as analytical tools applied to cultural beliefs, mores, and practices. Perhaps due to the inherent fluidity of what gives gender meaning and intelligibility, nineteenth-century literary, educational, political, and social discourses were rife with imperatives about perceived sex differences and beliefs about corresponding gendered behaviors, many of which coalesced around women’s education. Consider, for instance, E. A. Andrews’s claim in an 1887 article for The Religious Magazine that “[t]he tendency of female education at the present day is to develop the mind to the neglect of the graces. In place of all which is most attractive in female manners, we see characters expressly formed for acting a manly part upon the theatre of life. . . . Under such influences the female character is fast becoming masculine” (188). Given such extreme rhetoric, we must therefore understand that many discourses about gender division in the nineteenth century were metaphors that compelled prescriptive behaviors. The fact that in a nineteenth-century context these metaphors derived their potency through women’s material, political, institutional, and social impediments (such as limited property entitlements, disenfranchisement, and narrow access to education) made the living of such ideology a complicated and often restrictive experience. Moreover, although the public/private and masculine/feminine divisions were always porous, language directed at sustaining a clear distinction between the sexes helped to produce a conceptual version of idealized femininity that found resonances in motherhood and service, while idealized masculinity often found expression through industriousness and self-determination. In this context, Western’s discursive gender fluidity makes perfect sense. As with gender, so also with race, class, and ethnicity, since the practices at Western make evident a complicated backdrop through which to read for social-identity information. As just one example, if the missionary’s wife herself became a home missionary, her gendered role in relation to those she tried to “save” was all the more complex. As Derek Chang (2010) notes, on the West


Coast, where missionary zeal focused on Chinese immigrants, white, middleclass female home missionaries often occupied a position of perceived dominance as “moral and social betters [that] subordinated Chinese men to white women” (95). Incorporated into these gendered and racist values and undergirding the proselytizing fervor of the home missionary were tacit expectations that the new, Christian republic would exist in the unity of one belief alone. It is somewhat outside the scope of this article to discuss the history and objectives of the nineteenth-century American home missionary project specifically or theories of whiteness more broadly, but critical to my point is the manner in which the missionary project, as enacted through multiple Christian denominations, reinforced an ideology of harmony, whereby the conversion of “infidels” and “heathens” (here, specifically foreign immigrants, including Caucasians not perceived as white and Native Americans) created what historian Edward Blum (2007) has termed an “ethnic nationalism of whiteness” that came to “penetrate the American psyche” (244). As I have argued elsewhere, the denial of race frequently creates a scenario where what is not named reverts to a default norm. In this case, education dedicated to Christian improvement tacitly conflated with whiteness and American projects of upward mobility, thus implicating Western College in the same intricate matters of race, class, and gender that so gripped the nation (Weber 2009). Rhetorics of Rightness: Why Educate “Our Young Ladies”? Given the need to create wives for home missionaries, Western’s rhetoric of rightness, or discourses directed at bringing out a particular iteration of appropriate femininity, was also tacitly a rhetoric of whiteness and class refinement. Although Western’s near neighbor to the north, Oberlin College, became renowned as a liberal arts academy that first admitted African American students, Western made no such vow to racial uplift; instead, it marked itself as a progressive institution by catering to those without class privilege. Yet Western’s attentiveness to class was focused almost entirely on the home missionary, rather than to the working class or the indigent. Tenney indicated that he was largely motivated to establish a women’s college by the desire to promote Oxford, Ohio, (and himself) as supportive of a “superior order,” a prestigious and rigorous environment for women that would edify the daughters of the Ohio Valley and turn them into appropriately schooled members of the emerging American Victorian middle class. As he noted in his journal: For some length of time I have been hoping and praying that God would make me instrumental in the establishment of a school of a superior order, modeled somewhat after the South Hadley [Mount Holyoke] plan. The subject has been before me for eight years and I have hoped and despaired alternately; but of late the light begins to break in, and hope sits upon the throne. It shall be

180 · Feminist Formations 24.1 my daily prayer that this new enterprise may succeed. I will do nothing but under the direction of God’s spirit. I feel the greatness of the undertaking, and know that without aid from above I can do nothing. O Lord, grant me that aid. If I can through this undertaking accomplish anything to check the frivolity and wrecklessness [sic] of our young ladies, I shall not have lived in vain. (5 June 1855)

This excerpt from Tenney’s journal was included in a letter he wrote to Western in 1878 to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the school.3 As was appropriate for a man of his time and station, Tenney employed impassioned and highly religious language in his appeal that the glory of God make manifest the glory of man in the form of an institution to teach women how to be useful, modest, and culturally refined. His journal passage speaks of struggle, tribulation, and enduring faith on the part of its male founders, a generic trope extracted from the pages of heroic mythology and set onto the history of school making. The nineteenth century was rife with philanthropists seeking the best public expenditure that might ensure posthumous remembrance. Marion Bacon (1940) notes in her pictorial history of Vassar College, for instance, that Matthew Vassar was encouraged to invest in posterity, for if he “spent his money on city projects, his name would be known in the city of Poughkeepsie only; whereas, if he founded a college for women, his name would be known the world over” (10). Tenney’s histories equally indicate a vested interest in ensuring that the story was saved “accurately” for posterity’s sake, and such accuracy involved detailed accounts of monies owed and earned, stories of how investors were sought and courted, information about memberships on the board of trustees, and opportunities for the glorification of God. Western’s trustees promoted the institution to middle-class parents as a place where their daughters could expect a strict though edifying refinement into the conventional middle-class norms of white womanhood. Consider this section of a Western promotional flyer (1853): Its design is to qualify young ladies for all the peculiar and lofty responsibilities that devolve on them to so pre-eminent a degree in this age of the world. It aims to send back to the parents, who shall commit their daughters to its care, not vain fastidious pedants, with unreal views of life and its objects, but reflecting, intelligent, energetic and industrious young ladies, with hearts and minds well-furnished for the domestic and social relations of refined life. It aims to send out teachers for our district and select schools, who shall be the the [sic] glory of the West. Its main object will be to prepare young ladies to be educators, in the strictest sense of that word, of our children and youth. (emphasis in original)


In this promotion to parents and a larger community, the authors did not find it necessary to legitimate or explain the values implied in the language. An undesirable female was easily understood as one with “unreal views of life and its objects,” whereas an admirable woman was “reflecting, intelligent, energetic, and industrious” and had learned to turn these skills to her proper place in the “domestic and social relations of refined life.” The flyer promised parents that Western would establish middle-class sensibilities in their daughters, and such sensibilities tacitly reinforced the prevailing gender and race ideals. Education at Western could thus be viewed as a safe way to develop young women into mothers and wives that were better suited and satisfied and more fully effective as influential models to children. Note again in the second paragraph of the flyer, a sentence that stands alone on the page: “Its main object will be to prepare young ladies to be the educators, in the strictest sense of the word, of our children and youth.” The founders made this point most emphatically: that their institution was not about furthering female bookishness, but about fostering a very specific cultural ideal made legible through the mother/teacher. In addition to checking the frivolity of “young ladies,” however, Western’s educational curriculum, steeped as it was in Greek and Latin, as well as bookkeeping and written composition, offered women remunerative skills and intellectual sagacity, qualities that differed from the decorative education allocated to women at finishing schools or the Bible-based servitude exacted at religious academies.4 I want to emphasize here the gendered language operating in Western’s first advertorial. In it, there is an interesting acknowledgment of the financial benefits that will accrue to graduates who can serve as teachers. In stating its main objective as preparing young ladies to be educators, Western implies that women with education will continue to function as guardians for children in the unpaid economy of the home or the temporary holding ground between school and marriage that a teaching career offered some women. To be sure, as I have noted, ideological conventions of nineteenth-century America made it desirable—indeed, a supposed biological imperative—for white middle-class women to be both residents and superintendents of domestic spaces. Women’s presence as aesthetic objects and nurturing caretakers functioned as a critical linchpin in the prevailing idealization that placed women in domestic spaces and men in working public arenas, even if in the realities of everyday life such prescriptive separations were impossible to enact. Indeed, although we recognize that these gendered spheres were more of a convenient fiction than a reliable description of actual nineteenth-century practices, their power to articulate a normative (rather than normal) social arrangement held great appeal. As demonstrated in its publicity materials, the fact that Western’s advertising thematics appealed to both conventionally masculine and traditionally feminine qualities is telling, because it indicates some awareness that the deterministic prescriptive codes that governed gendered expectations did not always


easily accord with actual circumstances. As one example to suggest why concepts of the “cult of true womanhood” advocating piety, purity, obedience, and submissiveness were impracticable, the 1870 census showed roughly the same numbers of men and women nationwide, yet their distribution was geographically uneven (these figures were roughly in line with those during Western’s founding in the 1850s) (Welter 1976). In the Western frontier, predominantly the lands west of the 100th parallel that are approximately aligned with the Mississippi River, men outnumbered women by a ratio of three or more to one. East of the frontier line, because men were not always available and/or able to uphold their end of the sex and gender contract, women were compelled to earn money in order to support themselves and often their families. Education offered an important alternative for middle-class daughters who, in the absence of suitable husbands, could not fulfill the ideological mandates to be wives and mothers. Indeed, the rise of the middle class and a concomitant awareness of and investment in codes of whiteness made educated women all the more critical. Richard Bushman (1992) notes in The Refinement of America, for instance, that the increasing cultural capital placed on literacy meant that schools for women became a place where the upper-class, white parlor culture of learning and literature could be extended into a more public expression of a middle-class family’s commitment to educational accomplishment, regardless of ethnicity. Schools where women learned communally with a certain measure of class and race/ethnic integration were the popular adjunct to the tasks of literacy and literary refinement taken up by white women in the middle- and upper-class home. Bushman notes that as early as the 1770s, “[p]arents were willing to pay for instruction even when they were incapable of evaluating what they got for their money” (28). He argues that by the mid-nineteenth century, this “mental culture” indelibly marked a pupil and her family as denizens of a whitened middle class—a middle class that self-consciously cultivated the markings of refinement. “No matter what other personal gifts a woman had,” Bushman notes, “she was not complete without ‘mental culture’ achieved through study” (285). A frequent consequence of mental culture, though, was the shady gradation between owning books and reading them, between admiring books and thinking critically about ideas. Educated women were caught in a dilemma, for, as Jane Rose (1995) argues, women were “encouraged to become well educated and literate,” while also being bound by the widespread cultural anxiety “that if they receive education equal to men’s, they may become unsuitable for marriage” (51). Further, education itself potentially offered learned women a new sort of threatening voice. As Joanne Wagner (1995) has observed: “No matter how women planned to use their education, graduates expected to become participants in literate society. They expected the world to ask for their opinions, and they wanted to be able to reply in style” (199). Learning was esteemed for the social distinction it conferred and for the way it reinforced women’s roles as markers of white middle-class sensibilities, but higher education for women


was equally feared for the masculinized intellectualism and independence it seemingly provoked, thus offering an important register where class, race, and gender were broadcast through a conjoined rhetoric of crisis. The Importance of Place: Region and Identity at Western Given the intense social investments that coalesced around the meaning and doing of gender, Western had to be careful about the ways it promised both male and female qualities as a consequence of its pedagogy. Highlighting sex and gender conformity appears to have been one rhetorical strategy. The seminary’s public materials, pamphlets, and flyers reinforced conventional gendered metaphors by joining with other literary renderings of the sublime, linking Western’s lush landscapes to feminized bodies and behaviors. In fact, Western was not alone in this discursive conflation, since many colleges for both women and men also advertised themselves as being in settings of exquisite pastoral scenery or, conversely, in formerly wild locations that had been tamed, as Merchant (2004) indicates, through the strength and virility of the Adamic hero (see Williams College’s history as one example, at ). The objective of these metaphors of place as they relate to men’s colleges seems to be a reification of the interdependent though separate relationships between academy and nature, civilization and wilderness, and rigors of the intellect and idylls of landscape. As such, a men’s school placed amid the rolling hills of nature attested to its own value, since it stood conspicuously against the more prosaic landscape. For women’s colleges, however, spatial metaphors worked differently. Helen Horowitz (1984) has demonstrated, for instance, that geographic and architectural elements of female academies often reinforced notions of women’s purity and vulnerability through physical separation. Western’s catalog offers some demonstration of the competing gendered logics at work in the advertising of the school. The catalog’s descriptions extolled the school’s unique location on “more than 30 acres of land, unsurpassed for variety, beauty and healthfulness” (Catalog, 1855–56). Refuting a belief that civilized culture existed only on the East Coast, the catalog promised that the West was the place most perfectly suited to refine and instruct young women. Indeed, Western boasted that its natural topography made it far superior to schools in the East. Descriptions evoked the rolling hills of the Ohio Valley, in pointed contrast to the overcrowded cities of the East or even of the nearby growing urban hubs of Chicago, Louisville, and Cincinnati. Western promised “ample room” to expand and grow, and it extended this pledge to “healthfulness,” “social refinement,” and “religious privileges” (ibid.). Western was, quite simply, Western, which made it, like women, a fertile ground for implanting male desire, as well as a safe space to send daughters. The first sentence of Western’s 1853 promotional flyer also worked to join two feminized images: the female ideal and the pastoral scenery of Oxford.


It reads: “This Institution is to be located at Oxford, Ohio—a situation of unparalleled advantages for beauty of scenery, healthfulness, social refinement and religious privileges.” The natural images suggest that Western will work harmoniously with the culturally scripted role for women to be “properly influential” to children, either as mothers or teachers, thus reinforcing comfortable gender notions about femininity. This modality for feminine education also fits within Catharine Beecher’s ([1835]1970) belief that both sexes needed a “system of moral and religious education at school, which shall have a decided influence in forming the character, and regulating the principles and conduct, of future life” (183). As I have previously noted, Beecher and Mount Holyoke’s founder Mary Lyon were prominent voices in shaping women’s education, both believing that proper learning was a moral crusade that could not be lost if the nation were to guard against “insubordination, anarchy, and crime” (180). By so positioning themselves behind the evangelical rhetoric of the missionary, female educators were able to advocate radical changes in the ideology of sex differences, even as they underscored its so-called naturalness. Lest this seem like some deliberate counter-hegemonic move on the part of Lyon and Beecher, it should be clear that both women spoke of believing in a soundness to the domestic/public divide articulated through gender and reinforced through class, race, and ethnicity divisions. In fact, Beecher considered it “chimerical” to expect men to overcome their sex’s “aversion to the sedentary, confining, and toilsome duties of teaching and governing young children” when they could have the “excitement and profits of commerce, manufactures, agriculture and the arts” (qtd. in Barker-Benfield 1976, 21). At the Western Female Seminary, the promises of cultivated and educated femininity operated in tension with other more stereotypically masculinized qualities, such as independence, critical thinking, and wage earning—qualities that were coded as masculine even in light of increasing numbers of women entering the workforce. In this case, feminine signifiers came suffused with masculinized signification, laying the groundwork for the kinds of changes that fostered first-wave feminism, suffrage, and expanded roles for women. Indeed, just as Ann Firor Scott (1979) has claimed that the Troy Female Seminary functioned as “an important source of feminism and the incubator of a new style of female personality” (3), the seeds of feminism were equally cultivated nearer the Western frontier, on the borders of the frontier at the Western Female Seminary. Yet these advances did not always come easily. Educational institutions for both men and women were largely about the business of curbing youthful exuberance through discipline, while inculcating educable bodies with class, race, and gender-based sensibilities. At Western, as was the case with other schools, one way to “check” female “frivolity and recklessness” (Tenney, 5 June 1855) was in enforcing a strict schedule. An 1865 letter from Hattie Darrow to her parents in Peru, Indiana, demonstrates such policing through temporality:

Brenda R. Weber · 185 It is with tears in my eyes and feeling homesick and I endeavor to write this letter. I have had a spell of crying and homesickness every day since I have been here, but feel less badly every day. So of course, I will get domesticated after a while. . . . The only thing that perplexes me is the ringing of the bells. . . . There is no regular time by the clock to go by, but we go by bells. There is first-hour bell, half, quarter, three quarters, or fifteen minutes, five minutes, and tardy. There is a tardy after every bell. It is just one tap. There [are] about fifty bells.

While chimes, bells, and alarms were clearly a part of most school days, Darrow’s letter indicates that she interpreted the ringing of the bells as a means of enforced regulation meant to tame or domesticate her. Given this, it is ironic that in the culture more broadly, the shift from an agrarian to an industrial economy meant that the nineteenth-century working class was experiencing new lives structured by external and mechanistic notions of time: bells and whistles signified when to work, when to rest, and when to return home to eat and sleep. In referencing Western’s bells for breakfast, bells for worship, bells for class and study time, Darrow evokes a veritable cacophony of clanging regularity reinforced by Western’s demand for “perfect punctuality through the whole year, without interruption” (Catalog, 1855–56). In turn, Darrow’s quip that she “will get domesticated after a while” immediately following her admission of crying and homesickness situates the bells as an exercise in ego subordination, where the needs of the individual become supplanted by the regularizing socialization of the institution. The formulaic regularity of the schedule reinforced an austerity considered crucial to the founding principles of the school. As Daniel Tenney noted in an 1855 letter, [W]e are to open this school for those who have a thirst for a Christian education—whose means are in many instances only meager but who are determined to fit themselves to do good in the world. It becomes us therefore as trustees ourselves to set an example of self denial in all our arrangements and to call likewise to the service of the Sem. who will be tempted at all by the offer of large salaries but who will be called to come and enter to live as Christ.

Disciplinary regularity was a means through which the institution endeavored to inculcate values of self-denial and Christ-like service, for it was not the individual egos of the students or the faculty who established the regularity of the day, but an omnipresent order to which all within the seminary could only obey. The regulation of time underscored subservience. Apparently, the system worked for some students, though not to their overall delight. As Lizzie Cowan wrote to her sister in 1870 (29 October), “Maggie, you really can’t imagine how very sober and dignified I am getting. I don’t do anything wrong except once in a great while steal some sugar or crackers.” Adda Collier (1877) confessed


to her journal that “college life is not as pleasant as an ignorant person might suppose it to be.” Instead of tasting the fruits of freedom, she lamented she had learned that “if girls are not happy at home they need not expect to be any more so in college.” Western’s geographic placement and home-missionary student base heightened a sense that a school outside of the redundancies of the East must commit itself to old and tried Christianity and the indoctrination of women into their necessary roles. This was particularly important in those areas of the country that, at mid-century, were derided by East Coast sophisticates as backward and uncivilized, such as the Ohio Valley area around Cincinnati, which contended with an immediate Other in the form of foreign immigrants.5 For educational and religious crusaders like Lyman Beecher, the influx of immigrants on the Western boundary near Cincinnati and Oxford represented a metaphoric “Armageddon,” filled with “infidelism and Roman Catholicism” (Hedrick 1994, 68). As such, Cincinnati and the surrounding areas became the ideal sites for reformers, who came to the Ohio Valley in order to tame it—a gendered and racist trope in itself.6 In her introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, Sarah Robbins (2007) calls the nineteenth-century Cincinnati journeyed to by the Beechers a “cultural ‘contact’ zone” deliberately selected by the Beecher family as a place to “transplant the values of their home region into this western crossroads” (4). Equally, in Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Stowe and Lyman Beecher Stowe (1911) wrote that the Beecher family traveled to Cincinnati intending to “turn over the West by means of a model school in this, its capital,” thus suggesting the degree to which school-making fulfilled a broad range of ideological objectives (72; emphasis in original). This concern for hegemonic race, class, and gendered values as focused on religion and region was all the more heightened given the educational market. Oxford was a dynamic nineteenth-century college town with, according to the 1850 census, a population of 1,111 in town and 2,028 within the larger township.7 In the 1850s, Oxford boasted two other female academies in addition to Western, as well as the all-male Miami University and a seminary.8 These five institutions of advanced learning marked Oxford as an important crucible in an educational boom market, a site where institutions competed hotly for student enrollments. Increasing the numbers of male students was virtually impossible, but women’s education was still a market in which the entrepreneur could make headway. Oxford Female College and Oxford Female Institute were aligned with the more traditional objectives for ladies of finishing schools, offering courses in art, handwriting, and music for well-to-do students schooled in environments of luxury and privilege.9 The Western Female Seminary differentiated itself through affordability and a more demanding intellectual curriculum. As Margaret Nash (1996) argues, “Oxford Female College, with its ornamental subjects and uniformed servants, and the Institute, with its coursework in wax flower making, connoted a passive and protected view of womanhood that could


only be attained by the relatively wealthy” (33). At Western, students “studied hard, scrubbed floors, literally served each other, and were expected to put their talents to use in the world after graduation” (ibid.). To keep tuition costs low, Western, like Mount Holyoke, mandated that students perform the domestic needs of the school. Students followed strict schedules, in which they cooked, cleaned, laundered, and even darned the socks of male Miami students. Administrators and trustees contended that housework was character-building, an idea in good keeping with what the Beecher sisters would espouse in their The American Woman’s Home ([1869]2002). Western’s charter (1853), for example, presented the domestic responsibilities for students as a positive aspect of the institution, saying: “This arrangement is partly as a matter of economy, but altogether for its own sake. It is to promote industrious and systematic habits in those, who are hereafter to become themselves the Mistresses of households. It is to secure a degree of independence not otherwise attainable. It is to promote the health, improvement and happiness of the pupils.” In 1865, Western continued to reinforce the ideal that housework was morally edifying and pleasurable. Emily Jessup, a Western teacher and assistant to Principal Helen Peabody, wrote to Reverend Peabody (Helen’s brother): “Our new Matron is all we had hoped her to be. Miss White says there is less wasted or rather given to the pigs in one week than sometimes last year in one day. Then the neatness & care & constant supervision by one so ladylike is making these girls to see that housework is honorable & can be done gracefully & beautifully.” Although in-house domestic work kept tuition costs lower for the women who attended Western, there is little evidence to suggest that “helping the needy” cut across class lines. As previously noted, the indigent in this case were not the working class or those made conspicuous by race or ethnicity, but the poor members of the white middle class, most specifically the daughters of the “worthy servant”—the missionary.10 Roughly half of the 1853 flyer pertains to issues facing indigent home missionaries, suggesting that the founders were moved not so much by the need to educate all impoverished women as by the plight faced by minister fathers who could not afford to prepare their daughters for middle-class lives. “Nothing would so soon dispel the deep shades,” the flyer stated, “which envelop our parsonages and clothe them all with brilliant sunshine, as such a benevolent and noble provision to polish the cornerstones of those parsonages, which are their daughters.” The founders of Western perceived a need in the plight of home missionaries that rendered their daughters a likely clientele for an institution that could safeguard the development of middle-class ideals in the absence of financial means. In his handwritten booklet (1865), Tenney urged the trustees to “extend special aide and encouragement to the daughters of ministers.” Doing so, he said, “is one of the primary objectives in the establishment of this institution.” Margaret Nash (2005) trenchantly argues in Women’s Education in the United States that social class did more than gender to shape women’s education,


and this is a very compelling claim in terms of the curriculum. She notes, citing the example of Catharine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary (founded in 1823 in Connecticut), that while Beecher often reinforced the prevailing hegemonic paradigms that underscored an ideological separation between men as superior and women as subordinate, her academy instructed women in a rigorous education predicated on that in men’s colleges. Consequently, Nash contends, intellectual stimulation, moral education, and physical activity worked collectively to shape a mind that transcended gender differences. This form of education was critical for both men and women, she argues, due to the rising tide of Americanization that demanded nongender-specific workers who could “read, write, and do sums” (2). Nash offers an important mandate—namely, that scholars reckon with the degree to which class is critical when thinking about the social meaning of education—yet Western’s public materials about its institutional identity indicate that gender played a more important role than Nash’s work might indicate. Two points help sustain this contention. First, whereas a generalized curriculum of Greek, Latin, and mathematics at both men’s and women’s colleges might show, as she contends, that educators made no specific differentiation between the sexes, an examination of the materials that an institution like Western used to describe itself suggests that gender very likely factored into shaping notions of value and overall cultural legibility. And second, the idea of a nongender-specific worker that Nash describes is really a sex more than a gender difference. While a common curriculum could be taught to both young men and women, the tenor of that curriculum when geared toward a more classic education was decidedly masculine-coded. Women desiring entrance into the world of employment and commerce, then, had to learn to “act the manly part,” which is to say that they implemented the full meaning of the gender continuum that allows female bodies to enact masculinity. While the terms of this continuum equally make possible male bodies that articulate the codes of femininity, it is part of the patriarchal hierarchy that back then, as now, there was less cultural capital attached to the codes of femininity than to what was culturally perceived as masculine. The letters that Western students wrote home to parents and friends offer some evidence for how these matters of curricular rigor and discipline were absorbed. Students would speak of rising at four in the morning to practice Latin or of studying until late into the night. Cowan (30 October 1870) wrote to her sister Maggie that “I have to study real hard and it is once in a while that I get much home sick. I like it real well here until Sunday comes and then we can’t go out of our own rooms unless it is necessary and have to eat cold dinner. I don’t think that is very nice.” In another letter (15 December 1870), she wrote: “Mag, I have been to devotions, recited my history, and taken my writing lessons, and now I will devote the remainder of the morning to answering your letter. We always study in our rooms and it is a rule to do nothing but study, however


I am not observing that rule now. Maggie, it is the hardest thing for me to get my mind on my studies and I forget Grecian history faster than I can learn it.” Cowan’s reference to both what she learned and the disciplinary structure in which such learning took place helps to extend the idea, as theorized by scholars such as Margaret Nash and Kimberley Tolley (1996, 2003), that such subjects as science and math were increasingly becoming acceptable as middle-class pursuits for women. Already cited is Darrow’s 1865 letter to her parents as evidence of the disciplinary structure imposed on Western students, in this case through the incessant ringing of bells, but it is not entirely clear how fully the ideological codes such discipline was meant to confer were internalized. In many ways, her letter presents information of a different sort that is also relevant to gender. It shows a version of the long-suffering heroine who is affected by sentiment and longing for family, but is willing to undergo the trials her parents lay out for her by trusting that their judgment will make her the wiser and more virtuous woman. Of course, it may well be that Darrow was savvy to the ways of persona construction and knew that this kind of letter would be exactly what might most appeal to (or manipulate) her parents; it could be that she did not actually feel the homesickness she speaks of nor did end her letter so as to study the Bible, as she says she must. Although Darrow clearly communicates gender-appropriate information to her parents, she also lets them know that she is not merely transcribing her experience. Some degree of editorializing is clearly written into her message; we might thus more appropriately consider her case hypothetical rather than demonstrated transgression, yet the important point is that in a culture in which female resistance among “ladies” had seldom been acknowledged overtly enough to be charted, such ambivalence as Darrow’s signaled a less-than-complete indoctrination. Indeed, one of the possibilities that formal learning allowed was the potential to think (and write) ideas in opposition to the very norms that educational institutions for women were founded to inculcate. “A Rich Time at the ‘Great Western’ ” Perhaps as some attempt to further offset the perceived masculinization that came with independence through education, Western devised a number of strategies for placing the bodies of its students on display—a gesture that highlighted their sexual identity, even as their gendered identity was allowed a greater degree of latitude. Much like the students at other colleges for women, Western’s regularly engaged in organized calisthenics designed, as the 1835 American Annals of Education and Instruction described it, to perfect “our whole nature, intellectual, physical, and moral” (qtd. in Nash 2005, 94). At Western, such organized exercise was often choreographed as entertainment for visitors. Narka Nelson ([1954]1967) references a letter from Abner Jones—a


Miami University student during 1854–60—who wrote that “[i]n the evening there was a rich time at the ‘Great Western.’ Some of my friends were there. The ladies gave us an exercise in calisthenistics. I was introduced to about 50 girls. They are the finest and prettiest and most intelligent girls I ever saw; they talked with the greatest of freedom; I think there is the place to choose a good wife” (44–45). Jones’s reflections suggest that these public exercises functioned in many ways as institutionally sanctioned sites for public display of the female body in service of the marriage market. Far from cloistering its women behind the walls of academia and religious devotion, Western served as a mechanism for institutionalized display of these female bodies, all working together in an elaborate matrix of geographical demand. Indeed, since Western often functioned as a selection pool of wives for promising young missionaries, it did not partition itself off so completely from the influence of males and (sexual) threat as did, for instance, Mount Holyoke. In terms of visitation policies, Western initially had virtually none, allowing for completely “unrestricted social intercourse between our young ladies and the students of Miami University” (seminary journals [actual], 1858–78). This policy was quickly amended, however, when problems with such open access to Western students began to emerge. In the annual “salutations” to her “far-off sister Holyoke,” an anonymous writer (presumably an upper-class student or faculty member) alluded to such difficulties: One young gentleman called for no less than “six cousins,” an astonishing extent, under such a regulation. On the preceding night, moreover, a band of students had greeted us with a sort of serenade at once disgraceful to themselves and annoying to us. We will not disgust you by giving the details of the nocturnal performance alluded to. The occurrence served to strengthen our already-formed opinion about allowing our young ladies to associate with such persons; and it was subsequently decided that only the intercourse of brothers and sisters should be permitted. (seminary journals, 1855–56)

In this case, not even Western’s location in the West enabled it to brook the conventions other colleges for women followed. By so ardently desiring Western women, Miami University men proved that they were undeterred by the potential masculinizing influence of education on the Western student body. Indeed, through the logic of the heteronormative gaze, where looking is coded with masculine agency and “to-be-looked-at-ness” signifies as feminine spectacle, the visible display of Western women’s bodies rendered them all the more suitably feminine. Conclusion Overall, what we find at Western, then, is a fledgling school where both masculine and feminine forms of signification were critical for its sustainability.


Western established itself to fill a particular niche in the Ohio Valley, which was comprised of a rapidly emerging middle class that had investments in whiteness, religiosity, propriety, and utility. At times, the seminary viewed and advertised itself as a direct inheritor of the Mount Holyoke model; at others, it billed itself as unique, a frontier school unlike any other. In the former, Western was metaphorically the daughter of mother Holyoke—tractable, obedient, and eager to learn—an image that underscored Victorian investments in motherhood as women’s rightful place, and daughters as necessarily interested in learning to be good mothers and mother/teachers. In the latter, the metaphor was used that Western assumed the values not so much of the West itself, but rather of what it took to flourish in the West—namely, autonomy, self-sufficiency, and perseverance—in the process allowing for a slippage in gendered connotations that diminished the distinctions between feminine and masculine, even while relying on their perceived distinct meanings. Related to this doubled gender discourse were messages about class, race, and ethnicity. Western presented a telling example of a newly forming white middle class turning an exacting disciplinarity back on itself. As demonstrated through the materials housed in the Western College archives, the seminary offers one piece of evidence in a much larger schema for regarding the temporal, contextual, and spatial specificity of the workings of gender in relation to the education of women. Critical to this analysis is the shape of narrative, the way in which stories about Western’s institutional identity initially made use of both masculine and feminine signifiers, although by now such gendered plurality has been effaced by the much simpler story of Western as the daughter of mother Holyoke. Appendix: Western College Memorial Archives Materials, Miami University Libraries, Miami University of Ohio, Oxford11 Collier, Adda. 1877. “The College Life.” Transcribed journal, 20 April (file 68, box 3, folder 3). Cowan, Lizzie. 1870. Student letters: 29–30 October, 15 December (file 68, box 3, folder 2). Correspondence between Western Seminary and Mount Holyoke. October 1855–July 1857 (file 68, box 3, folder 5). Crisci, Janice. N.d. “Mount Holyoke and Western College” (file 34, folder 1). Darrow, Hattie. 1865. Student letters (file 68, folder 23). “The First One Hundred Years.” 1955. Visiting lectures, typewritten history (box 1, folder 13). Howe, Sarah Isabella. N.d. “The First One Hundred Years” (file 34, folder 3). Jessup, Emily. N.d. Letters (file 9, box 1, folder 1). Seminary journals (transcribed). 1855–71 (file 68, box 2, folders 1–8). Seminary journals (actual). 1858–78 (file 68, box 5). Tenney, Daniel. 1878. Anniversary letter (file 68, folder 11). ———. 1865. Handwritten booklet on Western’s tenth anniversary, 6 July (file 34, folder 7).

192 · Feminist Formations 24.1 ———. 1855. Journal, 5 June (file 34). ———. 1855. “Executive Committee Report” (folder I.1). ———. Additional letters (file 34). Western College for Women. 1855–56. Catalog (file 14). Western Female Seminary. 1855–56. Rules (box 1, folder 1). ———. 1853. Charter (file 34, folder 4). ———. 1853. Promotional flyer (file 34, folder 5).

Brenda R. Weber works on feminism, masculinity theory, popular culture, celebrity theory, nineteenth-century Anglo-American literature and culture, and the body. She is the author of Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity (2009) and Women and Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century (2012), as well as the editor of Reality Gendervision (forthcoming, 2013). She can be reached at [email protected]. Notes 1. In 1894, Western was renamed as The Western: A College and Seminary for Women; in 1904, it was again renamed, this time as The Western College for Women. Western existed in its own right until 1971, and in 1974 was taken over by Miami University of Ohio. “Western College” is now a specialized liberal arts offering within Miami University. 2. Daniel Tenney studied with Lyman Beecher at the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati and had initially named Western the Beecher Female Seminary, although he changed this for undisclosed reasons before the date of incorporation. Lyman’s daughter Catharine founded her own school in Cincinnati, the Western Female Institute, in 1832. It failed for lack of financial resources in 1837. In addition to Tenney, the executive and founding board of Western consisted of Reverend C. E. Babb, Reverend J. M. Bishop, Reverend J. C. Bonham, Reverend Wm. M. Cheever, Reverend J. B. Condit, John Ellis, James Fisher, Reverend S. W. Fisher, R. E. Hills, R. L. Rea, G. Y. Roots, Milton Sayler, Reverend Thos. Spencer, Robert W. Steele, D. G. Tichenor, and H. Van Bergen (eight were ministers, the others businessmen from Oxford, Cincinnati, and Dayton). 3. Although the school’s charter was written and ratified in 1853, the first students enrolled in 1855, thus marking 1880 as the twenty-fifth anniversary year. 4. From its inception, Western was devised as an institution for adult female education. Promotional materials encouraged “no children” and sought only young ladies of “mature character.” The third resolution published in the 1853 promotional flyer rationalizes such a move by stating: “The advantages of such a provision are obvious. The lectures and instructions of the Teachers can thus all be adapted to adult comprehension. And the social intercourse of the school will be of a more improving nature.” Incoming students to Western could not be neophytes, as they were required to have a “Good knowledge of English Grammar, Modern Geography, Mental and Written Arithmetic, History of the United States, and Watts on the Mind” (Catalog, 1855–56). Studies of the middle-level class included Latin (Cornelius Nepos finished and Virgil commenced), Cutter’s physiology, Silliman’s chemistry, Olmstead’s natural philosophy,

Brenda R. Weber · 193 Olmstead’s astronomy, Wood’s botany (continued), Newman’s rhetoric, Alexander’s Evidences of Christianity, and bookkeeping; those of the senior class included Latin (Virgil completed), Hitchcock’s geology, Paley’s natural theology, Upham’s mental philosophy (in two volumes), Whately’s logic, Waylands’s moral philosophy, Butler’s analogy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and bookkeeping (ibid.). Students were divided into four groups: unclassed, junior, middle, and senior, each studying a demanding curriculum. For example, studies of the junior class included a review of English grammar, Latin (Andrews and Stoddard’s Latin Grammar, Andrews’s Latin Reader, and Cornelius Nepos commenced), history (Worcester’s Elements, Goldsmith’s histories of England, Rome, and Greece, and Grimshaw’s History of France), Robinson’s algebra, Playfair’s Euclid, Smellie’s Philosophy of Natural History, Mars’s ecclesiastical history, Wood’s botany commenced, and bookkeeping (ibid.). 5. In addition to performing domestic work, all members of each class were expected to take composition and reading classes, as well as instruction in vocal and instrumental music, French, and drawing, available to those who could study such courses without “serious detriment to their standing in the regular studies of the course” (ibid.). 6. Joan Hedrick (1994) notes in Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life: “In 1820 Cincinnati’s population was 10,000—just a bit larger than Hartford’s. By 1830, Cincinnati had leaped to 25,000 and it was entering a twenty-year boom during which it was the fastest-growing city in the nation. By the following decade, swelled by large numbers of German immigrants, the population was 46,000. . . . In 1851, Cincinnati’s population was 114,000, of whom 46 percent were immigrants” (67). 7. The Bureau of the Census defined the Western frontier as a line where population density thinned to less than two people per square mile. In 1850, the approximate number of inhabitants per square mile in southern Ohio was 45–90, hardly the unsettled frontier, though in rural regions of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana the numbers could quickly drop to between 6–45 people per square mile. The frontier line in Beecher’s time ran along the eastern border of Kansas Territory and Indian Territory (Oklahoma), including portions of southeast Texas and a diagonal swathe from Kansas northeast through Iowa and Wisconsin. Beecher’s notion of setting up a religious camp on the edge of the frontier, then, was more metaphoric than actual. It seems more likely that his quest was not one of pushing religion into Western boundaries, but of confronting class and ethnicity in a largely populated, predominantly Roman Catholic, foreign-born, and working-class metropolis (National Geographic Society 1988, 175). 8. Narka Nelson ([1954]1967) notes in her history of Western College that Oxford was created expressly as a site for higher education through the Ordinance of 1787, written in part by Thomas Jefferson and enacted by the Continental Congress. The ordinance (predating the U.S. Constitution by two months) expressed the importance of education to the nascent country, and so “two purchasers of extensive tracts of land in the Northwest Territory were instructed to set aside part of their holdings for the establishment of educational institutions” (16). These became Ohio University at Middletown (later renamed Athens) in 1804 and Miami University at Oxford in 1809. The selection of the actual geographic area for the school, later named Oxford in homage to Oxford University in England, came from an edict by George Washington to “reserve one township for ‘establishing an academy and other schools, same to be located between the Miami rivers’ ” (18).

194 · Feminist Formations 24.1 9. The five schools in Oxford, Ohio, and their founding dates are: Miami University (1809), Oxford Female Institute (1849), Western Female Seminary (1853), Oxford Female College (1854), and the Theological Seminary of Associate Reformed Church (moved to Monmouth, Illinois, in 1857). Oxford was also home to the Oxford Female Academy, founded in 1830 by 16–year-old Miss Bethania Crocker and incorporated in 1839, although it was defunct by the time Western was founded in 1853 (Nelson [1954]1967, 20). 10. Tuition at Oxford Female Institute and Oxford Female College in 1855–56 was $160, exclusive of heat; instruction in music and drawing cost an additional $100 per year at the college. Western, following Mount Holyoke’s model, charged $100, lowered to $60 for ministers’ daughters (Nash 1996, 29). “The First One Hundred Years,” a 1955 internal history of Western College, notes that students at Oxford College were “ ‘wealthy girls’ who in many cases brought their personal maids with them.” 11. The Seven Sisters equally catered to white Protestant girls. See Linda Perkins’s “The African American Female Elite” (1997) for a helpful assessment of the Seven Sisters’ racial diversity from 1880 to 1960. 12. Because the Western College Archives are still in the process of being organized, not all material is contained within numbered boxes or folders. The citation information in the appendix coheres with the state of the archive as of December 2011.

References Andrews. E. A. 1887. “General View of the Principles and Design of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.” The Religious Magazine 1: 188. Bacon, Marion. 1940. Life at Vassar: Seventy-Five Years in Pictures. Poughkeepsie, NY: Vassar Cooperative Bookstore. Barker-Benfield, G. J. 1976. The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Harper & Row. Beecher, Catharine E. [1835]1970. “Essay on the Education of Female Teachers.” In Pioneers of Women’s Education in the United States: Emma Willard, Catharine Beecher, Mary Lyon, ed. Willystine Goodsell, 167–226. New York: AMS Press. ———, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. [1869]2002. The American Woman’s Home, ed. Nicole Tonkovich. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Blum, Edward J. 2007. Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Bushman, Richard. 1992. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York: Knopf. Chang, Derek. 2010. Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problems of Race in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Drakeman, Lisa Natale. 1988. “Their Daughters Shall Be as Cornerstones.” Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly 72(1): n.p. (special sesquicentennial insert). “Go Where No One Else Will Go . . .” 1988. Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly 72(1): n.p. (special sesquicentennial insert). Hedrick, Joan. 1994. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. 1984. Alma Mater: Design and Experience in Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginning to the 1930s. New York: Knopf.

Brenda R. Weber · 195 McFeely, William S. 1987. “Mary Lyon: The Life of Her Mind.” Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly 70(4): 6–8. Merchant, Carolyn. 2004. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. New York: Routledge. Nash, Margaret A. 2005. Women’s Education in the United States, 1780–1840. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 1996. “ ‘A Salutary Rivalry’: The Growth of Higher Education for Women in Oxford, Ohio, 1855–1867.” History of Higher Education Annual 16: 21–37. Nash, Roderick. 1967. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. National Geographic Society. 1988. Historical Atlas of the United States. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society Press. Nelson, Narka. [1954]1967. The Western College for Women. Dayton, OH: Otterbein Press. Perkins, Linda. 1997. “The African American Female Elite: The Early History of African American Women in the Seven Sister Colleges, 1880–1960.” Harvard Educational Review 67(4): 718–56. Platt, Carolyn V. 1999. “Holyoke in The Western Female.” Timeline (July/August): 42–55. Robbins, Sarah. 2007. The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rose, Jane E. 1995. “Conduct Books for Women, 1830–1860: A Rationale for Women’s Conduct and Domestic Role in America.” In Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write, ed. Catherine Hobbs, 37–58. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Scott, Ann Firor. 1979. “The Ever Widening Circle.” History of Education Quarterly 19(1): 3–25. “Schools and Colleges of Many Types Owe Origin to Mount Holyoke Alumnae.” 1937. Holyoke Transcript-Telegram Centennial Supplement. Stow, Sarah D. Locke. 1887. History of Mount Holyoke Seminary, South Hadley, Mass: During Its First Half Century, 1837–1887. South Hadley, MA: Mount Holyoke Seminary. Stowe, Charles E., and Lyman Beecher Stowe. 1911. Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Tolley, Kimberley. 2003. The Science Education of American Girls: A Historical Perspective. New York: Routledge. ———. 1996. “Science for Ladies, Classics for Gentlemen: A Comparative Analysis of Scientific Subjects in the Curricula of Boys’ and Girls’ Secondary Schools in the United States, 1794–1850.” History of Education Quarterly 36(2): 129–53. Upham, Alfred Horatio. 1909. Old Miami: The Yale of the Early West. Hamilton, OH: The Republican Publishing Company. Wagner, Joanne. 1995. “ ‘Intelligent Mothers or Restless Disturbers’: Women’s Rhetorical Styles, 1880–1920.” In Reclaiming Rhetoric, ed. Andrea Lundsford, 185–202. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Weber, Brenda R. 2009. Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2006. “ ‘Were Not These Words Conceived in Her Mind?’: Gender/Sex and Metaphors of Maternity at the Fin de Siècle.” Feminist Studies 32(3): 547–72.

196 · Feminist Formations 24.1 Welter, Barbara. 1976. Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Woyshner. Christine. 2003. “The Education of Women for Wifehood: Coverture, Community, and Consumerism in the Separate Spheres.” History of Education Quarterly 43(3): 410–28.