Throughout the Colonial Period of America, limitations surrounded education for women, reducing it to biblical teaching that lasted only through the primary years. As Enlightenment ideas settled in the country, the concepts of freedom, liberty, and equality pervaded revolutionary thought. In addition to shaping many nation-forming documents of the time, it engrained these Enlightenment concepts into the American identity. This identity led many minority groups in the new nation to question their place in this society and argue for rights previously denied to them. As women played an increasing role in the Industrial Revolution, they increasingly felt that they deserved rights previously reserved for men, like education. During the 1830s in
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A few colleges formed to educate women and although these institutions taught a very similar curriculum to that of a liberal arts college for men, only elite women possessed the chance to enroll due to the cost and limited capacity of these institutions. As the call for education for women became louder, though, a push began for more accessible means of formal education for women to become available beyond the ages of twelve or thirteen. One of the main arguments used to promote the idea of women receiving an education beyond childhood and into adolescence asserted that women could benefit society by learning more than just literacy. Schooling during this time served a practical purpose, so a school’s curriculum varied depending on the region and on the student demographic. Although curriculum for women in higher education shared commonalities with that of men, in earlier levels of schooling, only men learned certain subjects, such as Classical Languages, Politics, and spoken Rhetoric. Furthermore, the subjects actually accessible to them existed so that they could educate their future children and provide intellectual company to their fathers and husbands. Up until this point, an expectation that women ought to uphold Republican Motherhood prevailed, which required women to teach their children the values of republicanism—liberty, democracy, and inalienable rights. During the 1830s, since the United States had established a more stable national identity, a slight shift in the expectations of women towards True Womanhood followed, which centered on the four cardinal virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. The virtues of True Womanhood contain the values of Republican Motherhood through the aspects of domesticity, which included teaching the children about what it meant to be a true American citizen—thus liberty, democracy, and
A few colleges formed to educate women and although these institutions taught a very similar curriculum to that of a liberal arts college for men, only elite women possessed the chance to enroll due to the cost and limited capacity of these institutions. As the call for education for women became louder, though, a push began for more accessible means of formal education for women to become available beyond the ages of twelve or thirteen. One of the main arguments used to promote the idea of women receiving an education beyond childhood and into adolescence asserted that women could benefit society by learning more than just literacy. Schooling during this time served a practical purpose, so a school’s curriculum varied depending on the region and on the student demographic. Although curriculum for women in higher education shared commonalities with that of men, in earlier levels of schooling, only men learned certain subjects, such as Classical Languages, Politics, and spoken Rhetoric. Furthermore, the subjects actually accessible to them existed so that they could educate their future children and provide intellectual company to their fathers and husbands. Up until this point, an expectation that women ought to uphold Republican Motherhood prevailed, which required women to teach their children the values of republicanism—liberty, democracy, and inalienable rights. During the 1830s, since the United States had established a more stable national identity, a slight shift in the expectations of women towards True Womanhood followed, which centered on the four cardinal virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. The virtues of True Womanhood contain the values of Republican Motherhood through the aspects of domesticity, which included teaching the children about what it meant to be a true American citizen—thus liberty, democracy, and