Female Education

Excerpt from The Ladies Repository, January 1841 at 10-13

The following represents one man's call for changes in the way women were educated in 19th century America.

A Fashionable Female Education by Caleb Atwater

      If [women] are to be taught anything more, shall it be only, how to play on the harp, the guitar and the pianoforte; to draw pictures on paper or cloth with a painter's brush or a needle? To dance a waltz; walk gracefully on their toes; make a handsome courtsy? Keep an album; sing a fashionable song; wear corsets, false curls and  artificial flowers; hold a silly conversation on nothing; leer and look languishing, and--act the fool?

      [W]e now anxiously desire to see driven out of our land, the present frivolous practices which we have named. They are a disgrace to this enlightened age.

      The main objects of educating females are precisely the same with those of educating the other sex--to develop all their powers and faculties, and to prepare them for happiness and usefulness. We take it for granted . . . that females are as capable of attaining all sorts of knowledge as the other sex . . . . We now proceed to state what we wish our females to learn. In addition to the common branches of education, such as reading, writing, English grammar, and arithmetic, we wish to see superadded, geography, chemistry, botany, vocal music, astronomy, algebra, rhetoric, mineralogy, geology, mechanics, natural and moral philosophy, geometry, and all branches of the higher mathematics; civil and ecclesiastical history, biography, including most especially the lives of great, good and distinguished women. . . . As we admit of no difference in the capacities of the two sexes for attaining knowledge, so we know of no difference in the modes of conveying it to their minds . . . . Right education of either sex forms good habits and eradicates bad ones.