Women\'s Education 1840s an Analysis of Women\'s

Women's Education 1840s

An Analysis of Women's Education in the 1840s

Women in both Britain and America were set to receive greater attention in the realm of academia in the 1840s than they had in decades prior. The Bronte sisters had both begun their writing careers that same decade and Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel was published at the end of it. Mary Shelley had been writing for nearly three decades already -- Frankenstein being published a year after the death of Jane Austen. Women of letters had obviously received an education -- but from where? This paper will look at women's education in the 1840s and show how it was changing.

Changes

Jane Sherzer (1916) notes that "in West Virginia, in Southern Indiana and Illinois there were no schools for the higher education of women up to 1840" (p. 1), however, she adds that "early in 1840, in Indiana there were two schools started for the higher education of women, -- the Rockville Female Seminary on January 31, 1840, and the Crawfordsville Female Institute on February 24, 1840…" Higher education for women at the time "differed from the colleges for men mainly in the substitution of French for Greek, and in the addition of music and art to the curriculum" (p. 1-2). Colleges for women were private. But in 1830, Oxford, Ohio had opened the Oxford Female Academy "in response to a demand from the faculty of Miami University that their daughters might have an opportunity of higher education such as their sons were receiving in the Miami University" (p. 17). The pattern of colleges for women in the Ohio River Valley was essentially repeated elsewhere in the states.

Opportunities for women to receive a higher education alongside (at least in theory) their male counterparts was certainly on the rise in the 1840s. Yet, how did education alter the woman's role in that decade? Barbara Miller Solomon states that although marriage remained the ultimate goal for most women…the heroine of a popular novel expressed an attitude of young women common to the time: 'Let me follow my own volitions, for at least three or four years to come…Let my mind soar unfettered to the heights where I wish to stand' before being 'tempted to wear those bonds which, though covered with roses and seemingly light as air, must be stronger than steel, and heavier than iron'" (p. 31).

That men went along with such desire shows the degree to which Romantic/Enlightenment doctrine had spread its ideology: "liberty, fraternity, equality" was the mantra both far and near: "Females students, enamored of their new independence and influenced by their educators, deliberated more carefully before marrying. Their education and the opportunities it offered reinforced their sense of the seriousness of the marriage commitment" (p. 31).

Pioneers

But not all women were intent on marrying -- even if the majority of female college graduates did so (although at an older age than women who did not pursue higher education). Florence Nightingale, for example, made the decision to enter nursing in the 1840s -- and she remained unmarried for the whole of her life. Nightingale, however, acted as a kind of pioneer in the field of professional nursing -- meeting the former Secretary at War Sidney Herbert in Rome and getting his assistance for the formation of her first nursing corps in the Crimean War.

Other women were making headway in academia. Both Queen's College and Bedford College in the UK began to pursue a policy of offering education to women in the latter half of the 1840s. And Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in America to earn a degree in medicine in 1849. She helped push for the right of women to earn a degree in medicine in England.

Another alternative for women seeking education was in the religious tradition. The Roman Catholic Church had founded a variety of religious orders for the purpose of women's education -- as far back, in fact, as the sixteenth century. The Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary formed at the end of the 1840s and offered the kind of convent education that had been in existence in England since the 13th century.

Not all men supported the idea of single-sex education for women. Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "The Princess: A Medley," published toward the end of the 1840s was viewed as a satire of women's poetry, and was filled with lines like: "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean…" (p. 65). Such emotional outpouring indicated to some that Tennyson was making the case that ideas were not for women -- their expertise was emotion. Obviously, not every woman agreed -- nor did every man.