Women's Education in the 1840s: Britain and America

Introduction

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 Brontë 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 looks at women's education in the 1840s and shows how it was changing.

Changes in Women's Higher Education

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" (pp. 1–2). Colleges for women were private. Yet in 1830, Oxford, Ohio had already 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 at Miami University" (p. 17). The pattern of colleges for women in the Ohio River Valley was essentially repeated elsewhere across the states.

Opportunities for women to receive a higher education alongside — at least in theory — their male counterparts were 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 desires shows the degree to which Romantic and Enlightenment doctrine had spread its ideology. "Liberty, fraternity, equality" was the mantra both far and near: "Female 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" (Solomon, 1985, p. 31).

Conclusion

Women's education was on the rise by the 1840s in both America and Britain. America saw the first female graduate with a degree in medicine, while Britain gave the world the first secular professional nurse in Florence Nightingale. Colleges were growing, expanding, and adapting to the demands of the day — that women be as enlightened as men — and men, apparently, were listening, as the example of Miami University in Ohio demonstrated.

Sherzer, J. (1916). The higher education of women in the Ohio Valley. Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, 25(1), 1–22.

Solomon, B. M. (1985). In the company of educated women. Yale University Press.

Tennyson, A. L. (1847). The princess: A medley. Ticknor and Fields.