Nineteenth-century Women Learn to Write

Book excerpt: What and how were nineteenth-century women taught through conduct books and hymnbooks? What did women learn about reading and writing at a state normal school and at the Cherokee Nation's female seminary? What did Radcliffe women think of rhetoric classes imported from Harvard? How did women begin to gain their voices through speaking and writing in literary societies and by keeping diaries and journals? How did African American women use literacy as a tool for social action? How did women's writing portray alternative views of the western frontier? The essays in this volume address these questions and more in exploring the gendered nature of education in the nineteenth century. These essays give a more complete picture of literacy in the nineteenth century. Part one presents a panoply of sites and cultural contexts in which women learned to write, including ideological contexts, institutional sites, and informal settings such as literary circles. Part two examines specific genres, texts, and "voices" of literate women and students of writing and speaking. Nineteenth-Century Women Learn to Write interweaves thick feminist social history with theoretical perspectives from such diverse fields as linguistics and folklore, feminist literary theory, and African American and Native American studies. The volume constitutes a major addition to traditional social science studies of literacy.