This dissertation focuses on mid-eighteenth-century British periodicals and their claims to educate middle-ranked women in natural philosophy, modern history, and vernacular literature. I argue that articles published in female-penned periodicals are comparable to articles in male-penned periodicals and therefore allowed women to pursue an informal education through reading. I propose that female periodicals also illustrate how women formed counterpublics of learning through correspondence that rivaled the conversations that took place in the male-dominated public spheres, such as in coffee houses and meeting halls. As formal classical education was reserved for elite men, women learned through reading books and periodicals, and through conversation. Given the cost of books, periodicals became the main source for informal learning for middle-ranked women. I call attention to the periodical form that allowed women to complete feasibly short lessons between their daily domestic duties and amusements. Female-penned periodicals encouraged women to diversify their interests by deploying literary depictions of the moral pitfalls of women’s focus on the beautification of the body. Driven by the financial and social rise of the merchant class, middling-ranked women with small dowries sought to gain advantage in the marriage market by distinguishing themselves as suitable wives for merchant or even gentry husbands. Periodicals thus made an economic as well as a moral case for their single female readers to balance fashionable amusements with intellectual pursuits. By examining not only how mid-century female-penned periodicals defined themselves in relation to male-penned periodicals but also the impact of broader changes in formalized education, my thesis uncovers an important and under-discussed aspect of the rise of the middling ranks in eighteenth-century Britain. I show how female-penned periodicals encouraged women's involvement in discussions about the development of the modern disciplines of education. My thesis is organized chronologically and follows the work of three notable periodical editors and authors with chapters on Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator (1744-46), Frances Brooke's The Old Maid (1755-56), and Charlotte Lennox's The Lady's Museum (1760-61). The purpose of my thesis is not only to chart the changes in representations of women's learning over time, but also to reveal how Haywood, Brooke, and Lennox propose that women share their proto-disciplinary knowledge beyond their counterpublics in order to encourage intellectual discussions between like-minded males and females in the public spheres.

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Emil Behnke was a highly esteemed vocal pedagogue of the late nineteenth century. Perhaps rare for the time, the art and science of teaching vocal methods of speech and singing was a Behnke family business, one that Emil shared with his wife and daughter, who were both named Kate. Indeed, Emil's daughter, Kate Emil Behnke, was equally regarded and valued in the field of vocal pedagogy, carrying her father's teachings into the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the elder Kate Behnke, wife to Emil and mother to Kate Emil, was responsible for administering and building upon her husband's innovative methods of speech therapy, establishing her own reputation as a speech healer. The Behnke family published no less than fourteen books, cumulatively. Largely forgotten today, the purpose of this document is to provide a comprehensive overview of the biography and the pedagogical methods and works of the Behnke family, and to contextualize these methods within the framework of trusted vocal pedagogy, both historic and current.

The evidence of these diaries, all written in the nineteenth century, reveals the heterogeneous nature of early settler society in the Eastern Cape. Generalizations can only be of the most tenuous kind in such a small sample; but women tend to dwell on the domestic, the men on their public lives, the most reticent about their private lives are the soldiers. There is one diary which can be described as personal; the diarists did not regard their diaries as appropriate repositories of their personal triumphs and failures. The perceptions formed in Britain about the land and people of Africa are not drastically modified upon arrival unless the diarist experiences a prolongued contact with either.