The impact of Enlightenment rhetoric on Revolutionary conceptions of gender has been a topic of historiographical debate. This thesis examines how Scottish Enlightenment stadial views of progress influenced early American female education discourse. Within this framework, upper middle-class white women transitioned from “slaves” to reasonable companions through the performance of feminine domesticity. Women who conformed to the prescriptions of Scottish moralists represented Anglo-American ideals of civility and refinement which served as a justification for the enslavement and dispossession of African and Indigenous peoples. Examining opinion pieces, advertisements for schools, academy addresses, and runaway slave advertisements reveals how early Americans participated in the simultaneous construction of race and gender. Beginning in the colonial era, editorialists deployed rhetoric from James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1766) to argue that upper-class white women were capable of reason and thus deserving of educational opportunities. Pre-revolutionary rationales persisted into the post-revolutionary era. This suggests that increased educational opportunities were not contingent on the Revolution. In the 1780s, editorialists deployed lines of reasoning from John Greogory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774), to broaden the construct of reasonable companionship. They argued that upper middle-class white women influenced men’s manners and made society more virtuous. This conception gave women an informal public role as moral arbiters. In the 1790s, women’s rights rhetoric challenged but did not refute the ideological construct of reasonable companionship. Taking a critical race approach to studying Revolutionary women’s access to educational opportunities reveals how dominant discourses upheld the racial hierarchy. / Graduate / 2023-08-24
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/13368 |
| Date | 02 September 2021 |
| Creators | Flechl, Katelyn |
| Contributors | Cleves, Rachel Hope |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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