“Dominant Culture and the Education of Women”
Session Coordinator:
Julia C. Paulk
Dept. of Foreign
Languages and Literatures, Marquette University
Lalumiere Language Hall 254, P.O. Box 1881,
Milwaukee, WI 53201
Session I:
Paper 1:
“A Cultural ‘Abnormality’: Christine de Pizan,
a Self-educated Single Mom in Medieval France”
Christine de Pizan (1365- c. 1430)
is believed to be the first professional female writer in France, possibly
Europe, to have earned her living by writing when she became a widow, with her
three children, as well as her niece and her mother to support at twenty-five
years old. In its structure, one of her most famous works, La Cité des Dames (ca. 1405) parallels one
of the most popular vernacular works of the thirteenth to the fifteenth
century: the second part of the Roman de
la Rose (1268-1280) written by Jean de Meun. It
especially attacks its misogynistic portrayal of women. With this particular
work, Christine de Pizan developed a textual body for
women. To counter the misconceptions of her time, the author describes a world
of educated and powerful women who instruct “Christine” while building the city
and populating it with the best women of history. Knowing that the information
on the women Christine de Pizan mentions comes from
Boccaccio's De Mulieribus Claris (Concerning
Famous Women),
and that the structure of La Cité is similar to that of the
Rose,
it would be easy to conclude that de Pizan’s
literature is like that of her male counterparts. To the contrary, I argue that
her unique lifestyle and education allowed her to articulate feminist opinions
using the very tools employed by her male predecessors
to express their ideas and dominant wor(l)ds.
Dorothée Mertz-Weigel
Marquette University
dorothee.mertz-weigel@marquette.edu
Paper 2:
“Obligation and Giftedness in Mary Astell and Damaris Masham”
In her call for a female seminary, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694, 1697) Mary Astell appeals to rationalist but also specifically Christian arguments to critique a Lockean epistemological model that undermines, she claims, the kind of ethical program her female academy is designed to promote. Claiming that Locke’s epistemology can sponsor at best a merely negative ethics, Astell takes issue with what she sees as his largely proprietary account of personhood and knowledge-production. By contrast, Astell argues that individuals do not create or earn what they know: they borrow or are gifted with their rationality, which then has to be employed for the service of all in order to turn a “profit.” In revising Locke’s emphasis on ownership and contesting his suggestion that rationality has a primarily private and instrumental use-value, Astell makes a communitarian argument that undercuts the liberal emphasis on rights and privileges to argue that persons are mutually endebted to and reliant on one another. In arguing for women’s education, Astell thus challenges a major political discourse of her day by revising its whole notion of the person. While accounts of Astell have tended to emphasize her debt to Cartesian sources and downplay her Christianity while simultaneously foregrounding her political rather than her ethical proposals, this paper recovers the extent to which she uses Biblical images to lay out an educational and epistemological theory governed by her interest in making knowledge-production sponsor a viable and substantive ethics.
Joanne E. Myers
Valparaiso University
Paper 3:
“The Founder's Work in Progress: Mary Lyon's Mt. Holyoke Female
Seminary"
Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, which
later became Mt. Holyoke College, was founded in 1837 in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
A school noted for its dedication to intellectual and spiritual objectives, Mt.
Holyoke fostered in its early students (including Emily Dickinson), ideas and
ambitions unusual in schools for women during this time period. Its formative
agenda was the product of Mary Lyon (1797-1849), who founded the school and
directed it through the first 12 years of its history until her death. Her
project, similar in some ways to programs advocated by Catherine Beecher and
Emma Willard, was grounded in Christian benevolence but she also advocated a
level of intellectual excellence unusual in her era. Further, she designed the
school to be a domestic space, in which students and faculty functioned as a
family. Thus, her project fused both conservative and progressive tendencies in
nineteenth-century women’s education. Several of the founding documents,
including published “circulars” (such as” General View of the Principles and
Design of Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary”), the school’s initial catalog, and
Lyon’s letters, delineate her initial goals for the institution. However, her
on-going addresses to students, largely available in notes taken by her
teachers and students during Mt. Holyoke’s early years, supplement Lyon’s
original goals for her students and the institution. A study of these documents
suggests the ways in which she affirmed, implemented, and modified her concepts
of women’s education.
Beatrice Jacobson
St. Ambrose University
Paper 4:
“In Their
Own Way: Emilia Pardo Bazán
and María Martínez Sierra’s
Struggle for Women’s Education in Turn-of-the-Century Spain”
In this
paper, I will examine how María Martínez
Sierra (1874-1974) and Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921)—two of the most prolific Spanish female
writers at the turn of the century—understood and promoted women’s education in
accordance with Feminist trends in Spain at the time. Through a comparative
study of two talks— Sierra’s “Feminismo, Feminidad, Españolismo” (1920) and
Bazán’s “La educación del
hombre y la de la mujer” (1892)—, I will study how
these authors negotiated notions of nation and modernity in order to justify
the need for women’s education. In this sense, both Bazán
and Sierra considered women’s education essential in the creation of the modern
women and, as a result, in the process of modernization of the nation.
Nonetheless, I will argue that both writers presented their discourses in
different ways bearing in mind the physical presence of an audience. On the one
hand, Bazán’s talk showed a more confronting and
innovative stance towards Spanish patriarchal tradition in comparison to
Sierra’s paper in spite of the fact that the former was written at an earlier
time and was not openly presented under a Feminist rubric. On the other hand,
Sierra, in trying to acknowledge her open adherence to Feminism and present it
along with her innovative ideas on education to an audience who was strongly
prejudiced against the Feminist movement, made use of a series of rhetoric and ideological devices, which,
ironically, conferred a more conservative overtone on the text.
Maria del
Mar Soria López
University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
Session II:
Paper 5:
“Uglification
and Derision”: Educational Reform in
Victorian Women’s Fantasy Literature”
As early as the 1870s and 1880s, reviewers noted the growing popularity of what an 1879 critic described as “that class of stories to which ‘Alice in Wonderland’ gave birth”: a distinct genre of fantasy tales for children, a majority of them by women writers, which seemed directly to imitate or parody Carroll’s Alice books. The widely accepted status of the Alice books as, according to another contemporary reviewer, “beyond question, supreme among modern books for children,” made them a kind of enabling literary idiom for Victorian women writers, who extended their voices and audiences through the medium of Alice imitations by satirizing Victorian cultural institutions, conventions, and attitudes.
This presentation examines a number of these “Alice imitations” that explicitly comment on and attempt to revise late-Victorian models of educational practice and theory. I will consider the ways that these women writers’ parodies of Carroll—who himself uses both Alice books to satirize conventional educational practice—provide a vehicle for both critiquing and re-imagining Victorian educational practices such as recitation, object lessons, traditional student-teacher relations, as well as pedagogical innovations and fads such as those recommended in Friedrich Froebel's kindergarten handbooks and in the writings of such American reformers as Mary Lyon, Catherine Ward Beecher, and Kate Douglas Wiggins.
Carolyn Sigler
University of Minnesota Duluth
Paper 6:
“The Culture of Female Education
in the Americas in the Nineteenth-Century: the Contributions of Catharine
Beecher and Clorinda Matto
de Turner”
Two women who made important contributions to the education of women in the nineteenth century in the Americas were Catharine Beecher (U.S.) and Clorinda Matto de Turner (Peru). Beecher’s widely read Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (1841) was intended for use by both teachers and mothers. Matto de Turner’s Elementos de literatura según el Reglamento de Instrucción Pública para uso del bello sexo (1888) was written to be used as a textbook in the instruction of young ladies in literature. In both cases, the authors noted a serious lack of appropriate materials for use in women’s education and demonstrated their dedication to this important project by writing texts themselves. While the earlier work focuses much more on the domestic sphere, both books attribute national importance to the education of women, an enterprise that the dominant, patriarchal culture at times resisted. For Beecher, as Kathryn Kish Sklar proposes, the domestic sphere is fundamental to the development and proper functioning of a democracy. Matto de Turner’s text argues in favor of the importance of literature in particular in the training of women to be effective wives and mothers who will inspire moral rectitude and patriotic duty in their households. The two authors’ shared concerns suggest a similarity of experience for nineteenth-century women of the Americas.
Julia C. Paulk
Marquette University
Paper 7:
“Susan LaFlesche Picotte and Gertrude Simmons Bonnin: Negotiating Expectations”
Two of the most important American Indian writers of the late 19th and early 20th century were women who had been educated within the dominant culture. Picotte, an Omaha who became the first female Native American medical doctor, and Bonnin, a Yankton Nakota writer and editor, were both products of the 19th-century trend to remove Indian children from their homes and families and place them in boarding schools in order to educate, “civilize,” and Christianize them. Thus these women were forced to struggle against two dominant cultures, one which stripped them of their heritage, language, and homeland, and one which attempted to pigeonhole them into proper womanly vocations. After returning from off-reservation schools, they also had to face criticism from their own people: were they too white, too acculturated, too Eastern, to understand the struggles of Western reservation life? But both Picotte and Bonnin turned the criticism from all sides into activism for their tribes. Each wrote a series of journal articles that demonstrate their dedication to raising expectations for Indian women in the best way that they knew how: to work within the dominant culture to effect change, press for reform, and advocate for more opportunities. While in both of their fields they had to resist marginalization from the mainstream, which was threatened by their intelligence and success, and from the minority, which occasionally viewed them as white sell-outs, they remained fervent promoters of education as the best and most effective means to a better life for Indian women.
Sarah Jayne Kaufmann
University of Denver
skaufman@du.edu
Paper 8:
Teaching Manners: Nella
Larsen and the Education of Black Women
Manners, as Mrs. Burton Kingsland says in her 1901 conduct book, are
“minor morals.” Essentially, what you do
reveals who you are. The idea of the
moral nature of manners is one taken to heart by the black educators of the
early twentieth century, most notably Booker T. Washington. Etiquette is seen as a means to create
gradual social uplift for Negroes within Jim Crow’s legal restraints on
behavior. Charlotte Hawkins Brown’s
Palmer Memorial Institute (1902-1970) and her influential conduct book, The
Correct Thing To Do – To Say – To Wear (1941), for
instance, espouse the teaching of proper manners as a way for black Americans
to gain equality.
To discuss Washington’s and Brown’s concern with social uplift in conjunction with its peculiar demands on black women, I will look to Nella Larsen’s novel, Quicksand (1928), which deals with the relationship between conduct and race through the figure of Helga Crane. Naxos, the school for Negro education where Helga is an instructor, is an institution that emphasizes proper manners for proper habits of mind in its students; it is essentially a school like Brown’s institute. Education, rather than seen as a means of survival and uplift for African Americans, is indicted as a stifling system that inculcates particular manners and ways of thinking. In this paper, I argue that the education of African-American women under this rhetoric of conduct is particularly insidious, even as it works towards reform in the social conditions for the race as a whole.
Eurie Dahn
University of Chicago
eidahn@uchicago.edu